Color Coding Life

Between launching a book, running two blogs, going to school, having (somewhat of) a life, plus the whole “trying to find a job post graduation” thing, I’m busy. Trying to keep it all organized is an art, not just a practice. It’s taken me a while, but today, I’m sharing my biggest tricks for keeping it all organized.
Color coding, and I color code everywhere.

Obviously, the first place we think of color coding is with a planner. Right now, I’m using the Day Designer for Blue Sky than they sold at Target. It’s a day by day planner, which I love. Unlike my Day Designer last year, this one has three column and I love it!
For pens, I use the Papermate Inkjoy pens, the…. 100M. I use these because there’s a lot of colors and they’re a good deal. It took me a while to find a set of pens I could use and color code with and have enough colors for. Let me break it down what exactly I color code. Each of these is a different colored pen.

• personal things, like work and appointments.
• Bills
• Payday
• Blog
• Writing/Editing books
• Class One
• Class Two
• Class Three
• Class Four

Usually I take more than four classes, so in the past, I’ve need a lot of colors. Still, that’s nine different colors I use. Every semester I have to go through the process of relearning colors for classes. The things that stay consistent stay the same color. For instance, anything related to The Assassin is in red. That is a color I’ve always associated with the book (the book cover has red in it), so it makes sense to label everything in that color. Payday is green because of money. Anything related to the blogs is blue because that’s the color of my blogs.
Wanting to start with color coding things in life? Here's some tips. Click To Tweet
When picking colors, make sure they make sense.
And make sure you keep them throughout your systems. I have a large wall calendar I use too, and I make sure that all the colors are consistent with the Day Designer colors. There’s on category that didn’t match, but 8 out of 9 categories? That’s pretty close. I also use these colors for my online calendar (yes, i keep a lot of calendars), and for my to-do list app, todoist.
With Todoist, you set up projects, and you can have subprojects in these. For Blogging, I have a subproject for Ginger & Co. and one for Ginger & Books. Both of those are the color blue next to the little project.
When you begin color coding, embrace it. Put in every aspect of your organization life. Eventually, it will get to the point where you don’t even have to think about what the color means. My color coding adventure was born out of a need to be able to write down assignments in shorthand, but still know what class they were for. For instance, if I had three assignments that were just reading pages, writing them all in pencil didn’t do much.
So, I got over my love of my pencil, embraced the colored pens, and I haven’t looked back.