I just have a couple of updates and don't feel like doing my usual bullet-point thoughts, so this one's a little more straightforward.
First, have I written before about how much I absolutely love Clothes Mentor?
I have a speaking engagement this weekend which means three straight days of looking professional. Months ago, looking ahead to this event, I had planned to wear the white dress pants I got when I did the Christopher and Banks fashion show. However, this weekend, I'm just not quite feeling white pants. It still feels a little early in the season for that, especially since it's only supposed to be about 60 over the weekend.
So, just for kicks n' giggles, I stopped in Clothes Mentor while running errands this week to see if I could find a pair of palazzo pants or something that would feel spring-like but not be summer-like, if that makes sense. Instead, I found this great dress. For $14! I love that store!
It fits perfectly, and its great for work. Although it's made to look like a wrap dress, it isn't really. The neckline is sewn, not just wrapped, so it doesn't get awkward gaps and it's not too low. The bottom is sewn too, so it stays closed when I move. It actually has a wide belt that goes with it (I forgot to put it on the dress before taking the picture) that makes the whole cut of the dress very flattering. Because it's short sleeved, it'll be good for warm weather, but I realized when I got home that my purple duster cardigan works fantastic with it for 60 degree weekends and any convention center I might ever wear it in, because they're always refrigerator-cold. I've got a couple of other cardigans I could wear with it to change things up, and I could go a little more casual with it with a denim jacket for a date night. And I have three different pairs of shoes that will work perfectly with it, depending on whether I'm dressing it up or down, and whether I want to go heels or flats. Plus, with those colors, I can wear it into the fall with dark tights and boots. I'm so excited! For $14!!!!
The other randomness for this week is about my bullet journal (aka bujo). I'm really loving everything my bullet journal does for me that going purely digital doesn't, but I'm still a bit of a hybrid. I have some things digital, other things in my bujo, and often I copy from digital into my bujo because physically writing something down does actually give me a better chance of actually getting it done. However, I can blast tasks out into the distant future much more easily digitally. In any case, what I still wanted to fix was being able to see my whole year together, rather than working one month at a time as using a bujo forces me to do (and seeing a whole year digitally is impossible). I use Leuchtturm notebooks for my bujo and happened to see that they have a yearly planner as well. So I bought the Monthly Planner with Notebook.
It's a little hard to see in these pictures because Leuctthurm uses a gray rather than a black font. The upper left shows that they include a yearly date guide for several years--2016-2018, maybe even further. (I don't have it in front of me at the moment.) The upper right is the two-page monthly spread. Lower left are the note pages in the back. There's a spot for writing the date at the top, so I plan to use these for master projects/tasks lists for each month--stuff I know ahead of time I'm going to want to get done that month. The lower right is the one I have to figure out how to use--it's a "Project Plan" spread. It's separated by month. Each month has five or six rows, divided into columns by day. Looks like I would write the project name on the row header and then check off which days it would be addressed. That would have limited usefulness for me but I may figure out a way I could repurpose it.
I've started filling out the monthly calendar with all the stuff I already have scheduled--trips, doctor's appointments, staff meetings, etc. Each calendar day on the two-page spread has a little box for you to index the page number from the notes pages that's relevant to that page. Since I plan on using the note pages more for a general monthly brain-dump, I'm not sure how often I'd use that indexing system, but it might come in handy.
My plan is to do something like this right at the beginning of the year. (Since I just got it now, I'm considering the start of this year to be May.) Then, when I sit down to do a new month in my regular bujo, I'll reference what I've got in this one to start, and go from there. The regular bujo would be the one I keep up-to-date--I don't want to keep going back to this one all the time. It's pure reference, but it's the best way I can think of to see everything for the year all in one place.
So far, the only drawback I've run into with this new monthly planner is the fact that it's from Europe so the calendar weeks start on Monday rather than Sunday. I've caught myself getting off by a day a couple of times as I was filling things in. I just have to pay really close attention!
By the way...I'm presenting a webinar for work on time management in June. Within 24 hours of sending out the first email promo, we already had a bunch of registrants. Apparently I'm not the only one working on my organizational skills out there!