This week we made a big purchase at Ikea: New Wardrobes. One for me and one for the hubby.

Look at that shoe storage, I’ve never had shoe storage before!

Eek! I’m so excited!

Click the pic for the full view:

One of the things I need to do to make my life easier is to have a menu plan. I’m not a cook, I’m a pull it out of the freezer or fridge and pop it into the microwave kind of mom.

To help me try and be a little healthier and a little more creative I have created a simple menu plan that I can use each week to stop the panic I get everytime I realize it’s dinnertime.

Right now it’s just a basic outline I follow each week. Hopefully I will start looking ahead a bit more and planning each week out more. But for now this works.

The Plan:

Monday – Noodle Night
Tuesday – Finger Food (Hot Dogs, Fish Sticks, Chicken Nuggets)
Wednesday – Sandwiches
Thursdays – Chicky Night (Happy Meal Night)
Friday – Breakfast at Night
Saturday – Something Special
Sunday – Mexican

‘Chicky Night may be going away, you will see tomorrow  about that. But I’ve been thinking about doing a soup night, but Zane refuses to eat soup. We will see.

A Good Example

As a good example today is sandwich night so I made the boys Banana and Peanut Butter Sandwiches with Brocolli and for desert Strawberry Banana Yogurt with Strawberry Slices.

For me I made a Toasted Strawberry Banana Cream Cheese Peanut Butter Bagel. Which was amazing and easier to make than say!

1. Toast your Bagel
2. Spread Cream Cheese on one side
3. Spread Peanut butter on the other
4. Place sliced banana on the Peanut Butter
5. Place Sliced strawberries on the Cream Cheese side
6. Squish it together and enjoy!!

Make Your Own Plan

How to make your own plan is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Figure out the meals you make the most: Mexican, Chicken Dishes, Casseroles, Fish, Hamburgers, etc. and categorize them.

2. Give each day of the week a category.

3. Write it Down!

What is your families menu plan? What is your families favorite night of the week?

Uniquehorn Design:

• Take down old pages from i2i site
• Layout Design for Jo’s Studios
• Install WP for Jo’s Studios
• Work on sidebar for DowntownDiaries

Online

• Add a “Read More” button on my portfolio to testamonials
• Finish blog post about cake and food
• Redesign Twitter Background
• Clean up Bookmarks
• Clean up Google Reader
• Think of prizes for UBP
• Write a review on Gleefully Peacock
• Work on new secret site

Misc

• Transfer my phone #s from my old phone
• Upload pictures from Zarek’s b-day party

Okay my goal for today is to get the 3 underlined items done! I will update this evening what I got done.

What’s on your to do list? How do you get yourself motivated or keep yourself motivated? What are your 3 Most Important Tasks today?

Here is a little freebie for you for the New Year

Feel free and print it for yourself.

Get full calendar here.

I was really productive today even though all day long I kept grumbling to myself I wasn’t doing anything. Maybe it’s because I have too much on my to do list right now.

I was able to bake over three dozen muffins. Banana and Sweet Potato Muffins that I made from some produce I got at the discount grocery store for $1.50. I am freezing most of them and now I won’t have to make muffins for probably a month. Which is good because I need to start working on my holiday crafting and such.

I made dinner for Zane and I, took me an hour to cook my dinner and keep the boys entertained. Zarek even got fresh mashed sweet potato for his dinner. I tried getting Zane to feed Zarek a little bit so I could try and work on my dinner. He did pretty good until he got bored with doing it. But it gave me a few minutes. This was also my first time cooking tofu. I actually really liked it fresh.

I put together my breakfast, lunch, and snack for tomorrow. I also cooked the chicken for my dinner. I made Zane a bento for lunch and one for snack. I’m hoping he will eat them they are filled with fruits and veggies and a pb&j sandwich cut into a pumpkin. I wish I had a turkey cookie cutter.

I also cleaned out my email box today. Got through over 300 emails. I need to try and keep on top of this. I added some more labels so that should help.

On top of that I also got my workout in and got my devotional time in. So I feel pretty good about the day. How was your day?

Welcome to part 2 in the Remember the Milk series. If you would like to follow this series from the beginning please feel free and start here.

Rmilk (Remember the Milk) is a free service to help you create to do lists. Rmilk has some great features and one feature that makes Rmilk great is Smart Add. This tutorial will teach you the basics of Smart Add so you can enter your tasks that much faster and easier.

