Hey there, Mamas! School is back in swing. As much as I love the summer, I am beyond excited to get back into a routine with the kiddos. I feel like I have grown personally and professionally over the summer. I can’t wait to share with you some resources that I have found immensely helpful.
Be on the lookout for Healthy Living Resources {Part Two} – Podcasts for Health and Happiness
Organizational Resources
I have been on a crazy planner search through the first part of the year. Thank goodness for Facebook ads – haha. They knew I was searching, so they directed me towards two brands in particular.
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Productive Flourishing
These planning pages have been beyond helpful for my work projects. They have free pages you can download to try out their system, but I loved it so much, I spent the $12.99 on their academic year planner.
Pros: You can really breakdown your goals into manageable steps so you know what actions need to be taken and when. Yearly goals break down into quarters; quarters into months; months into weeks; weeks into days. No stagnation with these planners. I also love, love, LOVE their habit tracker and blog calendar.
Con: Currently, they are only paper/PDFs (not bound). This is okay for work, but I decided to get a bound planner/organizer for my home tasks. However, I did preorder their 2019 bound planner. I am super excited about it!
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Best Self Co
This is the planner/organizer I use for my home life. This is bound (bonus!) and has a very unassuming appearance, which is great for those who don’t want to flash their journal to the whole world. It has you focus on 1-3 big goals, and break down what success “milestones” you will reach along the way, plus what action you will take daily to help you reach your goals. (This is what I work with clients on a lot!)
Pros: Understated appearance, focus on gratitude in morning and evening, daily reflection (how can you improve tomorrow), habit tracking from week to week, dry erase poster helps you keep up momentum to “not break the chain” of success
Con: Daily breakdown can seem a bit confusing/overwhelming at first. However, they do have a Facebook group and the members are really helpful with guiding each other with how to best complete each page. Another con: times are already printed in the journal (6 am – 9 pm). If it’s a work day that I plan to exercise, my alarm is going of at 4:35 am, so I have found myself writing the times over.
What I love about both of these planning systems:
They encourage you to leave as little “white space” as possible. It’s not so overwhelming once you get used to it. This helps to ensure that you are actually ACCOMPLISHING things that need to get done – rather than keeping busy doing things that don’t matter.
Also, with a time estimated for everything, they keep expectations in check with how long things will legitimately take so you’re not over-scheduling.