2012 Homemade Planner

My wife is easily the most organized person I know. She thinks it's normal and that it's easy, but I've actually heard somebody ask her if they could hire her to help them organize their house. Over the years, she has tried multiple variations of day planners to help her plan and organize her life. The problem is that she has never found a planner that had what she wanted, and over time she has developed criteria for a planner that has yet to be satisfied by anything off the shelf.

So, she made her own.

Upon looking at this first picture, I can imagine you might have thought, "Wow, that's big." Well, that is intentional. One of the criteria she has developed for a planner is enough space to consolidate many things in one place. For example, when you flip to the first page of her new planner, you see this.

Birthdays. We're horrible at remembering birthdays. My family is huge, so that doesn't help.  She wanted to have a page where she could put everybody's birthday in one, accessible place. Oh, but there's so much more she wanted in a planner. Flip to the next page, where the monthly planning begins, and you'll see this.

Goals and notes. It's really important to both of us to have spiritual goals and everyday goals to motivate us to live a meaningful life. I don't track my goals...I just like to think they happen over time. :) She wants to be able to set goals and gain the satisfaction of meeting them (hence the weekly checklists). You'll notice that there are only enough check boxes for one week. That's because directly below this page is the following:

The week. When building her template for the weekly page, she typed in only the things that she knew were constant every week. Everything else, including the dates, she hand writes in when she gets to that week. Each weekly view that you see here is accompanied by the monthly goals and notes page above. So, at the beginning of every week, she is forced to go back to the week before to review what her monthly goals are in order to write them down for the next week. Brilliant!

This planner was the result of many purchased planners that didn't satisfy her requirements for good organization and planning. She created these four pages using Microsoft Word and printed them all at home -- 54 pages total (52 weeks in the year, plus the birthdays page and the cover page). Then she took her pages to Office Depot to get them bound together with a simple plastic cover.

In the end, I believe it costed her less than $10 total (not counting the cost of ink from our own printer...not sure how much that would amount to), and she got exactly what she wanted. :)

Mother-Daughter Calendars

The other day, my wife told me about a routine conversation that she has with our 3 year-old daughter almost every single morning right after she wakes up:

"Mom, what are we going to do today?"
"I don't know. We need to go downstairs and eat breakfast."
"What are we going to do after breakfast?"
"Maybe we can do a puzzle."
"What are we going to do after a puzzle?"
"Well, we're probably going to go to the library today."
"What are we going to do after the library today?"

...and so on; I think you get the idea. You might have even had this conversation before. Since this was happening day after day, and at times throughout the day, my wife decided to make life easier on herself by making a "calendar" for my daughter. She put it right underneath her own whiteboard calendar on the wall.

It's an old frame with Christmas wrapping paper behind the glass. Then she just printed off the days of the week on some card stock and created a stack of hand-drawn pictures of the potential activities they might do in a day. 

My daughter loves to check her own little calendar every day, and it saves my wife some breath, too. :)