Carry on Beautiful!

I’ve spent almost my entire life trying to get organised, and motivated. Daily planners, bullet journals, phone reminders, I tried them all. I’d get super focused on making it pretty, or keeping it neat, and it’s easy to ignore phone reminders, so it always fell apart and I was as unorganised as always.

At the start of this year though, I started using a small notebook that I don’t care about, to do daily to-do lists, and it’s changed everything. It’s ugly, it’s messy, it’s fine if I need to change or remove something. For the first time in my life, I’m getting everything I need to get done, done.

It doesn’t take any time to do, unlike the bullet journals, and daily planners, I used to use, so it’s fine if I forgot to do it the day before, or have already gotten started without writing everything down. It’s a two minute job each morning, that has a hugely positive effect on everything I’ve done for the day.

Making lists like these also help my crappy memory, I can just flick through to see when I last fed the snake, or when I last changed the cats litter tray. It’s really helpful for keeping track of what you’ve done, and what you need to do, and that’s a huge help to my daily life.

The fact that it’s just a to-do list means I can also keep track of what I was reading, and when, which is helpful when I have book reviews coming up. I also have a record of exciting things that happened, or events I attended. Best of all though, it can be for anything. Anything I need to remember, look out for, whatever it is, I can just jot it in with no worries about my ‘layout’ or if I have space on the page or whatever.

Finally, this is just me being a bit weird and sentimental I think, but I love the idea that maybe one day my grandkids or someone can look through, and see what kind of things I did in my daily life, what books I read, the gigs I went to. I personally only have photographs from past generations of my family, and obviously I don’t know if any of my notebooks and other bits will make it to future generations, but I like the idea of it!

How do you keep organised?

-Dana