Command Central Binder

In my reading of organising blogs, I'd seen quite a few posts about organising your paperwork at home. The general gist is that it helps to have one place to put things. I have on top of the bread bin and the pin board above it. Obviously now I also have my office but as on the days I'm home I spend most of my time downstairs it doesn't make sense to keep stuff up there that I'm going to use on a daily basis. So I have a mini "office" there on top of the breadbin. 


One of the articles I read about Command Central binders is from Simplify 101, a very good source of all things "organisey"! The idea behind it is to have a folder where you keep all paper things that you need to refer to. 


However, after going out and buying a large pretty folder (binder if you are in the US), I found that it didn't really work for me. a) the folder was far too big for my needs. I don't keep much in the way of paper. I'm a massive user of Evernote and so I photograph and upload any paper that I might need in the future to there and I add tags so I can easily browse for what I want and Evernote also has a fabulous search engine so I can just type in what I need by keyword or title. It really is fab. But that's another blog post. 


So I don't have that much paper that I need a huge binder. I wasn't sure what to do as I do want to keep the few things that I DO have in one organised place. So I found a notebook that I had been using. Tore out any old pages, got some good quality adhesive dividers and made labels with my Dymo label machine. 


This is what it looks like. Very pretty, I think you'll agree:

The sections in it are as follows:

• Labels (has a little pocket where I've slipped in some self-adhesive labels which I use for labelling food and other stuff)
• Photos (just did some passport photos and thought here might be a sensible place to keep them)
• Invites
• Services (brochures/cards for window cleaners etc)
• Vouchers
• Shopping (where I write my shopping lists - have left several pages free so I can have different kids of shopping lists in there)
• Receipts (anything I might need to refer back to in the near future - anything more long-term goes in Evernote and the original "filed" in the bin!!!)
• Exercises classes (I shrank the PDF of my local gym's exercise classes to A5 size and slipped it into one of the notebook's wallet sleeves)
• Babysitting - a place to write down the dates when we are going out and are trying to arrange a babysitter. It can get a bit confusing about whether or not I've spoken to whoever about which date and I thought it might help me to have it written down in one place. 
• And then I have my ROUTINES section. 
  • I have a tab at the top (as opposed to at the side) so I can easily find the "Routines" section and then I have another tab on the side for:
    • each day of the week
    • a weekly list
    • a monthly list
    • a list for the cleaner (I haven't finished this so haven't left it for her to look at yet) - she copes quite well without a list so I may not bother with this to be honest as she might think I'm being too controlling or something :) 

This is what my Monday routine looks like:

I very naughtily stole the style from Jen and her wonderful page iHeartOrganizing. Please check out her downloadable printouts and blog posts. I get so much inspiration from her! 

I print off the page on A4 and then cut it down to size and I bought some pritt roller glue so I can just roll it along the top and stick it in. I figure that can be a job for each sunday - putting together the routines for the following weeks. 

I think I may need to write another post about routines as I've tried all sorts of things and this is the only thing that has really worked for me so far. 

I'll do another post on my routines when I get a minute - about how I'm getting on with them and what I've tried in the past.