This post explains how to use the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner, a lifestyle planner that helps you get the most from seasonal time in the garden, kitchen, through your wellness practices, and eventually, through some authentic activism.
Click here or the image below to download your FREE 2020 Seasonal Living Planner.
Then, read on to learn best practices for using the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner!
This post also contains affiliate links based on my personal experience with products that support a seasonal lifestyle. As an amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. I hope you find them useful.
Create your seasonal life!
Creating your seasonal life is an undertaking that brings your body, mind, and spirit in alignment with seasonal time. It rests on 4 pillars: garden, kitchen, wellness, and activism.
The Seasonal Living lifestyle creates the opportunity for healing and leads us to eventually become healers in the world.
I’m Lorrie Schoettler, the creator of the Lorrie Season brand. It is based on my own healing process and principles in the field of ecopsychology as I understand them.
Use this link to learn more about the Seasonal Living Lifestyle and download the workbook. These resources will help you get the most from the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner!
Be sure to join our Facebook Group where you’ll find a tribe of gardeners and cooks eager to help you on your journey. Of course, your wisdom is welcome and needed as well! The group also warehouses all the free downloads from this website. Simply use the search bar to get recipes, garden task lists, and wellness tips to create your seasonal life!
How to Use the Seasonal Living Planner
The 2020 Seasonal Living Planner has a basic calendar that can help you find your way to birthdays and traditional holidays, but it is oh so much more!
It includes worksheets to help you get clear about your 2020 goals.
Then, you can drill down into the goals and create plans for each month, week, and day-by-day!
You can use the planner one of 2 ways:
- Print out the document and hole punch the pages for a binder. Then, print month, week, and day planners at the beginning of each time to incrementally move toward your wildest dreams.
- Get a 5 subject notebook and copy the information from the planner into the spiral notebook. This is how I use my Kitchen Garden Planner and Journal, and it’s how I plan to use the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner as well. It’s effective and much more affordable than running pages on the inkjet printer.
Connection to online resources
Use the information below to get the most from your 2020 Seasonal Living Planner. It goes section by section to help you understand the worksheets and describes best practices for goal setting and productivity.
Our weekly newsletters will help you plan, month-by-month, for seasonal holidays, meal planning, garden tasks, and wellness practices. You’ll be signed up when you download the planner and you can unsubscribe anytime!
Forms and Worksheets
The sections below will help you work your way through the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner, worksheet-by-worksheet, month-by-month, and day-by-day!
The system of the planner is designed to create building blocks of lifestyle practices that help you care for yourself and the planet without feeling so conflicted and overwhelmed.
It all begins with gratitude and mindset
This may seem cliche, but gratitude is a powerful and easily accessed spiritual practice that is healing and highly creative.
It has been said by many a teacher and guru that we must be aware of our current blessing before we can bring more into our lives. These days, the miracle of clean air and water are not to be taken for granted! The simple pleasures of intimate times with friends and family cherished.
What are you grateful for as you approach 2020?
Here’s a lesson from the Queen of Gratitude to get you started…
The Life Balance Wheel
The Life Balance Wheel for the seasonal living lifestyle is a little different than others you may have worked with because it grounds you in yourself, your garden, your kitchen, and your community. Its goal is to help you slow down and ground yourself in a natural rhythm that is healing and can extend to heal others.
You’ll work through 4 worksheets to grow down into a seasonal living mindset and then complete the life balance wheel in a way that reflects where you are, right now!
The Worksheets
There are four worksheets in the planner that will help you identify the strengths of 2019 and then find your way toward your highest aspirations for 2020.
You’ll need a journal to reflect on the questions.
When complete you’ll circle back to the Life Balance Wheel to make a graphic representation of where you are now. You can complete the process again at the end of the year to measure the impact of your efforts to create a seasonal life.
Annual Priorities
When you get through the worksheets, there will be many aspirations percolating in your soul.
Take a breath and center yourself.
Then, brainstorm them all out. No judgment. Just empty yourself of all that excitement and angst.
Then, select 2-3 of them as priorities for this year. After years of working on this process, I can tell you, if you aim for all of them, you’ll achieve none of them!
By creating priorities in your life, you’ll have a framework for decision making. This, to me, is the greatest benefit of planning because I can approach life like a Whitman Sampler! A bite of this…a nibble of that…and eventually, a box of half-eaten chocolates!
This is why we plan!
Monthly Roadmap
Once you have those priorities, mark dates and tasks that support them on the monthly roadmap. This will be your at-a-glance guide for the year.
Feel free to use a pencil here. Sometimes we take detours, or life drives us into detours. Flexibility is the best approach!
Monthly Planner Pages
There are two styles of monthly planners. Print them out the last week of each month and fill them out this way:
- Fill in all vacations, special events, doctor’s appointments, etc.
- Fill in due dates for special projects. I like to write in things like when berries will be ripe, or the week I want to can tomatoes. What are those seasonal activities that catch you off-guard and need to be squeezed in around life events that are all-consuming? Plan for them!
- Leave open spaces, at least one day or half-day a week. These can become the calm in your storm and be a very welcome aspect of your seasonal life.
Weekly Planner Pages
Here’s where the nitty-gritty details of your 2020 plan begin to work themselves out.
