I love those three things. I love everything from looking at the selection of planners at my local Staples (and trust me, this could take an hour, easily), to picking out the color, opening it up and taking a whiff of the fresh paper, thinking about how I could use each and every section, etc, etc. Then I look at the price tags. My goodness. Oh my goodness. I do not want to spend $15-$50 on a planner. I can't do that, that's crazy. I have heard people say "Yes, it's expensive, but it can do this, this and this and organizes this, this and this for me." FOR me? When I see a planner get up off my desk, grab my papers, file them in itself (neatly of course), and scribble down my appointments, deadlines and inner thoughts - THEN it might be worth $15-$50. But it otherwise doesn't DO anything for me because I still have to do the work! So, of course I have a money saving solution from the same Staples store, on the same day:
1" 3 ring binder= $.60 on clearance (ugly gray, but who cares)
1 ream 92 brightness, 20lb copy paper = $3.92
1 full package HP printer ink= $35
Now that's enough materials to last probably 5 years of printer planner related stuff. Of course I'm not going to use the whole package of ink just on that, but let's say I just use 10%, that would still only be $3.50. And I'm really not going to use all 500 sheets of paper on planner stuff, but if Used say 25% (125 sheets - still a bit of a stretch), that would be a whopping $.98. So right now my total comes to $5.08. Not too shabby.
Now all I need is a good website. Well, that is the easier part. donnayoung.org has ton of planning related printables including calendars of all types free to print, just browse around for a little while and you'll see them.
The main Microsoft Office Templates site allows you to browse through tons of free printables too, some are in pretty colors, some in black and white - find something you like and looks useful.
Organized Home has nice calendar and planner printables in addition to cleaning, organizing and pretty much any checklist you can imagine.
Of course you can google what you want like "Free printable planner pages" or whatnot. In the end, if you can't find exactly what fits your needs, but have lots of ideas you can start up your good ole' Word program and make what you want tailored to your needs with columns, sections, colors, checkboxes, or whatever else you love!!
My favorite site for that is Motivated Moms. You do have to pay for their download, but it was only $7. You can pick the style of planner, and I picked one page per week. So, fifty-two sheets of paper. (Maybe 53). What I like best about it is that along the left-hand side of the page is a section called "Daily Chores". This has checklist-style entries for things such as run/empty dishwasher, make beds, sweep kitchen, etc. Then, the main part of the page has a spot for each day, and it rotates out your chores for the day so you do a little every day instead of trying to tackle everything at once. Examples: "clean one bathroom", "vacuum first floor", "change kids' sheets". It also has a section (which you can have on there or not, depending on which style you download) for your daily Bible reading, which will have you reading through it in a year.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, that's my public-service announcement for the day!