Planner Stay Focused Blog Hop {Waffle Flower Crafts}

Hello friends,

Welcome to the Planner - Stay Focused Blog Hop! We have invited some of our planner friends, along with our own Waffle Flower design team, to bring you a fun hop about planners! Some of us are hard-core planner nerds, and some of us have just started. We all have one thing in common, as well as many of you who are reading this post, we are juggling between many roles in life and we want to play them all well. Family is as important as our personal achievement. How do we stay focused?

The main purpose of the hop is to share tips on using a planner to help us get things done so we can spend more time with our loved ones or just playing.

We will be featuring our brand new stamp set called Planner - Stay Focused in the hope that planning can become part of your life if it is not already. No matter how you organize your life, we hope you can find or make something that will work for you to makes things go even smoother.

2014 was the first year in a very long time that I didn't purchase a planner.  I recently acquired a small tablet and decided that digital was the way to go.  It worked pretty well for me for a few months.  I used Google Calendar to track all my submission and Design Team commitments.  I used a calendar connected to my email at work to track all my business appointments.  To do lists were scribbled on post-it notes, index cards, and occasionally the note function on my phone- it was really all over the place, but somehow, I was making it work.

Something happened though at the beginning of this school year. My daughters are in 1st and 5th grades and are becoming more and more involved in school activities.  I had one too many occasions of double booking a child or waking up in a cold sweat trying to remember if I had volunteered to help at a Girl Scout function and whether that would conflict with Sunday School and Cheerleading Practice, that I decided to go back to a paper planner.

After some research and a recommendation from a friend, I ended up selecting the Happy Stripes Life Planner by Erin Condren.

Production and shipping took about 3 weeks.  I seriously thought I might die in the meantime, but I was SO HAPPY when my new planner showed up on my doorstep last week. 

So I am just getting my feet wet again with the planner-thing, but so far, I am in LOVE and the Planner-Stay Focused stamps from Waffle Flower Crafts has made setting up and personalizing my planner even more fun.  Here's a peek inside my real life planner and process. 

Each tabbed month starts off with a two page spread.  I started by noting some of the events- football games, Girl Scout Meetings, Parent/Teacher Conferences, etc...  I also used the stamps included in the Planner-Stay Focused Stamp Set to mark dates for blog posts and other crafty due dates.

After the month at a glance pages, each week has its own two page spread.  Each day is separated into Morning- Day- and Night; however, I am using the top row for Work, the middle row for Family/Kids and the bottom row for my crafty assignments, goals and commitments.  My plan is to take a few minutes each Friday to start thinking about the coming week and filling in the details. 

Each week has a column for Goals and Notes.  I used the Planner- Stay Focused stamp set to add the Work and Personal headers and to add the darling checkboxes to the lines.  There is just something so gratifying about a checkbox.  I love marking things off! 

For this upcoming week, I am trying something a little different with adding a "Due Today" spot at the bottom of each day.  More checkboxes makes me a happy gal!  I am only a few weeks back into "paper planner mode" and already I feel better.  I make sure to check my planner throughout the day to keep me on track with my deliverables and to dos, and at night, I am sleeping soundly once more.

Hop Prize: (The giveaway is now closed)

To celebrate the release of all these amazing planner stamp sets, Waffle Flower Craft will be giving away all 5 of the new planner sets to one Grand Prize Winner. The winner will be drawn from comments left on all of our blogs and announced on Waffle Flower Crafts Blog on Friday, October 10.

I will also be awarding a Planner: Stay Focused Stamp Set to one of my readers.  Just leave a comment to enter.  Don't forget to follow Waffle Flower Crafts on Instagram, Facebook and their blog for even more inspiration (and prizes)! 

Here is a list of the other amazing crafters participating in the Planner Stay Focused Hop:

Waffle Flower Blog 

Jennifer McGuire 

Joni Andaya 

Patricia Roebuck 

Katie Gehring - you are here :)

Candi Billman 

Lorena Canto 

Kristina Werner 

Suzanne Dahlberg 

Debby Hughes 

I know this has been a post of epic length, so thanks for sticking with me.  I hope some of these tips and advice shared on the hop today provide you with some useful ideas that you can apply to your own life.  

Thanks for stopping by!

Katie