Cozi Tag

December has arrived, for me this is when the planning really ramps up.  So today I am sharing with you the 4 main reasons I am going back to paper planning. First let me describe what I mean by planning.  Planning to me is not just a diary entry in a calendar of an appointment or event, to me planning is all about the W’s.  That is the who, what, why, when and where that goes along with any event you might schedule.  There are gifts to plan, parties and catering to plan for and all kinds of extracurricular events to remember what to take, what to prepare and even more so at this time of year.

Before we broke for school holidays I found a pretty pink envelope in Gabi's communication pouch at pre school, to me that meant just one thing....PARTY TIME! I thought I would take the opportunity to show you how having a physical system (our action station) set up that my behavioural systems came quickly and easily into operation. A picture tells a thousand words...so here are '5000 words' that tell the story of how I handled a new party invitation immediately (so I wouldn't forget).

As you may recall February is one of two clusters of birthdays that our family has each year.  In the February cluster we have Jacob (who will tell anyone that will listen) is first, followed by Gabi then myself.  So we have LOTS going on in the lead up to these special days not to mention all the other things going on in our busy lives. Historically, I always used a diary – a small handbag sized diary with a week to view – and I am sure at some stage I had one of those old school birthday books full of messy entries. Back in the late 90’s whilst working a full time desk job I started to rely heavily on my office outlook calendar but found weekends and personal items being forgotten so I was using both the old diary AND outlook – hello double up and confusion. BI (Before iPhone) I had a mobile with a calendar with reminder functions so I started using that, but still I relied on the old paper one because I never managed to get everything updated into the phone. Then smart phones changed everything…