In part 1 of this series we learned how to add our tasks into the above highlighted field and then edit the task after entering it. Today we will be talking about how you can type one key to change the Due Date, Change Priority,  Add to a List & Add Tags, Repeat the Task, Time Estimate, Add Tags, Add a Location, and Attach a URL. Now I will show you how to add all of those with just typing a special sign for each.

Due Date

After you enter your task you can type the “^” symbol and you will get a drop down menu. You can select a day or just enter a date and that will add a due date to your task.

Change the Priority

If you type an “!” you will get a drop down menu to change the priority of your task. 1 being highest priority and 3 being lowest.

Add to a List & Add Tags

You can type a “#” sign and get a drop down list with your Lists. You can choose the list you want to add your task to. You may only chose one list. If you type another “#” sign then you can add a tag. You can add multiple tags by just continuing to add “#” signs.

Repeat the Task

You can get a drop down menu to make your task repeat by typing “*”. You can choose daily, biweekly, etc.

Time Estimate

You can choose a time estimate from a drop down if you type an “=” sign. You can also type a time estimate right after the sign if it is not in the list.

Add URL

To add a URL to your task is simple. Just type the address and it will be added to the URL field on the task. You want to type the full URL including the http://www to have it be placed correctly.

Conclusion

You can type any of these symbols in any order to edit your task. Once you hit the add button it is all set. But if you need to change anything you can edit it the same as usual.

Please stay tuned for part 3  where I will go over some of the Special Features of RMilk:

• How to add your to do list to Gmail
• Sync tasks with Google Calendar
• Learn about the Twitter app

As part of getting ready for the holiday season I am trying to get more organized. I got my calendar set up and ready to start adding parties and events as they come up in the holidays. Now I am working on my to do lists.

Remember the Milk is one of my favorite tools to help me with my to do lists. RMilk (Remember the Milk) is a free service to help you create to do lists. Some of the great features of RMilk are Syncing with Google Calendar, you can access it offline, you can use it on your iPhone or Blackberry, it can be used with Twitter, you can add it to your gmail account, you can email your tasks to your list, you can share your tasks with others… I could keep going but let’s start seeing how to get started using Rmilk.

Creating Your Lists

You will want to start by making your lists. (The Inbox and Sent Lists are defaults you use for some of the more advance features.) To add lists click “Settings”, click the “List” tab and above your current lists you will have a bright blue button that says “+ Add List”.

These are my lists I have created:

• Boyz
• Christmas (my to dos and present list)
• Church
• Home (things that need to be done around the house)
• Meals (Meal planning things, grocery shopping, etc.)
• Online (Posts I want to write and when)
• Personal
• Work (this is archived)

You can archive a list if you are not using it at the moment. I have “work” in my archives because I only work part-time now. I just pulled my Christmas List out of the archives this last week. You can archive and unarchive your lists in this same settings section. You can make as many lists as you want.

Adding Your Tasks

Now that you have created your lists you can now start adding your tasks. You can make your tasks as simple or detailed as you want. On RMilk part 2 I will go over a special feature called “Smart Add” which makes adding your tasks even faster and more advanced.

Adding tasks is simple type in your task and hit enter. It will show up in your list. Pretty easy. You can sort your list by priority, due date, or alphabetically. Now for the fun part, using some of those great features.

Editing your Tasks

If you click on the checkbox next to the task you will get a menu to the right. In this menu you can change many things about your task.

To change the name of the task click on the little pencil.

You can change when your task is due. One nice feature of this is you can type in the date, tomorrow, or Friday and it will automatically find the date for you.

You can set how often the task repeats. If you always go shopping on Thursdays you can make sure that it will be on your list every Thursday. In this field you can write it however you need also like daily, biweekly, yearly, after 1 day, etc.

You can also put in how long you think this task will take you so you can make sure you don’t overbook yourself.

You can Tag your task just like you tag your blog entries. That way if you need to do a search on everything that deals “food” your tags will pull those items for you.

You can enter a location for your task. This doesn’t have to be an address, this could be in your kitchen, the library, at home, etc.

You can connect a URL to the task also. Which is great for putting in URLs for recipes, crafts you want to do at a party, or a meme you want to participate in.

You can also see how many times you have postponed a task, who you have shared it with and if there are any notes.

If you click the top tab that says notes you can write yourself a note about the task. Maybe a place to write a grocery list or a list of participants, lots of possibilities.

