After taking a fortnight’s break from favourites during December to focus on Christmas and Blogmas posts, it is time to get back into the swing of things with my fourth instalment of Wednesday Favourites so I would like to share with you my recent favourite: my Life Book Diary.
The RRP of this diary is £14.99 and is available from Organised Mum in a faux leather case for protection as well. £14.99 on a diary does seem quite expensive but I had a couple of reasons to justify this: it is a 15 month diary (running from Mid-August 2014 to December 2015) and I wanted it for blogging. Back at the end of August, I really wanted to get more serious about blogging but didn’t know what to blog about, when to blog or what pictures I needed taking so I figured it would be a good idea to get a diary to plan ahead. I also wanted to use the diary in my personal life to help me plan what to do on each day better in terms of personal development.
The main set-up of the diary is a one week per two pages with a small space at the bottom of the right-page for notes and a dedicated line at the bottom of each day for meal ideas. When I lived in the flat with my boyfriend, I used this quite a bit as it was useful for knowing what to cook each day and thus what I needed to buy, even though it is just a simple addition to the planner!
The outer edge of the right-hand page contains a perforated strip with the top two-thirds labelled “to do” and the bottom labelled “important” - since there isn’t much for me to do on a weekly basis, I tend to use the “to do” section to create a list of products I need to photograph for my blog so when I have a spare day, I can take one weeks worth of pictures at once. On the outer edge of the left-hand page (so on the back of the previous weeks “to do/important” strip), there is a section entitled “shopping list” which, as it is perforated, can easily be detached and used for the weekly shopping trip.
This set-up makes up approximately half of the book. The other half is made up from monthly planning and holiday planning.
Monthly planning allows you to see the month at a glance and also provides you with an A5 page for each of the following for each of the months: a tick list to do list for the month, notes for the month, monthly budget and monthly incomings and outgoings.
The last part of the book contains pages for extra notes, a list for you to write your Christmas card recipients, your Christmas budget, Christmas plans, Christmas presents and Christmas shopping, as well as a summer holiday planner and thoughts and plans for 2014, 2015 and 2016. On the inner back cover of the book is pocket that contains an address book and two sheets of general stickers (birthday, special day, dentist, beautician, back to school, MOT, car tax, etc). If you run out of stickers, you can purchase 2 additional sheets from the Organised Mum website for £1 each. The additional sheets can come in themes, such as household, school and pregnancy, to name a few.
This diary also comes with two clear plastic page dividers that can be moved anywhere throughout the book for easy access to a particular page - I have mine on the current week in the first section and the current month of the monthly planning section.
Overall, I love this book. I love that it is 15 months so I can easily plan in advance - I have already made notes of some Christmas posts I would like to do for 2015 based on my experiences and favourite blog posts from last Christmas. The stickers allow you to see special days easily, the budget pages during the monthly planning sections make it easy to see where your money is going, and the Christmas planning section means you can start preparing as soon as you wish to cover all areas of the festive season!
At £14.99, there are cheaper alternatives to an A5 diary but, while I haven’t looked at many different types of A5 diaries, I doubt there are any as thorough as this Life Book Diary. I don’t feel as though I use the book to its potential, though that is because I don’t go out much (hermit.com) but I hope that, regardless of this fact, I will continue to use and repurchase this book for help with scheduling my blog posts in the future.
Have you ever used this? Do you use a diary to plan?
- Taisie ♥ | Bloglovin ♥ Twitter ♥ Tumblr ♥ Pinterest ♥ Instagram
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