How I'm trying to keep on top of things

 I suck at sticking with things.  I always have.  I have dozens of journals and notebooks and planners with a few days filled in and then nothing.  I alternate through apps trying to find what works for me, having something that works for a little while and then find myself stopping using it before I know it.  Being a non-organized person can really suck sometimes.  But I'm trying to change it and, once again I'm trying a couple different things to keep me mentally together.  Here are some of the things that I'm currently using (and if my readers have any other suggestions of things that have worked for them, please feel free to comment with your suggestions.)

The one planner I've been using for the last couple of years is the Simple Elephant Undated Planner .  I like it because it is undated.  This way, if I miss time updating it (and I have forgotten more than a few weeks), I'm not left with a bunch of empty spaces.  Each day has a small amount of space where I write down different things - sometimes what I have coming up on various days, sometimes notes about something that happened on a particular day.  It has blank monthly pages, which I keep updated fairly well with appointments, when the kids are out of school and things like that.  It gives me a non-digital location to look at what I have going on  The back of the book is lined pages that I use for various notes about things that are catching my attention. The elastic keeps everything inside without me worrying about the book flying apart.  And there's a pocket in the back where I can keep sticky notes for things I want to add.

The only problem is that it's out of print.  So when my current journal finishes at the end of February, I'm not sure what I'm going to start using.  There are a lot of similar ones out there, but I don't know which ones have the features I want.  I'm going to have to do some research.

For my Bullet Journal, I use an Exceed Dot Journal.  My local WalMart had several of them on clearance a few months ago so I picked up a couple.  I wasn't sure if I was going to try another BuJo, but I figured it couldn't hurt to have them if I needed them.  This time around, I'm trying not to be as ambitious in my journaling.  I still have a lot of the stencils and pens that I used the last time I tried to BuJo, but I'm going to try for more simple layouts and not trying to keep it as my everything.  At the moment, I'm using it to track several things: my 101 in 1001, my daily mood, a few habits that I'd like to keep in mind, and the reading challenges I'm participating in this as I go through it.  I'm also using it for a look back at the month, writing down the good and the bad that happened in the month, the number of books I've read, things like that.

Mainly, I use a Sharpie fine point to do the writing.  I've got several colors but as you can see in my picture, black is my primary color.  I want color, but the black is easier to keep up with.  I'll also use generic colored pencils and Frixion erasable pens to write as well.  I'm hoping that paring down what I'm doing with it will keep me doing it.

I have a small notebook (which, sadly, I don't have a picture of because it's upstairs and I am not) in which I keep a list of things I've done each day.  I call it my Today I... book.  Since it's just a regular small notebook, I don't have to worry if I miss days, weeks or months between updates.  I started doing it to look back, during the times of the deeper depression, to see that I'm not just wasting life laying in bed.  I put things as little as "played Animal Crossing" to the bigger "Reorganized my closet". Some days I have only two or three things written.  Other days, I fill a whole page.  It's been good for my mental health.

Electronically, I have a few apps that I use for both keeping on top of things and for helping with my sanity.  I've been a Google Girl from the early days.  I use Google Assistant to make notes of things as they come to me, as well as setting up my nighttime and morning routines, listening to a bevy of news bites, and speaking up when I need to be reminded of something.  I use Google Calendar to keep track of mine and the family's schedules.  With the boys in virtual schooling, it helps me to have their classes times in my calendar so I know where they're supposed to be at various points.  I often cross check it with my Simple Elephant to make sure I'm not missing anything.  Google Keep is probably one of the biggest helps for me.  Our family keeps a shared grocery list on it so we don't have to rely on someone telling one person of something we're out of.  I keep track of important things like my library card number in one file.  I have an entry for recipes I want to try, one for Christmas ideas, one for a To Do list - just about anything that comes to mind.  

Outside of Google, have one other app that I use all the time: Calm.  Primarily I use it for three quick things every night - my mood, three things I'm grateful for and a daily reflection.  It helps me wind down at the end of the night and slough away the stress.  I use the meditation and the breathing exercises occasionally (especially the breathing - they help when Pete is having a rough time, or when I'm having a rough time because I'm getting overwhelmed).  I haven't purchased the full version, though I may at some point.  Even the free aspects help me, though.

