How Do I Stay Organized?

Howdy!

Originally I wanted this post to go before both my seven year blogging milestone and how to become a music blogger posts, but I could not figure out how I wanted everything arranged so I’m going a bit backwards, but I hope you’ll enjoy it just the same!

This post will go over everything I use to keep my thoughts about future blog posts and information for other articles, such as for my pieces for History Of Royal Women in line!

Electrical or manual daily planner?

As a blogger, there are many ways on how to keep things neat and organized, funnily enough I’m just now finding out how good it is to do this. When I was in school, we were given little daily planners (we had bigger ones while in middle school!) and I never used them for myself, my aide(s) mostly wrote in them. So I was never really taught how to follow up on a planner like everybody else, but this also goes for taking notes in classes too, because since I was so slow at writing and typing, my aide or the teachers would provide the notes for me!

I know a lot of people will use planner apps on their phones or Google’s spreadsheets to keep everything on track, which is perfectly fine, but I have become the type of person who needs something right in front of them to organize posts on a monthly calendar. Personally, I figured I’d prefer a larger print calendar, that you can fit multiple things inside the boxes, but then I realized how much space it would take up around my bookshelf, so my mom bought me one in 2015. I was actually really excited to use it, because honestly I needed one, I’d always forget when I’d schedule my blog posts during the week or a few weeks in advance, so I knew I’d eventually have to break down and get one.

It’s a medium sized book, it has enough room to write out multiple things on each day, and at the start of a new month, it gave a two page mini calendar of that month, and then the next page starts it off. I figured I’d use it a lot more, but honestly I think I used the “notes” sections in it than I did anything else! One of the main issues I had been the fact that it was so bulky! Since it had a lot of pages in it, plus the first six months of 2016, it just wasn’t very practical for me, and of course, I felt horrible about it.

By February of 2017, my mom went to our favorite meat place and she saw that they were giving away free daily planners. I don’t know why a place like this would be giving out planners, but okay. She came back with one for me and again, I was excited but also a little worried, I didn’t really use the last one, I thought what would be different about this one? Well, for one, it’s lightweight and had nothing but an actual calendar of the whole month, no individual spots for each day, just a medium sized box that you could fill up.

Unfortunately, again I didn’t really use it all that much in the beginning. It wasn’t until September, when my WordPress calendar went away and I wasn’t allowed to see what all was taken already and that really bugged me, so I remembered the green planner and that’s when I started using the crap out of it! It was really handy and I didn’t dread getting it out all the time either. So, when I went to my mom’s work in October and I was given another one for 2018, I knew that I was set! It had the same layout as the other one, except this is definitely more sharper looking and it has a little bit of a larger print compared to the other one! I also don’t feel like it’s going to tire and/or break on me either!

My trustee black notebook

This is extremely important to me, because I’ve realized that I do get some of my great ideas late at night. It’s not the best of times for it to happen, but if I am wide awake around midnight or three in the morning and a thought comes to me, I’ll write out.

I have a number of notebooks on my mini bookshelf, but nothing compares to my black notebook though. I kind of made a vow to myself that I needed to at least try to finish a notebook in my lifetime. Even when I was in school, I never filled in a whole booklet, and I always felt as though I wasted it! So when I found this perfectly unused notebook, I knew this would become my trustee sidekick!

In the beginning, it was purely just for blogging but once I started thinking and looking up information for my story, it kind of switched to having sections of notes in the middle. Honestly, the whole thing has a lot of stuff stored inside of it, and I’ve only just started to write out my ideas for my future blog posts in like a bullet point format, it’s actually helpful branching everything out like that. Unfortunately, as you can see, it is really beat up! I’d say I have about 30-40 pages left in it, but the wiring is coming undone and papers are starting to slide out-of-place, so I will have to invest in a sturdier notebook soon!

Other things that are handy to have nearby

Whenever I don’t want to shuffle through my bottom shelf for my notebook in the middle of the night, I have a stack of different notepads to use that are very easily to get to in the dark!

My mom got me this red, white and gold love-y notepad for Christmas and every two months, I have to switch out the sheets because I literally have no more room to write on the front. I don’t write out my plans in a bullet point, because of the limited space so I usually try to write the thoughts and ideas, because I don’t look at my phone enough in the day and I know I’m liable to forget about it after a while, so that’s when I started using that hardcore! It’s become very handy for me.

How do you keep yourself organized? Have any tricks up your sleeve?

