Starting the year afresh, with strategy and with drive….

_____________________________

I love January.

It is hot (well, here in Perth it is anyway – just a cool 39 degrees today!), everyone is in this cool we-are-still-easing-ourselves-in-after-the-holidays mode, and it is all about new beginnings.

This year started very slowly for me, lolling about and dragging my holiday freedom on as long as I could. I do like to think that I made good use of my down time though. I flicked through my travel books and made some plans, floated over the waves at the beach, stocked up on notebooks and phone accessories/protection (3D tempered glass screens from Case Haven have been my phone life saver! I don’t know what I would do without a working phone!) and sat down to schedule, plan and reorganise my daily routine and blog/work happenings. It was so good to have some me time, and to be able to find the time to start getting myself organised for 2017. Here is to hoping I can keep it up through out the year.

Being the complete organisation freak that I am, I have started the year off with umpteen different books, apps and programs to help keep me on track. Below is the trusty combination that I am using to organise myself for 2017, some of which you may find helpful for organising your own year!

An Online or Electronic Calendar

For years and years I refused to use an online calendar, preferring to handwrite everything into a physical diary. Now that I do multiple things across multiple different businesses per day, the appeal of an online calendar is far greater. Not only can you colour coordinate different aspects of your life – i.e. Pink = Little Miss Mon Bon, light blue = general life and green = events – but you can set up reminders, see your whole week or month in advance, and manage your time much better with the coloured blocks. The fact that you can add invitees to certain calendar events, or even share whole calendars with others is a God send! When a number of people need to be across your schedule, nothing beats having a digital and easily shareable calendar!

A content/task schedule

You didn’t think that I could give up on physical diaries and calendars all together did you? Instead of writing my events, meetings and appointments in them, I use them to help schedule the content I will be posting across my own social media channels, as well as those of the businesses that I work for. Keeping the scheduled content separate from my digital calendar keeps both schedules more streamlined, and it allows me to see everything set out more clearly. Some people prefer to digitalise this too, but I personally can’t digitalise my to do lists and creative processes. Even when I was going through university, I would schedule out what needed to be done for what subject, day by day!

A dozen different notebooks

I kid you not, at any one time I am carrying between 3-5 different books around with me. It sounds ridiculous, but I need to have everything kept separate. One book is for my to-do lists (yes, there is always more than one to-do list), another for keeping track of what I need to shoot and which stories I want to match with what photos, a third for keeping lists of goals, dream destinations and packages I am expecting, and a fourth for all other creative scribbling. All of those books may sound excessive, but I like being able to go back to a specific book and find exactly what I am looking for. Flicking through pages and pages of uncategorised notes and scribble is too much of a headache for me!

How are you staying organised for 2017? Perhaps you have a better way of streamlining my streamlining (well, it is more like categorisation and far too much detail!)?

You may also like

Leave a Reply