I'm hoping that these things will be the perfect storm of things to keep me on track again.  Well, these and starting to blog again.  I'm trying to keep the pressure low, yet still keep my expectations to do things.  Keep wishing my success, because having people in my corner helps just as much.

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Brain Droppings - Thoughts, Memories and Things to Share from the Last Week

For the last week or so, I've been laid low with the sick.  I believe (though I never confirmed it) that I had the flu.  Fever, nausea, chills, all over body aches.... I felt like death, without even the benefit of being warmed over.  Rich stayed home Monday and Tuesday, but that was as much time as he could take off.  Wednesday, both boys were in school so I spent the time I should have been cleaning (and taking down the Christmas decorations) sleeping. Thursday, we were in for a snow and ice, so they closed Rich's department at 2 and he got to come home early.  Teddy was in school until 3, but things weren't too bad then.  I spent most of Thursday in bed as well.

Thankfully, yesterday I was feeling about 75% human.  Human enough that I could a) deal with both my kids (since they closed school because of ice - Nashville doesn't have the equipment to deal with a lot of ice on the roads) and b) get a bunch of things done around the house.  I was amazed at how much I got done in such a short amount of time.  It helped, I think, that I was listening to Home Improvement: The Undead Edition, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kelner.  Good books always help me stay focused on what I need to do.  I did end up hitting my physical wall before I wanted to, but I still feel good about what I did get done.

Being sick gave me a chance to play with my Kindle Fire a lot more.  I did do some reading (I'm rereading American Gods by Neil Gaiman right now), but mainly I used it as my conduit to the web.  I've been downloading a lot of apps for it - some games (like Angry Birds Free and 250+ Solitaire Collection), some essentials (like gReader (Google Reader | RSS) and MailDroid), some for productivity (like Cozi Family Organizer and Evernote) and a whole host of others.

Far and away, my favorite is Evernote.  Since I've been lying in bed most of the week, I've spent a lot of time reading my RSS feeds.  And since I like sharing goodies with my readers (which reminds me, I've listed all the book giveaways and goodies that I've found over the last week over on Views from the Reader Side - other goodies and giveaways to be listed here tomorrow.... probably), I wanted a way to keep track of the pages on which I'd found things to share.  I can't save things easily in my feed reader (well, I can, but I wanted something I could make personal notes with if necessary), so I went looking.  I wasn't sure about Evernote - I have a ton of "note" programs all over the place that I've only used in a limited capacity.  But I decided to give it a try.  I love the fact that I can have separate "notebooks" to put the notes in, that I can include audio and photo posts and that I can tag things under numerous tags.  It's an easy touch for me to get into the program from my feed reader on my Kindle and then an easy few more touches to drop it in the correct notebook, tag it and note it.  And since the information is kept in the cloud rather than on the device, it meant that I was able to pull it down to the desktop when I was ready to work on my Giveaways post last night.  Major plus.  The only thing I didn't like was the fact that I can't put notes into multiple notebooks with one click.  There are times, particularly with the book blogs that I read, that I want to share something with my readers and keep note of a book I want to read later.  I just need to get in the habit, I think, of saving it a second time to another notebook.

Apparently, Teddy has been bitten by the love bug.  There's a little girl in his class, Sonduce (not sure of the spelling) that Teddy has talked about occasionally as one of his best friends.  I asked him the night before last how things have been since he started back to school, who he's been playing with, etc.  He told me that when he and Sonduce went to their respective buses in the afternoon, they said good-bye to each other because "we love each other".  My eyebrows raised.  Not because he loved someone - since he was around 3, he had a crush on his friend Ruby.  But that... that was different.  This was a little girl I didn't know.  I asked him if she was his girlfriend and he blushed and said "Yes".    I can't help but tease him a little, though I know I shouldn't.  My mom still teases me about my first "boyfriend", Ramon Bennett.  I actually have a picture of our "wedding" in kindergarten.  It makes me wonder if the same will happen with Teddy.  Probably not, but it does make me smile.

I know I had more brain droppings to write about, but I can't think of them at the moment.  Well, that and the fact that I've got to get us ready to go to the library.  Busy day ahead!