Christmas is officially only 6 days away. If you are anything like me right now, you are running errands, buying gifts, wrapping, attending kid school events, wrapping some more, grocery shopping, and doing your best to keep your head on straight. I love the holiday season, but it can be difficult to stay organized. Today I’m sharing a few of my tips and tricks I use keep my life orderly thanks to Erin Condren.
Note: This post contains affiliate links
Here’s a fun fact about me. Up until about 4 or 5 months ago, I used to organize my life 100% electronically. Then my son started kindergarten, we were mid-remodel and hit some major goals with my blog and completely lost all control. I reached the point in life where I felt like I had too many balls up in the air. A change needed to be made to make sure I didn’t lose all sanity, or even worse, forget a kid at school. I decided to go back to a paper planner.
Erin Condren Life Planner
I was lucky enough to end up on a blogger mailing list and received an Erin Condren Life Planner (C/O) in the mail. Here’s the thing, I tried to use a paper planner in early 2017 by another brand and bailed on it after a month or two. I wasn’t convinced I was a pen and paper type of girl since it was a big fat fail last year. However, I’ve heard such amazing things about the Erin Condren planner that I decided to give it a try. After all, what did I have to lose. Well, except my mind.
I started filling out my Life Planner and the calendar layout turned out to be such a lifesaver. There is a full month calendar view, along with weekly calendar pages. I found that putting all my big events and deadlines on the main monthly calendar really helped me to see the big picture, and then all my miscellaneous tasks and to-dos can go on the weekly pages. I’ve now been using it for months and have fully converted back to a paper planner.
The biggest difference between Erin Condren’s Life Planner and other calendars is the insane amount of customization. First of all, I LOVE that you can add your name to just about everything for free. The brand also has a ton of extras, such as attachable pencil pouches, dry erase dashboards, stickers, writing tools and interchangeable covers to make it your own. The styles are also about as cute as you can get and they have all kinds of other coordinating goodies to complete your office space.
Don’t like a page or need a page – rip it out? Need an extra pocket in the back for business cards – you’ve got it. The extras are super affordable (usually only a couple dollars each), which makes it easy to truly organize your life around this little notebook.
Like I mentioned above, I used to organize everything on my iPhone prior to the start of the school year. The only downfall to using a paper planner is you do have to have it with you. However, in a weird way, I’ve found not having my calendar with me 100% of the time has HELPED me start to say no. I don’t immediately sign up for school tasks because I need to check my calendar first. If the snack calendar fills up before I can put my name down, oh well. After all, do we really need to always have the answers right away?
Now who wants to win an Erin Condren Life Planner and other goodies?! I’m going to be giving away a $75 gift card to ErinCondren.com starting at 1pm MST on 12/19/2018 Instagram. Head over to my Instagram page HERE to enter this super quick and easy giveaway!
Anyone else a fan of Erin Condren? Let me know all about it in the comments below!
