Between prepping for Bead Fest Philly, transporting two very intense and driven kids around to their various things, (one wants to single handedly improve and increase mass transit and got himself an internship with the city bus service without any parental assistance. The other wants to be an actress/dancer on Broadway and has play rehearsals, drama camp, dance class, and is in a film currently shooting locally), two houses to care for, bills to pay, pets to feed and care for, summer parties to host, etc etc etc.
I have a system for keeping track of our daily agendas involving Google calendar and a weekly chalkboard calendar (photo is from May 2011)
These two things working together help make sure I always know where and when. However, it's the "to do's" that were killing me. I was trying to remember them. And doing them on my phone just didn't work well for me...
Last weekend I was at the store and ran across a 4 pack of cute journal sized notebooks clearanced for $4. That was when the idea was born....I bought a pack of the notebooks.
They were located right next to the scrapbooking aisle. So I picked up a few inexpensive things that would make the book functional AND cute. I am pretty sure they all came from the "Smashbook" line.
First I added the blank sticker and titled it Brain Dump. Then randomly glued some "fortunes" from one of the scrapbooking things I picked up.
I also picked up some red and white striped paperclips that came with little adhesive flags and labeled them for my needs.
Here's a close-up of one of the tags. How you label your tags depends on your needs. But I have so many to do lists under separate categories, that 3 of them are specific to business, house, and lake house in addition to other categories: to make, to buy, party planning (yes, I do a lot of that), and Remember This (for misc stuff). I have a couple leftover paperclips I can use if needed.
As soon as I started "dumping" all my to do's onto the page rather than trying to keep them filed in my brain, I already started feeling less stressed. I even have a list of specific beads to make for Bead Fest.
I also found these super cute sticky notes/page markers that are stickers. Super convenient to just stick one set to the inside cover of the journal to use when I'm "on the road".
Lastly, I wanted to make sure I always have a pen with me to write with. After all, what good is a brain dump system if you can't write in it? I bought some of these journal bandoliers a while back as gifts. I forgot to give them (oops) and took one to use for myself.
Hope this inspires you to create a system that works for you!
-Jen Cameron
