A new year has started and let’s hope I get a bit more use out of my diary in 2021 as opposed to 2020!
There is nothing quite like a new diary – I actually have three different diaries (or calendars) that I use each year:
- A monthly calendar that is on our pantry door that showcases what each family member has on, household bills due and family/friend birthdays.
- My phone calendar (that also syncs to my outlook calendar for work).
- My hard copy diary that also doubles as my social media planner! It also means that should something happen with my electronic version – I can still see what is happening.
So as we’ve started 2021, I thought I would take you through my planning when I’m setting up a new diary ready for the year ahead.
How I organise my diary
- Firstly, as I still have children at school, I start by writing in all the school holidays or term dates.
- Then I think about how many weeks leave I would like to take and block it out.
- After that, I add all my regular bills eg: QBO / Zoom / PAYG due dates etc.
- Then I start to put in any specific appointments (be it business or personal).
- From there, I can start to fill in when I work onsite with clients or have specific targets or deadlines that I need to ensure are fulfilled.
Colour Coding
My best tip I can give you is to ensure that you use colours in your diary or calendar. Pick a colour for:
- Business
- Personal
- Family and so forth.
That will make it really easy to see what you’ve got on for the day and who it relates to. You can do this quite easily when using any calendar.
When putting dates into my diary (hard copy and digital) to remind myself, I actually use one colour for me and a different one for each of the kids so I don’t actually have to use their name in the activity section – I can easily go off the colour that it is!
My awesome marketing planner diary actually also has a month view so here I can put due dates of business bills or appointments so I can easily see the overview of that particular month quite quickly.
It also has a fantastic content planner so I can write a quick overview of what I have planned for social media, blogs or my newsletter.
How do you organised your diary/calendar each year? Post a comment and let me know know.
Until next time!
Jo