Bonding Time #2

It’s not every day that you and your younger sister will devote the last bit of her last day with you before she heads back up to campus. A couple of months ago, I did a post about going into my sister’s room and helping her out with writing out different quotes and song lyrics to be put on the back of her door. I kind of fell in love with the idea of covering the entire door with neon colored paper and different words and sentences that matter a lot to you. She put a lot more quotes than song lyrics. The only three I remember were lyrics from Brantley Gilbert, Mayday Parade, and Machine Gun Kelly because that’s her main three she listens to them the most. It’s also kind of weird that she did this with me and she told me she hasn’t exactly decorated her dorm room yet. She and her roommate Skyela only have one bit of their walls done and apparently it’s really crazy. I’m sure by the end of their first week, it’ll be more decorated and she’ll be posting pictures up of it. Until then, she used up her creative juices with me for my room. We did a small bit of my door. I knew I should have written them out on the colored paper instead of the notebook because I was able to write out 22 of them and we didn’t even got more than 18 or 19 of them on there. Which isn’t bad, but I still had a couple more than I really wanted up there but we ran out of paper.

We did this as our parents decided to take a nap. Blondie was going to try to take a nap as well, but that didn’t happen. She came into my room about twenty minutes after she told me she was going to sleep for two hours. She also came in yawning, which was making start to yawn as well. What got me the most was that when she came in, she signed me out of my Spotify and we had to listen to her stuff, even though we were in MY room. I told her that I already had things down in my notebook and asked her to write out my song lyrics as they were pretty long and weren’t the easiest thing to write out last night either. I got in the mood to do this late last night, around 8pm. I was sitting on my bed looking off my Pinterest account and copying down different ones that I thought were closely related to me and my mentality. I also had to remember which ones we used for Blondie’s room as well. In a way, I was looking for quotes that I would use for affirmations to start my day or the middle of the day. I just wanted to have positive notes to keep myself in line for the good and bad days. I wanted to do this with song lyrics too. Since I listen to metal, I didn’t think I’d find very many but I ended up find a little bit more than I had planned. While I was doing all this last night, I took mini breaks and was tweeting my thoughts. Apparently, my mom was getting a kick of them. I was having a lot of lower back pain last night and today too. I just can’t write on my bed without being uncomfortable. I’m surprised I didn’t fall off my bed of how I was sitting, I literally sat on the very edge of my bed on one butt cheek. Sometimes I feel like a guru because a lot of the times I’m very calm. It’s weird I know!

Blondie kind of rearranged my room a bit, at least the posters. My oldest poster is from my rap phase and it’s of 50 Cent, Eminem, and Dr. Dre. 2004 to 2007 were fun years as that phase was how I got my first music shirts. I wanted to switch it with my Vampire Diaries poster of Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley that I got like literally a month the first few episodes premiered on TV. That was the first poster of the “new” phase and now it’s placed directly above my head. I have this small poster of when New Kids On The Block and Backstreet Boys went on tour together and released a CD together, it came inside the album and it was underneath the TVD poster, we decided to keep it there even though I have the same poster just bigger on another wall. After my sister and I were done writing everything out on the amount of space we could, she cut them out because I can’t be trusted with scirrors. I also don’t know how the work them either. She taped them up in the middle of my door because our parents like putting my towels up on the corner of the door after I get my hair washed to dry. We put them in the middle of a reason. The towel doesn’t block them. Thank god. After Blondie was done with taping them, she grabbed a small square of paper and made a music note for the bottom. It represents me well after all the song lyrics I had her write out for me. After she left I signed her out of my Spotify and went back to listening to my stuff. Well, that’s my last DIY project for the summer I think.

Journal Me Up.

I’ve been thinking lately, yet I think all the time. I can’t seem to turn off my brain half the time. Anyways, I’ve been thinking about writing down my feelings. Not writing them in song or poem form, but just thoughts of how I’m feeling and closing the cover and hoping nobody reads them. I still think every notebook should a dead bolt to lock everything.

I have two notebooks on my floor right now. I’d rather use the green one since it’s the biggest one I’ve got. My red one just has some things written in it, I need to tear out and throw away. The green one has stuff that need to go in the trash too, but my trash can is kind of filled at the moment. Gonna have to wait on that for a bit.

I’ve had some good and bad thoughts floating around in my head. Sometimes I’d like to blog them out, but yet I have family reading this and they’d read my thoughts and want to ask. Thank god for the ones who don’t ask questions. I have dreams at night that I’d like to write about, but they’re kind of bad. Even if I write them down or post them on here somebody’s gonna go, “oh, she’s crazy!” I would have to agree with that statement actually. I just need to let everything go. I just need to release everything. Maybe if I do that, I’ll start healing from all the pain.