Getting Organized // 2014 Planner Organization

I've touched on blog planning here before & honestly I love it but honestly I gave up on it recently.  Most recently I decided not to push my self into hating my blog - so I posted about being flexible, about posting when I want & what I want, and most importantly not posting if I don't want to or am not inspired to.  I would love to take this blog to a full time job thing (and even tried it & was loving it! and sort of miss it) but I don't want to end up feeling disconnected from my blog and I have in the past.  I don't put a lot of emphasis on number & followers, but I think the reason I tend to hang around the same amount of followers for a long time is because if I get too big, there's too much responsibility.

This blog is for me, honestly - for me to share things in a genuine way & hope someone finds it comforting or relatable.  Anyway, that's not the point of this post.  The point of this post is my renewed interest in planning.  Not just blog planning but life planning.  I thought I'd share with you a little video planner tour and then share with you what I'm doing & what I'm planning.  Onto the video:

(don't forget to watch in HD!  Let me know how you feel about this vid, I'm not sure the quality of my vids is really coming across here!)

Some of the most important things in my planner are as follows:

Color Coding

Like I mentioned in the video - prettifying my planner is not what I'm trying to do here. I'm not going to spend hours making in beautiful with each week having a theme.  Nope, I'm here to plan.  But that doesn't mean it can't be colorful.  I actually dismissed the color coding thing at first but then agreed that its the best way to see what's happening at a glance.  I also like my color associations - yellow for family because yellow highlighters mean most important to me & family is important, pink for blog because why not, orange for goals because they are important & orange is another important color to me, blue for youtube because why not (lol), green for money because green always equals money, and purple for things for me because it's my favorite color.  These 6 areas are all areas of my life I think.  So color coding means I can see what's happening where & when really easily.

Dashboard

This is a great idea because I can flip here & instantly know what to focus on (hey, there's that word again) for the day, week, etc.  Having the post it notes in coordinating colors also means that I know what parts of my life I'm focusing on & what needs to get done for each.

Monthly Life Calendar & Monthly Blog Calendar

My original planner set up was much larger.  I had a larger calendar - a month on two pages - and also a week on two pages.  After a week I realized I didn't need that much space!  So I condensed my monthly calendar to one page & recycled the month on two pages to the back for an editorial calendar.  It's taken me a bit to get back on track with how I used to to my blog planning.  You ever start something then stop & don't know how to start up again?  But having them separate is working for me - I do put the blog/youtube colors on the Life Calendar just so I know since it's the first place I look.

Ideas Section

At first I thought why not go back to having a blog notebook? But then I realized that now that I'd condenced my calendars down I could fit more paper at the back of the planner.  So that's where I jot ideas down & it really functions as my blog notebook.  Having everything in one place means I'm not looking for one or the other - I'm more organized because I know it's all in one spot.  The dividers also keep me on my current ideas.  I can flip back & forth but sometimes an idea is developing and I need to flip to it easily.  This section is good for supply lists, product lists, etc as well.

My planner is really important to me now & has been keeping me really accountable.  I am still under the mindset that I'll publish when I want to publish but this keeps my ideas organized.  Not to mention the trash goes out and things are mailed when they are supposed to be mailed!  I need to put things like change the air filter in here too - that is the next step!

How do you plan?  Do you keep your blog/work/life/etc separate or together?

xoxo, Moe

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