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.

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