I love weekly planner pages and use them both to plan the week ahead, as well as review the week just passed.
My biggest lesson almost every week in review is that I over-estimated my capacity. I’m getting better at leaving more white space on my weekly calendar, but it is a hard lesson for me.
On the other hand, you may be just the person who is surprised at just how much living can be done in one week without burning yourself to a crisp!
Daily Planner Pages
Daily planner pages are pure gold!
I actually do not print these out, but copy the format onto a notebook page and sketch out the day, hour-by-hour, based on my weekly plan.
For instance, let’s say I plan to batch write for the blog for 4 hours on Monday. That’s my priority for the day. Here’s how I would write that out on my daily planner page:
- Block out time for my morning routine
- Time for my evening routine
- Time for exercise
- My meal plan for the day in detail
- Then, and only then, will I block out my 4 hours of laptop time.
If you don’t schedule in the sacred parts of your day, they will creep into your blocked time for your projects. Honor your self and you free your creativity and productivity!
The Project Planners
This is my first year using project planner pages, and I like it!
By writing out my projects in detail, I have a better sense of just what’s involved to complete the task.
I have, as mentioned earlier, a capacity to overestimate just what I can accomplish. This has only gotten worse as my body begins to age.
Project planning helps me realistically block time for projects in a way that better ensures success.
Morning and Evening Routines | Habit Trackers
If you get nothing from this planner, learn the importance of daily routines and habits. They make you and they break you. Period.
To get a deeper understanding of what I mean, you must read Atomic Habits by James Clear!
This single resource will help you understand that your destiny rests in your daily habits, not in herculean effort. Really, its the small accumulating over time that helps us move toward the person we most want to be, not the quick bursts of momentary effort.
If you want a sample of the gems in this essential resource, listen to the podcast episode from my personal guru, Amy Porterfield.
Just to be clear about daily routines and habits, and habit tracking, I read or listen to this book 3 times a year. I hear and learn new things about myself every time!
Basically, life unfolds initially with a thought. Then…
Meal Planners
I’ve dreamed of meal planning for years, and 2020 is my year!
We’ll be doing this together because my weekly emails will highlight meal plans for seasonal eating.
There’s also a food tracker in the planner. You may find this helpful if you are on a low carb meal plan, like me. Since I’ve started tracking everything I eat, I can see that I’ve been eating twice as many carbs as I thought when creating meals without tracking.
It’s only through observation that we can make an authentic change.
This may not be a priority for you, but living in optimal health is one of my 2 primary goals for 2020. Mid-life body changes have stopped me in my tracks health-wise, and old ways won’t work. There’s gonna be some changes made!
2020 Checklist and To-Do lists
When using Checklists and To-Do lists, be sure you are listing accomplishments and not tasks. These kinds of worksheets can create busywork that makes us feel productive but actually get nothing done.
An item that says simply ‘Seed Catalogs’ might quickly become an escape. You simply sit and dream with the catalogs and a cup of tea.
An item that says build garden budget and order seeds is an accomplishment that might easily take 3-4 hours.
I hope that helps!
Thank you! Every little choice you make makes a big difference!
For years, I wanted to live closer to nature.
Months and seasons would pass and I’d still be dissatisfied with the amount of time I spent behind a screen, eating processed foods, and feeling dissatisfied by the gap between who I wanted to be and who I really was.
Working hard to create this planning process, which is alive and responsive, has helped me to move my daily habits closer to my aspirations and accomplish some amazing things!
I hope you find it useful.
There’s a gift at the end of the planner!
I am offering FREE coaching sessions to anyone needing help finding their way into the 2020 Seasonal Living Planner.
I hope you take me up on the offer if you are struggling to get started or get stuck in the middle!
Current events suggest there are big changes ahead and we can only manage them together! It is in community that we thrive.
The Winter Garden Planner
January is the perfect time to sort through garden catalogs and create your plan for the spring garden.
I wrote this post on how to select the best garden catalogs and it comes with a FREE Winter Garden Planner! Click here to read the 2020 Seed Catalogs for the Kitchen Garden post, and here to download the Winter Garden Planner!
16 Winter Wellness Tips and the Winter Wellness Tracker
Be sure to add this information about winter wellness to your Seasonal Living planning for 2020. Let the Winter Wellness Tracker help you build a routine that supports your body, mind, and spirit throughout [email protected]
Join the Tribe
If you enjoy seeing life through the lens of the changing seasons, I invite you to stay connected. This is a community of activist-oriented gardeners, cooks, and nature lovers.
If you want a loving community to be a part of your seasonal life, please do anyone (or ALL!) of the following:
- Sign up for the newsletter and get my herbal teas and tisanes recipe book for FREE! Tea is always a welcome addition to any time in the kitchen.
- Join our FREE Facebook group where we’re always talking gardens and kitchens.
- Follow me on Instagram and watch the seasons unfold on my 5-acre homestead in Harpers Ferry, WV.
WANT TO REMEMBER THIS? SAVE THE 2020 SEASONAL LIVING PLANNER TO YOUR FAVORITE PINTEREST BOARD!
- What is seasonal living?
Creating your seasonal life is an undertaking that brings your body, mind, and spirit in alignment with seasonal time. It rests on 4 pillars: garden, kitchen, wellness, and activism.
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