One of my big resolutions this year was to just be more organised in general. I tend to be in a state of disarray even at the best of times, with to do lists coming out of my ears but never written down, never knowing what I’m doing on any given weekend without ringing my mum to check and not really knowing the state of our budgeting for the month until I check my bank account.
At work, we’re given a “desk allowance” with which we can purchase anything we want that to help us with our jobs or life at work. Last year, I got my awesome yoga mat because we’d just got our gym set up and that helped me in our lunchtimes. This year, one of my colleagues suggested these awesome diaries with the title “CEO of My Own Life Planner” and I jumped at the chance to get one. It was a difficult choice in terms of colour because they’re all so pretty, but I decided to go with the standard and sensible black, white and gold – it makes me feel more grown up but still on trend with the gold.
It’s definitely been keeping me on track with my organisation at work and in blogging. Each page is a single day (and they’re big pages!) with room for “Business”, “Home & Family”, “Health & Fitness”, “Me” and ‘Gratitude”. I’m using the Business part for work, obviously, then popping in events under Home & Family and also blog “big” to dos at the bottom of this section, then Me gets my daily blogging tasks (like Twitter, Instagram etc.). The gratitude section has also taken over from my other gratitude diary (as I can’t do too many!) which is pictured. There’s also a daily section for “Today’s Mantra” which I’m filling with quotes I find as inspiration for the day – I’m loving it!
And of course, I had to get a pen to match too! We were actually watching something on TV when a character pulled out a fountain pen and I thought – HEY! I used to love writing with those! So Ben found me the perfect one, some black ink cartridges (which I wasn’t allowed at school, they had to be washable blue ink) and ordered them for me. I’m loving writing with it and have even been doing my writing course all in fountain pen and real ink!
Then I’m trying to get organised in other areas too – note the Filofax, the budget planning sheets and the food planning on the fridge all pictured here. We’ve got a lot of financial planning to do right now! We’ve started off the year with a bit of bang getting the bathroom redone (happening this weekend!) so that’s an added expense to our usual budgets, but we’ve also got a wedding to plan – lots of money will be going on that, so lots of saving to happen! In general, Ben and I aren’t too bad at saving – we’ve got various savings accounts set up and we’ve actually started putting down some early repayments on the mortgage too by direct debit, but that means we need to be all the more careful with our monthly planning as we have extra expenses such as life insurance, critical illness cover and all the other fun things that come with having a mortgage too going out of our accounts. I was sent the budget planning sheets by Contact Numbers UK who are advising how important it is to make sure that you’ve got insurance in place for all your most valuable possessions – in our case, that means phones, Macs, cameras and TVs – we have a lot of gadgets in our house that we’ve made sure to get covered. It might seem like an extra expense, but I promise, it’s really important to have! For example, when my phone was stolen out of our window…
Anyway, onwards! Ben and I usually do a weekly “menu” which we keep track of using Google Keep, but I’ve also received this magnetic meal planning sheet which is awesome as it helps to remind us what we’re having every day so we don’t go off track, which, of course, we never do… We’ve been trying to eat healthily recently and I’ve got some posts going up soon about the books and recipes that have been helping us to do that.
And finally, I’ve been attempting to bullet journal! It hasn’t been hugely successful yet as I’ve only done monthly trackers so far, but I’m planning pages for tracking writing, books, blog posts and more – wish me luck!
This post is in collaboration with Contact Numbers UK.
