#1) Make a Household Planner Notebook: Go get your mess!
You know, the piles and drawers you have stockpiled with receipts, bills, business cards, coupons, recipes, notes from school, church bulletins, sermon notes, sticky notes, greeting cards, paint chips, notes from your husband about what types of oil and air filters you need for your vehicle, printed how-to articles from the internet, clippings from magazines, appointment cards, lists, notes to yourself . . . anything you have kept that you feel is important, but just haven’t had time to do anything with yet.
#2) Make a Household Planner Notebook: Sort your mess!
Make separate piles for things like . . .
menu planning, housecleaning, homeschooling, business, financial, shopping, family, medical, goals/dreams, ministry, etc.
If it’s trash, throw it away now!
#3) Make a Household Planner Notebook: Label your piles!
Take a piece of paper and create a label for each pile.
#4) Make a Household Planner Notebook: File your piles!
Hole punch those labelled pages (or put in sheet protectors) and put them in a binder, filing everything from your piles into the binder behind the appropriate label. This is just a temporary resting place for your piles. So use an old binder, the bigger the better. Use more than one if needed. Hole punch full pages and file them behind your labelled page. For loose or smaller items, insert a sheet protector or hole punch a large envelope for the labelled sections and put those items in there for now. I used sheet protectors for my labelled pages and put the loose items in the same sheet protector behind the labelled top page.
#5) Make a Household Planner Notebook: No more paper messes!
In the coming days, weeks, months, you will begin building your “official” household planner notebook(s). While this is a “works-in-progress”, file those paper trails in this temporary binder.
No more piling!
No more stuffing drawers!
If you find that you need to add another section, do it. Keep some blank, hole-punched pages in the front along with a marker, so you can add a new section as soon as you know you need it. You can buy a cheap hole puncher to keep in the notebook to make punching other pages easy. File some extra sheet protectors or large envelopes in the back.
Using this temporary binder will work for those who have trouble with messes AND for those of you who are perfectionists too. For those that struggle with messes, this will get you in the habit of putting things away right from the start, before you’ve even printed your first page from Mom’s Home Journal. For those who are perfectionists, this temporary binder gives you a place to keep the mess under control and organized while you “perfect” your household planner notebook. I have a tendency to not complete a project because I’m waiting for everything to be just right. This process will allow you to work one section at a time while keeping all the other paper trails in check.
