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GIVEAWAY CLOSED
Please enjoy the product review and thanks for stopping by!
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If you’ve ever been here before you know that our daily life is a little…crazy. Kids, jobs, and belching livestock are all part of our daily grind here at Walkin’ in High Cotton. And I’ve blogged before about how important maintaining a comprehensive family calendar has become to keeping this 3-ring circus on track. And how I’m still searching for the “perfect” product to help me do it.
So I’m very excited to have the opportunity to review Orange Circles Studio’s 2011 Do it All Mom Planner for Families with Purpose. And they’re sponsoring a 2011 Do it All Mom Planner GIVEAWAY for my readers too!
{See the bottom of this post if you just can’t wait for the GIVEAWAY details! Disclosure: I did receive a free copy of the 2011 Do it All Mom Planner from Families with Purpose to enable me to do this review.}
According to their website, Families with Purpose “is an organization dedicated to helping busy parents create a meaningful family life for themselves and their children. ..most importantly [they] advocate the little things in life, because they really do matter!”
Sounds good to me! I’ve used the 2011 Do it All Mom Planner for about 3 weeks now. As a group, family planners tend to differ from business planners or appointment planners in a couple key ways. First, they rarely break the day into actual times. My previous Franklin Covey planner scheduled the day in hourly increments between 8:00 am and 6:00 pm. None of the family planners I’ve scoped out are that specific. Second, family planners tend to include more To-Do lists and pages and less Contact pages. And third, family planners tend to start in August and usually run 17-18 months to sync up with the school year while business planners usually run by quarters or 12 month sets.
The 2011 Do it All Mom Planner includes all these family-friendly planning features. It utilizes a one week per two pages spread.
My absolute favorite feature of this layout? Of the whole Planner, actually. Look at Saturday and Sunday–a FULL column!! I can’t stand the way so many planners shove Saturday and Sunday into a split column. Seriously, who is less busy on the weekends? Or who has time to keep two separate calendars for home and work? I’m also bummed by business planners that sort of just…end…at 6:00 pm. Half the time my office day doesn’t even end at 6:00 pm, much less my life. 6-10 pm is sometimes our busiest, most slammed-packed full time of day.
Well, check this out…
Technically the pink space is for Mom’s day and the blue lines are suggested for tracking individual family members at the same time. That doesn’t really fit with our “one master calendar” philosophy–especially since my kids don’t go anywhere that I don’t have to go too, so everything they do is automatically something I do anyway. So, with a spark of creativity from Polly Schlafhauser at Families with Purpose, I re-purposed those blocks to be exactly what we need.
The first one is “evening”, for our immediately from home chores/errands/events. The second one is for “nights”, which gives me a place to plan out any me-time for after bedtime (blog ideas, scrapbook ideas, TV shows). Then I’ve got a meal planning section, and farm note section (for plans for just notes to remember), and a family notes section for birthdays, anniversaries, church needs, etc. It worked out awesome! This planner holds a heck of a lot of information about our life in one place!
I mentioned less Contacts and more To-Do lists. Here’s what I mean…
My business planner basically had a phone book for a Contact section, complete from A-Z with tabs! The 2011 Do it All Mom Planner has contact forms too (more than I’ll ever use) but they are grouped into household focused topics.
Personally, this is my least used section of any planner I’ve ever had. Our contacts are just too extensive for me to copy them over and over again each year or 18 months to a new planner (or even bother carrying them around with me everywhere). But this planner includes several blank lined pages just titled “Notes” that I would use to jot down my regularly needed/carry everywhere numbers.
I do get tired of recopying that part every year and wish they would come out with a detachable contact/notes section that could transfer easy without having to go all the way to a 3-ring binder set up. That’s the original reason I went to a Franklin Covey system, but it’s so bulky!
Other features of the 2011 Do it All Mom Planner include monthly at-a-glance planning calendars and stickers!
Lots of stickers actually.
Stickers are a new-to-me feature that I really liked. It’s an easy way to put reoccurring events on your calendar without writing it over and over and over and…you get the point. And their fun!
It also has several pages of To-Do lists and Grocery Shopping lists in the back which are perforated for you to tear out and take along. This was a new feature for me too, but pretty neat, and I’ve seen it in a lot of family planners now.
Unfortunately, you may have noticed how bad my handwriting is in some of those pictures above. This Planner is about 6 inches wide x 8 inches long, making the planning spaces and especially the contact lines a little tight for my writing style. In the long run I think this Planner is going to be physically too small for me to be comfortable with. I just have to focus to much on writing small when I’m using it. If it was an 8.5 x 11 format it would be just about perfect–so I’ll be keeping my eye out if they decide to make it in a bigger format!
A few other features I miss would be bigger monthly planning spaces (maybe one month per page or even one per two page spread?) and monthly tabs for quick flipping.
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So, how to end my first product review post? With a GIVEAWAY, of course! Families with Purpose will give away one brand new 2011 Do it All Mom Planner to one Walkin’ in High Cotton reader. {U.S. residents only, please.}
Just leave a thoughtful comment here for 1 entry.
Follow me on Twitter for a 2nd entry. (Click on that blue “t” on your upper left then come back and leave another comment here to tell me you did.)
Follow the Families with Purpose, Family Life Blog for a 3rd entry. (Click on this link to find their blog, then come back here and leave another comment letting me know.)
Follow FamiliesPurpose on Twitter for a 4th entry. (Click on the link here and then come back and leave another comment here to let me know.)
Last day to comment will be August 22, 2010. Be sure to include your email address when you comment so I can let you know if you’re our winner!
