My do-it-yourself planner for 2010

I’ve blogged about my planner before (here and here). I’ve decided to take a step back toward simplification, so for the new year I will begin using planner pages similar to one I created and used a while back. My new planner pages will consist of:

• A monthly calendar, which I have already created—two pages per month, with a column for notes. It’s very similar to the Day Runner calendar, which I really like and which, if you can afford it, is a better quality calendar than what I make. (Day Runner’s comes on better pages, and each month is tabbed.)
• Event/meal planning pages. These are the pages I mentioned above. Each page will cover two weeks’ worth of event/meals. The pages have three columns: One for the date, one for “events” (the normal stuff that’s going on in our lives, which I also record in slightly more detail in the monthly calendar), and one for meals. I usually only list dinner, since it’s the big meal; however, I will include lunch if I have to plan for co-op, or if we happen to eat out. I’ll probably only print these single-sided and use the back of the page for grocery lists or other notes.
  Most recently, my meal planning pages covered just a week at a time, which was great—I could see each week’s worth of everything in one glance. However, I’m not sure I really need that. On the other hand, I’ve also tried meal planning pages that cover four weeks at a time, but it doesn’t leave enough room for me to write. Two weeks should work okay. I really like being able to look back and see what we ate in the past few weeks, in order to add a little variety to our meals. (I’m afraid I’m not terribly creative with food choices, however. I may work on that this year.)
• A to-do list. This is a two-column list, which will be somewhat freeform. Ideally, it would be great to figure out how to organize my list by type (for example: homeschool, co-op, work, and home/personal), but every time I try to do that, I end up running out of room.
• Homeschool planning pages. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this in the coming year. Son will begin high school in the fall, and I really need to get more organized with his schooling and records and the like. So… back to the drawing board as far as lesson plans go.

Here’s a picture of the event/meal planning pages.

Event/Menu Planning Pages

Oh, and I’m using those removable sticky tabs to indicate the current page for each. Well, I’ll probably use a “real” tab to separate the homeschooling info, but I’ll still use a sticky tab to mark the current page(s).

My, I do go on about my planners… I’ll try to blog about something else next time.

My do-it-yourself planner, take 2?

Waaay back in April, I blogged about my planner. I said that I would try using it for a few weeks. Well, it’s been a bit longer than a few weeks now…

For anyone who cares, here’s a picture of the planner. You can click the picture to get a better look.

My current planner

It is as I described it in my previous post, and it has served me well for almost 8 months now. I think this is actually the third iteration of these planner pages—the first didn’t have the horizontal lines in the daily boxes. And then I added the letters under the days on the left—those are daily reminders to do certain things.

I print these pages back-to-back, punch the holes, and the facing pages are shown in the picture. This spread gives me a pretty good idea of what my week looks like, but I must admit that I don’t consult it quite as often as I should.

I’ve thought about changing things up a bit for the new year—maybe trying to figure out how to do only one page per week—but I’m not quite sure what to change. Perhaps it’s time to do some experimenting…

The laundry system

My son assembled a laundry system last month. It’s the chrome kind with three removable bags and a hanging rod. We’re keeping it near the bathroom and using it for undies, light towels, and dark towels. (We wash all of our stuff together rather than each person doing his/her own laundry.) The system is working nicely. (I would eventually like to get another.) What I like about it is that everything is pre-sorted. With the laundry sorter, a full bag is a reminder that we need to do some laundry. Whoever is doing the laundry can just grab the bag, take it to the laundry room, and transfer all the dirty stuff to the washer. Yes, this is simple and is how most normal people do their laundry, but without it, we tend to just heap all of the laundry into big piles until we want clean clothes.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been very good about taking things out of the dryer and putting them away once they’re dry…

Now I need to finish creating the “laundry chart” (well, that’s what I’m calling it, since I don’t really know what else to call it). This will be a list of the different types of loads of laundry and how to wash them. For example, Normal wash, Hot/Cold temp, 2nd Rinse, etc.

I’ve also begun to put together a schedule for doing laundry, but I’m not so great at actually following the schedule. The kids might be better at it than I am, though.