Color Coding

The months of July and August have been (and are going to be) crazy for us. Birthdays, anniversaries, taxes, imports/shipments, tournaments, a convention, and more taxes mean that I need to be on top of my time and money. This is why I picked up a planner and after using it for a few weeks I'm starting to get into an efficient grove. It has helped us a ton already and I feel pretty confident that I'll be sticking with it.

Over the course of the last few weeks I've tried different things to see what I liked/didn't like and what worked/didn't work for me. Post-it notes, to-do lists, highlighters, and colored pens, oh my! After hours and hours spent scouring blogs and watching youtube videos I've come up with a system I'm pretty set with.

I found a blog post on Plannerisms about color coding with a "life mapping" system. It's basically an indexing system to help you see at a glance what events are happening that week, or however far in the future you plan, using colors.



This is my oversized index insert that I keep directly behind the current week in my planner. My life is separated into six categories and when an event or something is happening on a particular week I mark it on the edge of the paper. The squares I mark on my week match the position of the squares on my insert for continuity. I like having my week on two pages, that way I have enough room on each day to write out multiple things like events and lists.



Once a few weeks are completed using this system, you can flip backwards and can tell just by the colors on the edge of the paper what events happened. These weeks look pretty much the same, but that's because I have that many things going on right now. This works for flipping forward in the month or year. If you know ahead of time when certain things will happen you can color them in and if you forget the date you can still find it just by looking for the colored square.

For a detailed tutorial on how to make a life mapping system like this, along with some other life mapping resources, check out DIYfish's blog. If you are interested you should definitely check it out. I also watched a good video by One Fantastic Find on how to create an index.

How do you keep your planner organized? Do you color code also?

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