To Do List, and Binder Organization

List of organizational things to do -- ones that are done or mostly done are in italic.

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* Write week in review
* Summary of first half term -- goals for next half -- this can wait if I don't get to it.
* Plan next week's things
* File things in last week's folder-- move new folder into basket.
* Plan history for Year 7 -- next 3 weeks.
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I wanted to write out what is working for me right now with organization. It will probably change over time but at the moment, I am happy with it. So at the risk of being even geekier than usual, here goes:

First of all, my main binder. It has a cover, not very pretty on the front side, so I didn't show it (maybe sometime I will try to sew some nicer fabric over it; it was a dollar store find). What I like about it is the nice pockets for pens, cards, cell phone, journal, whatever.


Here I put the picture upside-down so that the tabs were more visible. They are divided into the days of the week, Monday - Friday.


This picture shows the section behind the Monday divider. I have the daily layout there, and then a list of things to do that day (my "Agenda"), and sometimes a few other things -- handouts or worksheets for the kids, whatever.

The other days of the week are set up in the same way. There is another section in front of the binder for general things.

I try to keep only the things that I will need for that week in there. I have another binder for the bigger picture things -- it's the red one on here:

(The green one is for my son's stuff -- I'll write that out sometime, too -- here's a couple of pictures).

This is my basket -- simple but quite effective -- I can put anything "loose" there. Here it holds some math squared paper to use with my son next week, and a couple of drafted checklists, plus a local town newspaper and a Veritas Press magazine.

I keep my folder for that week in the basket, too -- you can see it's underneath -- a sort of maroon color.


At the end of the week, as I listed in my bullet points above, I take the old papers out of the binder and go through my basket, tossing what's really no longer needed, and filing the rest in the week's folder. The folder goes in its proper place in this box.



This is how the system I wrote about here has evolved. For now, it is simple enough so that I actually use it, and I am hoping it will also make it easy to go back to a particular time and open that week's folder and retrieve whatever I might need.