Back in the early ’90s, I used a Daytimer system as both my work and personal planner. It wasn’t very pretty but it was very functional in keeping track of my hectic schedule at the time. Over the last decade, I’ve split my planning system into two so there was one planner dedicated solely to work and another for everything else in my personal life. It was around this time that I discovered ‘pretty planning’ which includes one of my favorite methods for keeping track of various things in my personal life: color coding. I have one color dedicated to each member of the family, one for all the pets, red for anything important, and blue for anything work-related that might cross over to ‘off-hours’. My work planner, however, stayed as plain as it always.

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