4 Ways to Use Your Planner During the Holidays

During the holidays, the demands on your time come from everywhere – preparing your home, keeping up with your family’s schedule, handling end-of-year work projects, and coordinating all the gift giving. Using your planner effectively can help pull all of these demands into a single place, making them easier to manage. Here are a few ideas:

Create a Master Shopping List

Make a list of each member of your family and any friends or neighbors, and create checklists for all the gifts you’re planning on giving them. Slip this list into your pagefinder. As you shop, you can then check off the gifts as you purchase them, whether you shop in person or online. When everything for everyone has been checked off, you’ll know you won’t need to run any last minute errands.

Holiday Card Mailing List

Sending your season’s greetings can be a daunting task – if you remember to do it in the first place. If you’re determined not to miss anyone this  year, make a large list of your holiday contacts. Then you can visit SendOutCards.com (https://www.sendoutcards.com/franklinplanner/) to customize, order, and send your cards with a click of a button. It sure beats an evening of licking envelopes.

Holiday Party Planning

There are a lot of little things that go into a party – selecting the decorations, preparing the menu, arranging the space in your home to accommodate guests. Make a master plan with dates for each specific tasks, and keep it with your holiday plan in your pagefinder. Then when you reach an assignment due date in your planner, you can transfer the tasks to the to do list for that day, and when the day of the event arrives, you can finalize the menu and the details on the notes page.

The Present Code

It’s a battle that has gone on for time immemorial: parents hide the gifts, and kids try to figure out what they are before the big day. From shaking presents under the tree to spying through the house for the hidden gift cache, there’s nothing a kid won’t try in their excitement.

This year, as you wrap the presents and put them under the tree, label each with a random number, letter, or word (or mix up all three). Keep the master code list in you planner or in a Password Book  (http://franklinplanner.fcorgp.com/store/buy/Search-5/Password-Book-by-Wellspring—Flip-Flops/prod720104/?skuId=40791&_requestid=71208), without telling anyone, and it will be much easier to surprise your kids.