Today Princess Leia and I are going to show you how to get the guts of your organized life. Last time we gave you the bones: the frame of your organizational, time efficient house… now we’re adding electric, plumbing, ventilation, insulation. We’re adding all of the fun things that yes, you could probably survive without if you had to… but you’ll be much more comfortable with.

^{Organization Cat waiting patiently in our supply bin}

But first let me start by expressing love and gratitude for my amazing sister and brother in law. I woke up to a nice big Tim Hortons iced coffee and full pack of cigarettes. It’s going to be a productive day, I can feel it.

Second, have you worked on what we talked about last time? If not, you should or you might not be able to keep up with this post. If you’re one of those humans that can function in daily life without a piece of paper reminding you what to do you might be able to. You know what, either way you should go do that because I showed the basics of time auditing, priority mapping, and routine building and any one at any stage can benefit from that.

I want to real quick explain a couple of things for y’all that will hopefully help solidify what we discussed last time. I did not do the dishes yesterday. I know what you’re thinking; She’s writing posts on time management and efficiency and not actually doing it? But wait… I wanted to show you guys what it looks like if I don’t do dishes for a day. I wanted to show you guys why the things listed in my survival mode are there. This is from one single day of not doing dishes. One. So yes, at least one load of dishes a day is essential to my survival mode list. Same with the floors and laundry.

Time to play Tetris. Princess Leia and I did our AM block today, replacing the hour for exercise and yoga (because we haven’t decided on what exactly we’d like to do for that yet) with working on this post. I put exercise and yoga (working on this post) where I did because the first two things, dishes and laundry, take time to run. They take about an hour, and I like to take care of things like wiping down surfaces after I clear out the dishes so that I can get to all of the surfaces. I like to sweep the floors after I wipe down surfaces so that I don’t have to sweep again after any crumbs/ramen noodle pieces fall onto the floor. The blocks don’t have to be an end all be all, if something comes up or you need a shake up you can fit it in. Play Tetris with your blocks, find the best way to fit the different shapes of tasks together to clear them out!

Alright now that’s out of the way we can move on.

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What is important to you?

Weather you chose bullet journaling, the binder life, an organization station or post it notes, you should ask yourself What is important for me to include? This is a little different than the priorities we set before, though they will probably line up. If you Google or Pinterest what to put into your bullet journal you’ll likely get a bit overwhelmed, there’s lists of every possible thing you can think of. So just ask yourself that question, for me my long term ones were:

That's skin though, right now we’re going to try to stay focused on those guts. (Nine just pulled the knob off of the stove trying to turn it on -.- ) So, let me walk you through my process for this bit and keep in mind that I make my stuff pretty extensive, your list might me a lot shorter, maybe even longer…

Month view...

1. Calendars

• It’s important for me to have a calendar, if you haven’t noticed I have a very large family. If I don’t write down birthdays, school concerts, riding shows, appointments, so on and so on I will either forget until the last minute and freak out or forget entirely and just miss things.
• When I need to pay bills and such I’m also going to need a financial calendar where I write the due date for each bill, when I would like to have the money set aside by, when I need to buy certain household items, you get it.

1. Finance Page

• I have a yearly finance page to record my credit score to watch its progress, and to mark of bills paid (which right now is just student loans), but a smaller monthly page is important to me as well… here I can make my precious little square blocks, one for “Income and expenses” where I have a date, what comes in, what goes out, and a running total.

1. Daily Gratitude

• This may seem a little campy but over the years I have learned that taking a moment to be grateful each day has a major effect on your overall happiness. I used to write down, or recite in my head ten things I was grateful for each day and sometimes still do a lot when I’m having a rough time, but generally just writing one now is enough to put me into perspective.

1. Mood Tracker

• This may seem a little campy too but it really helps with self-awareness, and for me it’s particularly important because my mood can be a huge indicator of where my iron and vitamin levels are at. I get much, much more irritable and quick to anger when my levels are dropping.

1. Sleep Tracker

• Nightmares. Monitoring lethargy to track vitamin levels. ‘Nuff said.

1. Habits

• This is a whole other ‘ask yourself’ bit that we’ll come back around to later, brief description would be a detailed account of daily habits that you would like to encourage in yourself. Drink enough water, take vitamins, check e-mail, you get it.

Down to the week...

1. Liquids Intake

• It’s important for me to be able to see what kind of liquids I’m putting into my body every day or I seriously will just drink twenty cups of coffee and nothing else and that’s just not healthy. Plotting points after every drink forces me to pay attention.

1. Cigarette Intake

• I would like to eventually quit. Again, plotting points after each cigarette helps me pay attention.

1. Major Astrological Transits
   -I study astrology, I like to know what’s going on up there, having a quick cheat sheet to peek at is really helpful for me.

