ORGANIZING YOUR WHOLE LIFE WITH A NOTEBOOK

 

How do you organize your life? Do you bounce from calendaring system to calendaring system or planner to planner but eventually come to the conclusion that none of them quite fit your needs? Have you switched completely to a digital calendar but still miss the experience of paper planning? I have the answer for you.

 I use this organizing system, but I love journals, so I’ve split each list and task into a few journals. My journals are my hobby, and there’s no greater pleasure to me than sitting down with a pile of notebooks and journals and planning my days, weeks, months, and life in general.

How to organize your life using a notebook

I need to write things out. On paper. There’s something about the act of physically writing that helps me commit my schedule to memory, that connects me to my goals and plans.

At this point, I’ll always keep a digital calendar and master to-do list as a back-up and to sync up with my family.

 

Plan Your Typical Day

At the front of the notebook, write the things you like to accomplish in a typical day. Think of these as routines for organizing your life. If you were the perfect ideal version of yourself, what would you do from sunup to sundown? We all know that at sundown, you hit the couch with a bowl of popcorn and a middle-grade novel. It’s okay to admit it.

Organize Your Life Daily Using Time Chunks

This may be the most important tip in this post. Do not start writing a daily to-do list until you’re clear about what your day looks like. Each morning, start a fresh page with the date up top in colored pen. Next, use a colored pen to divide your day into time chunks.

After you’ve written your calendar items down, your day should naturally break itself up into chunks of time. The time after you wake up but before you get the kids out the door to school, the time between getting the kids out the door and getting yourself to work or getting your younger kids down for a nap. There’s a slice of time during your lunch break or after work before dinner. You have another chunk of time after the kids go to bed but before you dissolve into a mush-brain in front of the TV.

Organizing Your Life on Paper

Writing on paper helps you look and feel more engaged in the real world. I spend so much time on the phone and on the computer that I look like a hypocrite when I tell my kids to put the screens away. Writing for a deadline, planning my schedule, playing Minecraft? It all looks the same to my kids. A screen is a screen is a screen. So, planning my day in a notebook is a nice change.

Weekly Chore Checklist

The idea here isn’t to make more work for yourself. But if you have a list of weekly cleaning tasks to complete, you can easily knock 1 or 2 out when you have a couple minutes.

You can also assign certain chores to particular days of the week. Maybe every weekends you do the laundry, Monday you clean the bathroom, and so on.

That way you never have to do it all at at once, and you don’t have to think about it. It just becomes a routine.

 I like to use a small 3×5 notebook so that it is easy to take with me {and can fit in a pocket in my day planner if needed}.  One of my hair ties worked perfectly to keep it shut and it also works great for a pen holder.  Basically you are going to create three different tabs in your notebook {I just used some tape for this} and will then divide your to do list into three different lists.   The first tab is for tasks that HAVE to be done that day.  The second tab is for tasks that need to be done within the next week or so, and the last tab is for bigger projects that I really want to do. but don’t currently have a timeline attached to them.  I also put in a fourth tab {that you don’t need to do} for other lists that I like to make such as blog post ideas, gift ideas, recipes that I want to try, etc.

Each evening before I go to bed, I write down all of the mandatory things that need to be done the next day in the first tab.  You do have to use a little judgement here and make sure that you are not expecting too much out of yourself – your tasks must be doable within the time frame that you have available to you.  I just do a running list here – not a new page for each day.  If for some reason, there was a task that I wasn’t able to do the previous day, that will be my number one task to get done.  I do have a regular morning and evening routine that I am pretty good at following so I don’t add any of these tasks to my list.

Carry your notebook with you 

This tip may sound a little odd. Most of the time, our planners and journals have a home on a kitchen table, desk or nightstand. But we’re suggesting something different. When it comes to organizing your life with a notebook, it can be helpful to have it on-hand whenever you’re on the go. 

In order for one notebook to help you keep everything organized, it needs to be accessible when you need it. This eliminates our tendency to jot down different lists in different places. Plus it helps you stay focused on what daily tasks you need to complete in order to keep your life organized. Even a quick but frequent review of what’s in your notebook makes it easier to always keep track of important tasks.