Now that you’ve seen a glimpse of my weekly planner pages, let’s get you started with some preliminary work to help you understand more about your daily flow and routines.
Remember:
For these steps, we are still working in our temporary binder. Once we get a better idea of how we want to use our household planner, we will begin building our official binder.
Make a Household Planner Notebook: Organizing Your Daily Routines
For this step, I want to propose two ways of organizing your daily routines & tasks:
1) By the specific day of the week.
Take 7 pieces of paper and label the tops of them with the days of the week. These pages will temporarily keep track of the tasks that are always assigned to these days.
2) By the type of day it is.
Take additional pieces of paper and label the tops with the “types” of different days/routines you have throughout the week. For example: homeschooling, work/ministry day, errand day, cleaning day, day of rest, etc.
Your days of the week may all follow a similar schedule or routine and so you won’t necessarily have much need for a specific divider for each day. That’s fine. By the time you’ve worked this plan, you’ll know. You might find your routines are more like my mine and your days are dictated by the “type” of day rather than the day of the week. Not sure what kind of labels to use yet for the “types” of days? No problem. That’s why we’re building this temporary planner. Start with what you know and see how it works for you. Make adjustments as needed.
For my Household Planner, I would have labelled pages for:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Errand Day
Home Blessings Day
Homeschool Day
Work Day
Split Days
Weekends
Once you have your pages labelled, hole-punch and put them in the front of your temporary household planner. In the coming days (or weeks), use these pages to write down all the tasks you want to do (& actually DO) each day, write notes to yourself about these tasks, create checklists, routines, and schedules for your different days, write down what works, what doesn’t, jot down any ideas/brainstorms about how to make more of your day, etc.
I wrote down things like:
-prep meals
-made phone calls
-sent emails
-scheduled appointments
-school prep
-schooling
-make menu plan
-make shopping lists
-chores
-pay bills
-lunch with my husband
-Bible study
-played board games w/kids
-things I’d like to do if I had more time
-goals for the day
-home “blessings”
-exercising
-called my parents
-trips to library
-shopping trips
-church activities
-family activities
-took a nap
-sorted the mail
-field trips
-date nights
-family nights
-business work
…anything and everything you actually DO or WANT to do goes on these pages.
Just decide if the task(s) are an “every Monday” thing (and if so, write it down on your “Monday” page) or if they are an “every ______ day” type thing you do (if so, write it down on your “_______ day” page).
Coming up next:
It’s time to print your weekly planner and start planning!
