Artful Organization for the New Year

When I started spending time on Pinterest, I discovered that just as there are entire communities dedicated to art journaling, mail art, and drawing Zentangles, there is also an entire community that shares and shows off its daily and weekly planners.  I created a board entitled Daily/Weekly Plan Books, and pinned picture after picture of delicious planner pages using washi tape, stickers, sticky notes, tabs, markers, and illustrations to keep track of the owners' day-to-day lives.  I was hooked!

My weekly planner is a workhorse:  it keeps my head on straight when trying to keep track of all of the drop-off and pick-up times; play dates and meet up; parties and meetings; paperwork, phone calls, and emails; errands and shopping needs.  While I have a great book (from Martha Stewart Home Office for Avery from Staples), and used pretty scrapbooking papers to create fun monthly dividers, beyond that, my calendar pages have always been a mess.

For 2014, I decided to change all that!

One of my pins came from Jennifer at My Purpley Life.  Week by week, Jennifer shares (through both posts and videos) how she prepares her Filofax pages to make them personalized, colorful, and fun.  After watching just one of her videos, I raced to Staples to purchase 2014 calendar pages from Day Runner (which I prefer over the Martha Stewart format I've used this year, with long columns for each day), and settled into decorating my own planning binder for the new year.

Basically, I set myself up in front of evening TV with my stash of decorative tapes and a big bag of stickers, and just played around for two evenings.

I've gotten about 2/3 of the year decorated at this point.

I just know that using these pages in the new year is going to brighten up the task of planning my days!

I even have used some stickers from my sticker collection from when I was a little kid!

Does anyone remember Glurfs?  (Notice the 1981 copyright!)

Does anyone still have stickers left over from when they were a kid?  I adored my sticker collection!

I had to leave enough space to keep the planner usable, of course; it won't be worth much if I don't have room to write in my appointments, after all!  But I added enough color and whimsy to infuse more creativity into what has been a very bland and boring part of my life.

Take a look at my Daily/Weekly Plan Books board on Pinterest, and see if you don't get inspired to do some artful organization for the New Year!

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Do you receive emails from Beth Kempton of Do What You Love?  She just sent out a free, downloadable resource entitled New Year's Revolution:  A Practical Kit to Help You Make 2014 the Year You Do What You Love.   I printed out the whole 24-page packet, and am enjoying looking through the writing and goal-setting prompts, and the calendars for each month of 2014 to help us keep ourselves on track towards our goals.  Visit the Do What You Love web site, and click on the prompt at the top to download your own copy!