Hi, It’s Lisa with you today.

It’s time to set up my November planner, so I thought I would talk through and show you what works best for me and how I use my planner pages.

For my day to day planning I prefer to use an A5 planner. This sits open on my desk. It’s not a planner that I carry around with me.

I really liked the washi tapes that came with the Planner102 kit. The colours are so perfect for me and go so well with my planner. So I’ve added them to a large book ring which I’ve then added to a chain to hang from my planner. I really like how this looks.

As I open out my planner, I always like to start off with the monthly dates. I often find these handy. For example, my husband has every other Friday off work, so things like this are easy to work out with a calendar of the dates laid out like this always to hand.

I then always keep these calendar pages next. They work as a great month over view. It’s easy to just jot down a few important dates.

To start my weekly pages, I always start with this days of the week page. I use these as my menu pages. This particular week isn’t looking so great as we are about to head down to the coast for a few days, so it’s not our usual type of menu. For me though on a normal week, although I work from home, I work really long hours. Our meals are important to me and I cook everything from scratch. Being organised is vital. I sit down every weekend with my planner and take a look at our plans, the kids activities and can then work out how much time we have after school, what time we need to eat and this then depends up on what I will cook. This also makes writing a shopping list very easy and I find we have much less waste and we also save money this way too. We buy what we need. This really does work great for us.

Then come the week pages.

I write in the dates at the side of the days of the week. I tend to write in black pen and the kids activities in blue for Louis and pink for Hollie. I love seeing other people’s planners all pretty and fancy inside, but this doesn’t work for me. I need to be able to glance at my planner and spot exactly what’s happening and when. I like to keep it clean and clear.

I always keep my ‘to-do’ list attached. I clip this in the opposite side of the week we are on. I change this each day.

I like to use sticky notes as reminders in my planner. These are not permanent notes, but things that once actioned can be removed and thrown away. This has just reminded me to pay for my daughter’s school trip, which I have just gone and done whilst typing up this blog post : ) I can now remove that sticky!!

I also add sticky notes to the back of the month. If I have anything upcoming and the next month hasn’t been set up yet, I have the notes ready to transfer over when I do set up the following month. This way I don’t forget anything.

These sticky notes and the Simon note pad are just so adorable that I decided to pop these in the front of my planner.

So that’s me all set up for November. I’m ready to go!!!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Thanks for joining me today.