Saturday, October 5, 2013

Time For Some Organization

 

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When I was in high school I remember being very organized. I always showed up on time, I kept track of my daily schedule and obligations... somewhere along the line I lost those skills. I suppose as you grow up life gets more complicated and its harder to keep track of, but I am always running late and much as I try I can't keep myself organized to save my life!

I am a list maker. I constantly have lists going for various things that I need to keep track of. The problem is there are so many different categories of information that I can never remember what is on which list and maybe even where I put that list five minutes ago when I was writing it. So I graduated to keeping different notebooks for different topics. I have my daily task notebook, my planner, (yes I am still a paper planner type of person) my massage business notebook, my pottery business notebook, my keep track of my spending notebook, and more. While this feeds my love of cute little books, it also keeps my bag very heavy and I still have notes scattered between different books if I write things down in a hurry. And then do you think I can find them when I need them? Not so much.

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So my exciting news of the day is that Justin found something that I think is going to solve my problem! It's called bullet journaling. At first it seemed a little overwhelming. A lot of little things to remember to make it all work, but at a closer look I've decided that it's brilliant and am a little upset with myself that I wasn't able to come up with it on my own. Essentially, it's a way to organize and KEEP TRACK OF all of the little things you write down for yourself. The brilliance lies in keeping the first page (or pages) as an index. Every time you add an entry, you give it a title and on the index page write down what page that topic is on. If you add another entry 23 pages later, you just add that page number to the topic. For example:

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Brilliant! The website suggests a graph paper notebook, but being my artist self I bought a beautiful handmade notebook from Purple Bean Bindery without lines assuming that I could figure out how to function on blank pages. Now every little passing thought, task list, sketch of a new design idea, can be written down and easily found afterwards! IMG_8490

I still have a couple of  books that I use for different things, but I have just this one book that I can carry with me and keep daily reminders and lists in that is nice and organized! Hopefully this is going to keep my head free of worrying about remembering things so that I can be more productive and efficient with my time and cross those tasks off the list!