ORGANIZATION STATION Part 1: The Weekly Schedule Board

Finished Product

The Idea

I LOVE being organized. I mean I am seriously passionate about organizational systems; charts, graphs, schedules, spreadsheets, to-do lists, you name it and I love it. Lately I've been thinking more about the end of my maternity leave drawing nearer as I move on to the second half of it (how did this happen so fast?!). I am loving every moment of my time off, and even though I am very committed to my work, I can't help but find myself feeling sad about my 24/7 time with my son coming to an end, but today I realized that it's not as if life is a dream that I wake up from all of a sudden; I will still have a wonderful son whom I will be fortunate enough to get to eat lunch with when I'm working from home and enjoy during all of my non-working hours.

The exciting thing now is starting to think about how I'll organize my family when I'm back to work; what schedules and systems will I use to manage our time so that we are organized and can just sit back and enjoy life. The first thing I thought of was a weekly schedule board.

Our schedule varies week to week so I wanted a wipe board that I could go to every Sunday night as we prepare for the week ahead and chart our nanny's hours. Along the road of envisioning this board, I realized that it also made sense to add some fun little touches to it, like magnets with Logan's activities on them, and some magnets for sticking reminders to the board. We'll also use colour coating of the dry-erase markers so that we can show when I'll be home vs. at the office or in meetings, and the same for my husband. While we are big fans of Ical, I wanted a visual where we could see all of our days laid out, so off we went on a long awaited trip to Staples and the Dollar Store...

I love our little DIY adventure outings!

How-To

Measure twice, drawn once :-)

I used a fun tape to create columns on the board for days of the week, but took the time to measure out the board first to ensure that the columns would be even. I originally planned on creating rows as well for hours of the day, but realized during my crafting that it wouldn't really work because the tape would take up too much space, and it would be awkward to draw across the rows, so instead I just blocked the hours together on the left-hand side to create a spatial sense on the board, and then wrote in the hours as a guide. I placed packing tape on top of the days of the week and the hours in order to keep the content static.

To create the activity magnets, I bought some cheap dollar store magnets, labels, and stones. I stuck the labels to the round magnets, wrote the activity on the label, and then fastened the stone to the magnet using a glue gun.

These look better in person, but the light reflects at funny angles in the photo

Cost & Materials

White board: Staples - $21.99
Colorful large round magnets: Staples - $3.50
Funky tape: Staples - $3.89
Dry erase markers: Staples - $1.89 each (I bought two)
Small round magnets: Dollar Store - $1.00
White gem stones: Dollar Store - $1.00
Small labels: Dollar Store - $1.00
Total cost: Less than $40 all in with taxes

Other Materials

Measuring tape
Glue gun
Packing tape
Sharpie marker

Final product with sample week