Getting Organized (Part 1) – My Home Notebook Overview

I am a very organized person.  Oh yes I am!

In my head, at least.

I keep an amazing amount of information organized in my head, and I can retrieve it with relative ease when asked.  This skill infuriates Tahd.  He’ll claim I never told him something while I can remember the exact conversation – blow by blow – in which I told him.  This fuels a second argument between us, one related to his listening skill.  Marriage is fun, no?

Although I can store and retrieve a lot of information in my mind, I’ve come to learn it’s relatively ineffective to keep track of everything in that way.  Deadlines can come and go without me ever realizing there was a deadline.  I lose track of things because there were no reminders along the way requiring me to recall the information.  Most often I forget about something until the very last minute and then scramble to complete the tax on-time.  Organization is no good if you forget to recall!

Please tell me someone else relates to this!

Several years ago – before Gabe was even born – someone introduced me to Flylady.  Blessed Flylady.  Cursed Flylady.  My feelings on her are mixed.  She is so… legalistic, I guess.  You have to get dressed.  To your shoes.  Everyday.  Your sink has to be shiny around the clock.  You do things like flings and boogies and frankly all sorts of things that end up making your home look better but make you feel like a bit of a dork in the process.  At least they made me feel like a dork.

One thing she recommends is what she calls a Control Journal.  Sounds positively joyful, right?  Yeah… Basically, a Control Journal contains everything in your life you need to keep track of – your schedule, important phone numbers, medical information, birthdays, to-do lists, daily routines, monthly routines, meal plans, and so on.  Given my love of packets, the Control Journal looked like a lot of fun, in spite of the negative connotation that I had to be controlling (i.e. micromanaging) my life.  So I made one.  And I used it.  And it worked.

There were some little glitches along the way, not the least of which was the fact that I gave birth to a child and my world totally changed.  I was far more concerned with sleeping longer than two hours at a time than I was filling out pages in a binder.  So I filed it away and promptly forgot about it.

One of the things that keeps me most defeated in life is my anxiety.  One of the reasons I feel so much anxiety is that I’m juggling a lot of balls in my head, frantically trying to make sure I don’t drop any.  This is certainly not the only reason for my anxiety, but it doesn’t help.  In an effort to relieve a bit of stress in my life, I decided to resurrect the Control Journal.

I’m also working on the skill of happiness, however, and the idea of micromanaging my life sounds positively torturous.  So I decided this time would be different.  It would be streamlined, fun, and pretty.  As such, it also has a new name – Heidi’s Home Notebook.

Cleaning Schedule

First up was the creation of a cleaning schedule.  Normally when I set out to create a home cleaning schedule I think of all the things that need to be done and the frequency by which they should be done.  I end up with what seems like dozens of tasks to do everyday – boring tasks; monotonous tasks; mind-numbing tasks.  It’s like going from zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds.  I currently dust my house approximately once every three months.  Do I really need to start dusting it twice a week?

Instead of creating a “perfect” cleaning schedule, this time I created a realistic one broken down into five sections – one for each week of the month (the fifth being a week devoted to special home projects since not every month has five weeks).  I followed the suggestions from Steady Mom about Intentional Cleaning.  I focused on the essentials, thought about how often I do them now, and thought about the next step I could take toward improving my home management skills.  Instead of dusting twice a week I broke my dusting down into two sections and will do each section once a month.  If dust starts bothering me more often than once a month, I can spot clean anytime I want or I can adjust my cleaning rotations to include more dusting.

Calendars

Next up was a calendar.  I decided to include three types – a monthly calendar so I have access to a month-at-a-glance view of my life.  This is where I’ll record future events.  For instance, I am already aware of some events that will be taking place in May.  Rather than write these on a daily planner, I’ll record this on the month view for May and will fill out my daily calendar when I get closer to May.

I also included a weekly planner.  At the end of each week, I’ll transfer any pertinent information from my monthly calendar to my next weekly calendar so I can keep track of  my week-at-a-glance.  I’ve included other things on my weekly planner as well, including a space to plan meals, make grocery lists, keep track of little goals, and other things.

Finally, each night before I go to bed, I use the information from my weekly calendar to plan the next day.  These are more specific versions of my weekly calendar and allow me to highlight appointments, due dates, and things of that nature.

I know it seems like a lot of copying.  I could streamline the process by only writing things once.  But I find if I fill out my daily planner too early I don’t have a good picture of what I need to do on that day and the day starts looking cluttered.  The clutter makes it hard for me to identify the most pertinent items requiring completion.  Also, rewriting things helps give me a concrete reminder of my goals.  I’m not a tech user in this regard for that reason – my mind is wired to remember things when I write them moreso when I type them.  Tell me something and I might (i.e. probably will) forget it.  Get me to write it down – even if I don’t ever look at the paper again – and I’m much more likely to retain and use the information.

There are a lot of online resources for organizational tools like this.  If you Google “home notebook” you can find lots of free printables.  I used a monthly calendar from Vertex42.  Although I found weekly and daily calendars I could have used, I wanted these to be highly customized and FUN!  Instead, I opted to make my own.  I’ll link up to them at the end of this post.  The weekly calendar I used was inspired by the weekly calendar by The Design Girl.  I would have paid for it except it didn’t track exactly what I wanted to track.

Miscellaneous

I added some miscellaneous pieces to my notebook – an emergency contact page, a year-at-a-glance calendar, a birthday calendar so it’s easy for me to take a quick look and see whose birthdays are in each month.  I’ll eventually add a section for financial information as well as a section for contact information.  I’ll add these to my links at the end, also.

To-Do Lists

The next major feature is my to-do list.  To-Do lists have been notoriously challenging for me.  It’s easy to dump everything on them and end up accomplishing nothing from them.  They can get really discouraging for me.  Last fall I was gifted Getting Things Done by organizational guru David Allen.  The book is geared more toward people in the business field; I found it difficult to translate his system from the business field into my stay-at-home-mom role.  However, my adaptation of the to-do list system (if I’ve understood it correctly) is working really well for me.

Basically, I’ve divided my life up into several roles.  I’m the homemaker, a wife, a mother, a friend/daughter/sister, a ministry director, and more.  Each area has its own category.  I think I have a total of 10 categories?  If I end up working on a special project I’ll either add a new category or make it into a sub-category of one of the larger categories.

For each category, I did a “brain dump.”  I brainstormed everything I need to do – every single to-do item I could remember.  My goal was to get it out of my head and onto paper so I don’t have to use my mental energy remembering lists.  My lists have ended up being fairly long and since I did this in the middle of the night I know they’re not complete.  I need to revisit them to make them more complete.  The more information I put on paper, the less clutter I have in my mind.

The secret to these lists is the next step.  I’ve looked at each category and selected one or two items that I’ve put on a master list.  I call it my “Next Up” list.  In his book, I think Allen calls it a “Must Do” list.  Periodically (weekly, maybe?) I will revisit my individual lists and update my “Next Up” list to help focus me on the things on which I need to spend the bulk of my energy.  I use the same To-Do form for each of these types of lists – I just have a separate categories.  Each role has a section and the “Next Up” list has its own section.

***************

In my next post (which I will publish later today if all goes well), I’ll explain the layout of my binder and link to all the files.  I was going to do it all in one post, but I realized this is getting super long.  I want to break it up so it’s not gigantic.