"Paper-based planning has many benefits, including building in screen breaks to your day for reflection on the highest and best use of your time." - Julie Morgenstern

Despite having a home office filled with various planners and notebooks, notepads and paper, organizers and folders, I am always on the lookout for a new system.

You know the one - the one that finally simplifies my crazy schedule, the one that neatly streamlines my to-do list that currently could fill a stadium, and the one that will point out what I should focus on next and what I can leave until tomorrow or the next day (you'd think these things would always be clear, but I assure you they aren't).

And while I'm perfectly aware that this is not possible, Levenger & Julie Morgenstern's new line of Circa products for staying organized come mighty close.

I have long been a Julie Morgenstern devotee and have longed after the entire contents of every Levenger catalogue since the late 1980s, so I've been jumping up and down with excitement ever since the announcement a few weeks ago.

This line, available exclusively through Levenger, takes their award-winning Circa notebooks with their removable, refillable pages, and blends them with the amazing tracking systems that Julie Morgenstern is known for. This gives people like me that really like to customize their calendars and organize their notes in a way that makes sense to them the flexibility to work better, faster, stronger, etc.

A great place to start is with the Circa Balanced Life Planner, a quarterly day-by-day agenda. Smart that it's only a quarter, so you're not lugging around more than you need to (have you felt my purse and tote bag lately?), yet it gives you 2-pages-per day, so that you can actually capture all that you need to (and we both know how much you've got to do today).  And speaking of which, the schedule section on the left-hand side goes from 7 am to 11 pm - the most realistic schedule I've ever seen in a planner - so you can fit in both work AND life stuff. Amazing. And the roomy sections on the right give you places to track your to-dos and calls for work and one for personal so that you can focus on what needs doing now and what you can do later. There's even a time-estimating column so planning your day just got a little easier and a 4D section - Delete, Delay, Diminish, Delegate - that allows you to whittle down your tasks even faster.

At the top, there's some advice from Julie, and each month is tabbed and comes with a monthly calendar, so you can get a wider scope of how the next 30-90 days look. The thick see-thru cover protects your precious pages, so you can lug it around with you to your various meetings and happenings. 

And because the system is so flexible, go ahead and add in the Circa Do Every and Circa Time Map cards,  available separately, if you like. They'd also work beautifully with the Circa Next Action Notebook.

Another insanely useful creation is the the Circa Stepped Project Notebook. This five-tiered planner for tracking multiple projects allows you to see 5 projects at once, which as you know has been pretty much impossible up until now (unless you're willing to spread huge pieces of paper on the floor or wall). Like the Circa Balanced Life Planner, my productivity and clarity has increased and I finally feel like I've got a handle on things.

Isn't that just what you want from your calendar and notebooks?

Shop Levenger & Julie Morgenstern's new line of Circa products now.