Let’s Get Organized

Even if you’re not a resolutions person, the abundance of change the new year brings can still be inspiring. It’s a great time to get your head on straight, adjust your priorities, and get everything in order so you can fully take advantage of every opportunity that comes your way. Since I work for myself, juggling client tasks, calls, events, and blog priorities gets overwhelming. I’m very big into paper, but I also love having a digital copy of my thoughts to reference while I’m on the go. Here are my favorite organization tips:

Paper

• Thyme Is Honey Notepads: The magical Twitter fairy brought Dani to me in 2013 and I couldn’t be happier. After creating organizational printables on her blog, Thyme Is Honey, she received so many requests for printed versions that she opened her own Etsy store. She sent me The Daily Page Notepad 3.0 and I’ve never looked back. If you’re looking for the ultimate to-do list to encompass your food diary, tasks, cleaning, schedule, goals, and more, this is it. Next, I ordered The Blogger’s Notepad as an alternative to my Google Docs editorial calendar. If you have a blog, it’s a great way to organize your upcoming posts for the week and keep track if you have prepped the post, drafted, published and shared it. These have really kept me on track over the past three months and I can’t wait to see what else Dani creates!
• Pilot Frixion Clicker Erasable Gel Pens:  If you’re a paper person, then you know how important a great pen can be. While I love the ease of a regular gel pen, my brain moves faster than my hand and I often make mistakes. Whenever I use the Thyme Is Honey notepads, I always use one of Pilot’s remarkable erasable gel pens. They come in fun colors (I prefer the purple and pink) and can be erased at any time, making mistakes or adjustments as easy as can be. Once you go erasable, there’s no need to ever go back.
• Legal pads: As much as I love a beautiful notebook, my thoughts are rarely permanent enough to commit to the pages. I always end up tearing them out, which can cause the entire notebook to come away from the binding, or rewriting my previous thoughts once they are more fully formed. One day the light bulb went off: why not use a legal pad? I love that the large pages give me plenty of room to brainstorm or work out an idea and there’s no pressure to use the back of the page (like in notebooks), plus you can tear a sheet out at any time. I love the pink legal pads even if they are a little Capitol Hill Barbie.

Digital

•  To-Do Apps: I shared my favorite 4 Cross-Platform Apps To Make Your Life Easier last year, and while they all certainly still hold true, I’d love to add Wunderlist to the mix. I was trying out Wunderlist at the same time as Any.Do and over the past six months, Wunderlist has taken a strong lead. The addition of a couple of strong Chrome plugins now allows for deeper Gmail integration, including the ability to add your list to the right pane of your inbox, has really made Wunderlist invaluable. Plus, there’s a satisfying swoosh sound that plays every time an item is marked as completed.
• Slice: Keeping track of packages sometimes feels like a full-time job for me. I don’t have a doorman and with my unpredictable schedule, something is always out for delivery when I’m not home. Slice is a great app that integrates with your email and automatically pulls tracking numbers from your shipment notifications. It then gives you push alerts when the item has been shipped when it’s out for delivery when it’s been delivered, and if there has been an exception. It takes all the worry out of my packages and frees me up to worry about other things, like what I’m ordering for lunch.