Day Book: Dailies Page

As a result of some chatting going on over at Steady Mom, I thought I'd put up a quick post with some specifics about the Dailies page of my day book. This is not about to win any prizes, but I hope it's a useful jumping-off point for someone who - like me - benefits from a visual representation of an organised day and week. Perhaps these things grow into a sense of an organised life, but I'm not there yet!

My daybook has various sections, but the first page (behind the extra-thick plastic sleeves for reminders and immediate stuff) is still the brainstorming page I used as I collected ideas for the book. I went to all sorts of sites, gathered all sorts of frameworks on how to structure a day, handy lists I might like to have. Christmas card lists. Accounts and passwords. The dirty dozen and clean fifteen. The ten Primal Blueprint laws. Food diary, recipes and comments. Contact info for babysitters. School holidays. House and people measurements. Then I grouped those ideas into categories: calendar, addresses, records and reminders, finances, and social.

Those categories became dividers and those sections are (more or less) working for me. (I paid rather a lot for an address book which I never ever use.) But some stuff just needs to be up front and colourful. If it brings a lot of those zillion 'good to have' things in one place, it's something I want in front of me all the time, to prove that these things - at least theoretically - all fit into a week. And equally to prove that there is unspent time in my week, in the hopes that I will spend it better and get more benefit from it.

Here's what my "immediate stuff" page looks like:

Time runs down the left side. Blue is for household tasks, yellow are fixed appointments (for either myself or my child) and white is unscheduled time. Pink is meals, including the things we should eat, and things that need preparing regularly.

So can anybody tell me why, if it all fits in the week when the week is in 2D, there's never much order in my 3D days?