Head over to my Facebook page to access my free planner printable available to my fans!
Last week I shared some of the things that I’ve learned about myself while doing research on how to get my life and home organized before my family welcomes another addition in November. I promised to share with you this week what I’ve learned about home management binders. So I’ll dive right in:
Even though all those free printables and different section ideas are very tempting, I don’t need them all. Some things come more naturally to me than others. I don’t need to organize areas of my life that are already organized. For example: My bill paying and savings plans are second nature to me. They don’t require a section in my binder. I also don’t have any need for a lot of space for appointments because, let’s face it, my schedule on paper is very boring. I made and tried a daily planner. I had used a two-page-per-day planner for years before I had children so I thought this would be the best method for me, but found that it was just not working this time around. Then I read this article about different levels of planners and it became clear to me what the problem was. I was much like her and started off with the “nerd planner” when I really only needed a Week-at-a-glance. I have found it makes more sense for me as my tasks are not usually day dependent because the amount I can do in a day varies so much.
I have since upgraded to a color printer so my weekly pages are color coded into different sections. Keeping the boxes and line space to smaller amounts has meant that I can only add so many tasks to my list, so as not to overwhelm myself. I took a lot of inspiration from the Uncalendar and tweaked this idea to suit my personal and business life. First, I made a list of things I wanted to keep track of: personal to do, blog to do, kids to do, meals, habits I’m working on, people I need to get in touch with, a weekly memory/focus verse and a simple “catch all” area for when I don’t want to pull out the specific list or project sheet for thoughts that pop into my head. That’s a lot of information that I was trying to get out of my head and onto paper!
I also have a very simple list of regular housekeeping tasks, broken down into daily, weekly, and monthly. I put them in a page protector and I just lay it on top of my binder. One side has my brief daily list and a section for each day of the week. On the reverse side I have a 4 week rotation of monthly tasks and I will choose one week at a time to complete. I found it much simpler to make my own lists rather than print or purchase those made by someone else because, others’ lists just don’t suit me. There are certain cleaning tasks that I just don’t care about (at least in this stage of my life) and I do different things on different days than or not as frequently as premade lists tell me.
I am still using a lot of the tips I learned from Planner Perfect when it comes to projects, lists, goals, and having all of my brain’s information available at my fingertips. My mind feels much less cluttered and, surprisingly, my energy levels have increased! It has been great to use this newfound energy to play more with my kids and actually stay (mostly) caught up on my housework.
Do you use a home management binder? I’d love to hear about it or see photos because I’m on a constant quest of tweaking mine to perfection.
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Head over to my Facebook page to access my free planner printable available to my fans!