Please stay tuned for part 2 and part 3  where I will go over some of the Special Features of RMilk:

• How to add your to do list to Gmail
• Sync tasks with Google Calendar
• Learn about the Twitter app
• How to Smart Add

This post is linked to WFMW.

http://lh4.ggpht.com/_-YPOMHwnAj0/Svo_jvY_CWI/AAAAAAAAFUk/7FJDZKb5Knk/s800/Task.jpg

Some days I feel like the world is falling in on me as I try and deal with the disorganization that lives in my house. I’m not a supermom or a superwife or a super-housekeeper. But I try. And so far we have all survived.

I’ve been trying really hard to get more organized. I realized that the disorganization that lives in my house is making me go crazy. If I feel overwhelmed with the way the house is I just don’t feel like doing anything. Which becomes a never ending cycle that makes it really hard to not be depressed and unproductive.

I’m a list and schedule kinda person, but sometimes I get off course. Okay more than sometimes, a lot. I want to find a system that will work for me and my family. Maybe you do to and maybe you will join me in my quest.

I’ve decided to do this small series on organization because it seems some of my readers were interested in my post about my Google Calendar. And also because that is one main goals I’m trying to get accomplished before we get swept up into the holiday season. So I hope you will enjoy these posts and participate with me.

One thing that has really helped me feel more motivated is doing a list of 3 MIT (Most Important Tasks) for the day. I find that once I get even one of these items off my to do list I feel more motivated. Sometimes I get even more than the three items done. But if I only get the three things done for the day I don’t feel guilty or discouraged at the end of the day I feel accomplished.

Later this week I will write more about my MIT and how I do my to do lists and the tools I use to do this.

I learned about MIT from simplemom this is a great blog if you haven’t read it before.

This may be cheating for My Place & Yours, because yes this technically is not a photo but a screen shot. But my secret weapon is my Google Calendar. I love my Google Calendar. No matter what system I try I always end up back at my Google Calendar.

Now the above image may look like a colorfully garbled image but there is a system to it. I can look at each calendar individually or I can have a few open to sync everyone in the household or I can have the whole thing open but that is a bit overwhelming.

But let’s dissect my Google Calendar I maybe you too will run out and get one.

Let’s start with a blank calendar:

This is what your calendar will look like with nothing on it. Okay, let’s start adding things. One nice thing about Google  Calendar is that you can sync to other calendars. Google offers multiple holiday calendars you can sync to your calendar. I can also sync Google Calendar with my favorite online to do list Remember the Milk.  (I have the phases of the moon on my calendar, though I can’t find how to add this option anymore.) Let’s add those options:

You will see a little blue check next to the date. If I click on that and it gives me a drop down of my  remember the milk to do list.

I also have a calendar for birthdays but I will not be showing that for privacy to others. I found that you can download your friend’s birthdays from Facebook and upload to your calendar. The application to do this is called Birthday iCal. Very nice feature.

I also have my church’s calendar synced to my calendar so when they have events I would like to attend I can just add it to my calendar.

Let’s add my personal calendar, which is purple because I like purple (you can choose the colors of your calendars from a list of colors). This calendar is where I put my appointments, my events I attend, or things we do as a family.

I keep my work schedule separate to make it easier to add my schedule to the calendar and to be able to find my shifts faster. You can add all day events which are the bold blocks of color or you can add time frames. One other nice feature is you can make things repeat. This month I am working every Monday 10-5:30 so I told the calendar to repeat this through the last Monday in the month.

I also keep my menu plan on my calendar. I love this, it makes it so much easier to plan meals, make a grocery list and link to recipes (in the notes). I learned to this from simplemom.

I also keep a calendar for my online work. Right now I have mainly just the meme’s I like to participate in, but hopefully that will change soon.

And now let’s add my boys calendars. I have a calendar for my husband and each of my boys. If your husband has his own Google Calendar you can just sync it to your calendar and that way you will know when he has plans with the guys or has to work.

My last calendar I have is our routine. I have set up one calendar so that it shows our daily routine so I can make quick reference to it to see what we are doing today.

And that brings us to my full schedule. Which isn’t actually complete for the month. I still need to add date night, family day and I want to add a cookie making party with my friends. But this will be easily scheduled now that I have my whole calendar in front of me. I hope that maybe you to will try out Google Calendar.

If you already use Google Calendar, are there any features that you love?