1. A Section for Notes Through the Week
   -Pretty self explanatory

2. Time Management Monitoring

• I try to keep the self-awareness timelines going all the time, you might not need to, but I like to.

1. Steemit blog plan

• So I don’t forget what I’m doing with my running series posts, and so that I plan ahead for a bit more efficiency.

Down to the day…

1. What I’m Making for Dinner.
   -I forget to thaw out meat a lot and often wind up scrambling to figure out what I’m going to cook later in the day.

1. Moon
   -Again I like astrology. A lot. Having the moon phase right there, and which sign its in is absolutely something I want to include.

2. Weather

• Being able to just flip my bujo open and see that Wednesday is going to be 72 degrees with heavy rain helps me plan. For example: now I’m not going to plan on getting on a bus with my kid to go take care of things downtown that day. Or if I see it’s going to be a particularly chilly day I can send kids out with sweaters.

Don’t look at me like that. I know listed like this it seems like a lot, especially on top of what we did last time. Honestly if I was just looking at the list with no knowledge of what’s to come I’d be really overwhelmed, but I do know. We’re going to play some more Tetris.

Once you’ve decided what’s important to you and if you want to track it by the month, week, or day it’s time to slide those colorful blocks into place. I’ve already outlined a bit how I like mine. Things like habit tracking and finances and gratitude are better for monthly views… Why? It’s much easier to see your overall progress that way. Could I put each one on a daily? Of course, but then I wouldn’t be able to see the big picture I’m looking for. Things like coffee and cigarette intake I keep on a weekly track because yes I want a bigger picture, but I also don’t want to be overwhelmed and discouraged by a full page chart. Dinner plans, weather, moon phases… these I like to have tied in with the day they’re attached to because they directly influence the structure how I’m going to go about just that day.

So now I’m going to…

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Outline

I’m using my bujo now, but I’m also a big fan of binders. Binders are nice because you can rearrange papers, easily throw in completely new sections and the biggest factor… you can have repeated layouts saved to your computer to print and pop in instead of drawing each of them out. I like drawing them out because it’s kind of soothing and calming for me. It’s a ‘me time’ thing so it’s usually worth the time consumption. After I get a job and am a bit busier I might even switch back to binders, we’ll see.

There are other options too. You can have a big ol’ white board where you write out what you decide to include. You can stick post-its everywhere (I did this in my early days while I was training myself, I’d write out a little to-do list or note on a post the night before it and stick it where it had to go. “Clean me!” on the fish tank, “Pull out chicken” on the freezer…), you can have reference sheets for routines and write out small chunked check lists every day. Pick your poison. (I will have you addicted to organization if you stick with me.)

Now stop and think again, I know it’s a lot of thinking but once this is all laid out you have to do a lot less thinking over all, about structure. Keep the monthly lists in one section, mark it for easy flip to. I keep the weekly and daily together. I have boxes for each day of the week up top, and my weekly stuff underneath. Though the design may change by monthly theme (completely unnecessary but fun) my structure there doesn’t. I like this way, I don’t know if you can tell but I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error with this stuff and I really like that way.

We do always have to adapt to change though right? I’ve decided to add a Steemit plan to my bujo, maybe doing my weekly charts on one page, and giving each day its own page would be more efficient for me?

I just did a quick mock layout for this idea and I didn’t like it. So I’m going to stick with what I’ve got for that, the two page layout design that I have. I’ll add a two page weekly blog post plan in between that and my two page weekly timeline.

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So let’s take what we just did and implement it. If you’re hand drawing selections I suggest doing it in pencil first, I usually skip that step and have to live with f’ ups. Here is what I’ve done up for this month, July here in America has a fun independence day holiday all about barbecues and fireworks, it’s usually a pretty good time so my theme for this month is good ol’ red white and blue. ‘Merica! I usually just used colored pencils and simple doodles to decorate. Sometimes colored sharpies but those tend to bleed through the page more so I try to avoid them.

Monthly Intro page:
It’s okay to keep it simple, or exclude it entirely. Personal planners are personal.

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Calendars:

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Finance and Gratitude

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Mood Tracker, Sleep and Habit Trackers

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Weekly spread

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Weekly Blog Plan

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Weekly Time Audit

^{We forgot to take a picture of this before it was written on so here have another picture of Princess Leia in the supply bin}

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So there’s your guts with plenty of examples on how to arrange them. The bones I gave you last time will keep you up, the guts I gave you this time will keep you opperational. Next time we’ll be adding the muscles, the utilization of everything that I’ve shown you so far… the more you use them, the stronger they’ll be and the easier your organized life will become so make sure you stay tuned. ;)

^{(all images credit moi, @accio)}