Getting Organized

It's no secret I have a very hard time some days finding the balance between work, home and fun. Even harder, I have a hard time distinguishing which projects to work on first, my deadlines or my clients? 

Well after reading a zillion organization blog posts and pins on Pinterest, I think I came up with a simple solution that seems to be working and I wanted to share it with you. 

This is it! My new idea. It's a dry erase board calendar and some magnets. That's it. 

I've read about keeping lists and trying to stick to a schedule, but my schedule changes everyday or week and my list can be a mile long some days. I've also read about picking your top three goals to tackle for the day so that super long list isn't so daunting. But there's those few things I need to do every week too. 

So here's the plan:

Pink magnets are for working out. I'd like to workout 3-4 times per week, but I have a fifth if I get extra motivated. I don't want to do it any more than that because that's how I've injured myself in the past. 

Green magnets are for long arm quilting. Once again, there's only 5 magnets so I can't quilt 7 days a week anymore. But I'd also like to limit this number too. 

Black magnets are for office work which includes edits, paperwork, blogging, etc. 

Purple magnets are for cleaning. 

Teal edits are for sewing for my own projects. I may need to get more of these :)

And finally blue magnets are for rewards. This includes going out to dinner, watching a movie, spending time with friends and family. Going to a Luke Bryan concert :) sadly I forgot to take some me time in the past, not now. I'm happy to report I used all of these this week and needed more :)

I was trying to think of how I could incorporate all of these ideas into something that actually worked for me. The dry erase calendar is perfect. I have a space for each day of the week for working out and I know I only need to fill that space 3-4 times. That leaves 4 other spots for other tasks for the day. I would like to hit three each day, but if I hit a fourth, all the better. But if I only hit 2 in a day, I can see everything I've done in the rest of the week and then it's not all bad. 

Plus I keep all of the magnets to the side as I need them so I can see exactly what I have left to do. I'm such a visual person and so far this has been great. 

I also have my to-do list off to the side for my sewing projects and deadlines so I know what I need to tackle first when I get to paperwork or sew or edit. So far it's working and I've gotten a ton of stuff done even with watching a few movies and going to see some concerts this week. 

It's amazing what you can do when you're organized and waste less time figuring out what to do and just do it. 

The only issue I've had is keeping this calendar up. The magnets I have are glass so they weigh a bit. The calendar only came with permanent 3m strips to hang it and I'm not ready to make this a permanent fixture on a wall. I tried using other magnetic strips and they are still on the side of my filing cabinet, but the adhesive isn't that great and the calendar and magnets went flying one morning. I'm still missing one somewhere...

Anywho, I just wanted to share what I finally found has been working for me. I have a schedule (kinda) but it's flexible since I don't do the same thing every day or from week to week. 

Let me know what you think of my plan and maybe it could work for you. If you have any questions or suggestions of other ideas to try, please leave me a comment below! Have a great day, be back soon with quilt pictures!