5 Tips to get organised for 2023
The wind is whooshing outside the house and I am sitting beside the last glowing embers of the fire with a blanket on my knee, a cup of chamomile tea in hand and an array of tasks to prepare. The new year means adhering to a new schedule whilst being another year (or at least part of another year) older and hence (dully) more forgetful.
I am reading the cleverly written “Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney as a distraction from the real job at hand. I am particularly enjoying how she writes speech in an unconventional way which makes the characters seem modern to me. I am also quite concerned that my teenage son might look over my shoulder when I am reading one of the sex scenes and lose all respect for me, hence the covert night-time mission to reach the end of the plot.
Like everyone, I am busy, so being prepared needs to be efficient and lead to efficiency. Hence I’m sharing these 5 tips to get organised for 2023:
Wall Calendar
Desk planner
Digital diary
Cards stash
Grocery shopping and menu planner
This is how I like to break these down:
Wall Calendar
I like to have a monthly wall calendar in the kitchen. It hangs on the notice board next to the class schedules of my children and a spreadsheet for pick-up times and after school activities. At the beginning of the year I transfer everyone’s birthdays from the previous year’s calendar. Then I fill in all the school term dates, flights we may have booked for work and work holiday dates already planned.
As the year progresses, we add weekend plans, dinner engagements, playdates, outings, car appointment reminders, vets, doctor and dentist appointments and so on. (there should be more self care appointments planned, maybe I’ll include that as a goal for this year 2023). Each morning as we sit for breakfast, I glance at the day and ensure we don’t miss any important events.
As I totally rely on this calendar to Know Everything, it is vital that we fill it in as soon as we are aware of anything….. Apologies to the music teacher when we have forgotten to attend lessons (more than once, oops).
Desk Planner
For the past three years I have used a Clever Fox planner from Amazon, that I purchase or receive as a gift. The former only if the latter doesn’t evolve.
There are an array of options for size, colour and depth of information. However, they are all undated so you can start at any time. I enjoy the split of diary entry pages, monthly planners and quarterly goal setting and reviews.
Being human and largely imperfect, I don’t ever complete this in it’s entirety. There are weeks that are left blank and sections that start with good intentions. However, I do always come back to it and store them in a box with all my annual diaries in case we need to remember where we were at a certain time.
This year I have aspirations to a sentence-a-day diary, inspired by Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project”. Have you read it?
Digital Planner
This has been installed to ensure that we never miss any more music lessons, ahem. It is a sort of “to be sure, to be sure” scenario. I set weekly scheduled events in to my phone calendar, with an alert half an hour before each, so that we have enough time to get there (and sacrifice dinner if needs be).
Card Stash
I should really find a more elegant sounding title for this, however, all it is, is a bundle of blank cards for all occasions: birthdays for boys / girls / adults, thank you notes, get well soon, anniversary, sympathy, and plain yet pretty cards.
I am much more likely to send a card f I have one handy. It eliminates one task from the purchasing-writing-posting equation and saves a lot of travel and shopping time. These cards sit in a pretty box on my desk awaiting their precise moment to shine.
Grocery List and Menu Planner
This has inordinately changed my life. My daughter discovered them first and it was the most useful and subsequently used (no pages wasted) gift I received last year. Gift giving is one of her love languages.
Basically there are 2 notepads side by side, one contains the grocery list section, and the other is divided into the days of the week. The night before I do my Big Shop, I sit surrounded by recipe books and my phone (for internet advice), and plan 7 dinners, duly noting down the necessary ingredients for each. These are added to the grocery list section, which is added to by everone as items are depleted. Raisins for the porridge, loo rolls, hand soap, bin bags, tinned tomatoes, you know the sorts of essentials. Mostly always Tissues in our house, as someone has undoubtedly a runny nose, especially in January.
Are these useful?
I hope this was useful. I’d love to hear some of yours too - why don’t you share them in the comments below.