I'll show you mine if you show me yours

I was tagged by Suzanne to show you my daily planner.

I’ve said before how I like lots of order in my life – 3 desks, each with a different function, numerous blogs and it looks like it’s the same with my daily planning because I have 3 tools!

1. An A5 leather-bound daily planner for 2007.
This is for my personal life and out of the ordinary business stuff.

I LOVE this planner. When they come out in August, I buy mine because I don’t want to take a chance of them running out. I tried other versions over the years but this is the 3rd year I’ve used this one and I am very happy with it.

It’s made by Christian Art Publishers in SA and I buy it at Exclusive Books for about R100 (US$ 14). I had to pry papers loose in the front to check who makes them because I have a habit of absolutely personalizing everything.

In the front, I have my affirmations, goals for the year, personal info (I have it in Excel so I just print a few pages for this planner and our household file every year), reference numbers, and so on.

The success of any system depends on if you use it or not. And for me, what works is how I organise it on a daily basis, like this.

The household organizing file has 3 sections – planning, personal and household. I use almost all of the personal pages, reduce them in size and stick them in this planner, at the back in the notes section.

Now you know why I would rather lose my cell phone than this planner!

Why I love this one:
A page a day except for Sat and Sun (half a page each)
Monthly planner before each month
Budget sheet before each month (I’m big on budgeting so that I can spend on what I want. Make sense?)
Lots of notes pages at the back for all my lists

2. A smaller planner (freebie with the Jan issue of O mag).
This is for business only. It shows a week at a time so I write my weekly business goals on the right and the appointments on the left. It is so cool because if I page back, I can see how much I’ve accomplished over the month or year.

And of course, I also use my business binder. (Jennifer D, did you do yours?)

3. Tiny notebook – the pink one above
This is for miscellaneous stuff I don’t want to lose track of. I write lists of topics to blog, shopping lists, things to chat to people about, quotations, anything really. And it has a pocket at the back where I keep spare business cards (besides those in my wallet)

Now let the games begin.

I'm tagging CoachJ, Laura, Lara, Annie, Jenna, Beth, Ariane, Jessica and EVERYONE else who wants to play along. Even if it's just a to-do list, I want to know about it.

This is my first Linky thing so have patience if it gives problems - I'm not a techie!

By the way, here is a holiday (!) photo for the moment!