I picked this Quote sticker to hold a spot of prominence in my planner this week for a couple specific reasons:

1. Sunday, May 19th, my friend Kristin celebrated 9 years with her company, Krissyanne Designs. She has grown from a hobby shop on Etsy, to hosting her own website, becoming a corporate sponsor for our (huge and amazing) Go Wild planner conferences, to having a line in Michael’s stores across the nation and beyond. Through her shop, she has brightened countless lives and inspired those around her to celebrate their lives. Of herself, Kristin is a dear, sweet, creative, kind, caring, brilliant and fun sticker scientist who is a fantastic role model, not just in the planner world, or in the business world, but an overall prime example of what it means to be a compassionate and loving person. The vibrancy of her dreams, the strength of her determination and hard work, the consistent choice of kindness that is the backbone of her world-class customer service – these are truly things to be proud of.
   
2. In the planner community, we #KADdicts (the Krissyanne Designs (KAD)-addicted members), are celebrating with her this week. Her shop (www.krissyanne.com) is offering special anniversary items, discounts, and daily deals all week long. Many of us are recognizing this by featuring her products and giving shout-outs on social media, and using her stickers in our planners. This “Don’t Stop Until You’re Proud” sticker is one of her “vintage” stickers. It was printed in the older formatting, before she moved to vinyl stickers (which have since changed again to a reposition able formulation). In my planner photo (featured), you can see stickers from Krissyanne Designs from near the beginning of when I discovered her shop to stickers from her line at Michael’s.

One of the things that I struggle with in my planner is how to plan out my week when I don’t have a lot going on at home. For a long time, I’d plan out my work day meetings in my weekly planner, but so often these are repetitive – I have a schedule of Monday meetings, Tuesday meetings, etc. In addition, I have a Daily Emily Ley planner that I use and keep at work, so putting these things in my Weekly Erin Condren doesn’t really add any value for me.

So, I’m trying something a little different this week. Well, a couple things that are different, but we’ll get to the #pencolorchallenge in a minute.

First, I am following some inspiration from both Laken (@planwithlaken) and Julie (@julies_plans on IG), who use either quote full boxes or checklist full boxes to mark off the times in their planner where they are at work, since they both also use separate planners for work. I don’t typically have a lot of to-do items any given day, but I can use smaller checklists/quotes/decorative stickers as needed. I’m thinking that I’ll keep these at the top of every day to either be motivation or putting right in front of me the things I want to accomplish before I go to bed.

Second, I’ll use the middle and bottom boxes to put any appointments, activities, or notable things about the day. It’ll be (mostly) in chronological order from top to bottom, but I may/may not make a distinction between things I did before work vs. things that I did after work, unless there’s a reason I might need that information later.

In this spread, I currently have a lot of text. Mostly, because I didn’t do too much other than dishes, shopping, and watching YouTube while I ate dinner. What I did do, was spend some time in introspection, which I don’t do all that often.

On Monday, I asked myself the question: What is one small thing that I can do today to make myself proud?

• 

• 

These cute daily log sheets are part of Kristin’s line at Michael’s, and I had a really fun time filling it out. It made my very boring day seem important and allowed me to celebrate my mundane daily #adulting accomplishments. Like keeping up with the dishes. I even took all the recycling out of the house and into the bin.

Today, I worked a couple hours past my shift, then spent probably another hour having a great conversation with a coworker and her husband. How often have we done that? Taken the time to really get to know those we work with? Not as much as we’d like, probably.

One interesting part of the conversation concerned our reactions to horrible/dangerous/clueless drivers around us. Both Eric and I have a tendency to be – let’s say less than charitable – in our hearts and thoughts. I have, over the years, really tried to be aware of this and the reasoning behind it, and have come up with a few things that I try to keep in mind to re-train my heart to be more forgiving and compassionate. I’ll follow up with more details on this in an upcoming blog post.

For now, I’ll leave you with the question I left for myself today:

What are your dreams for yourself?

Have a blessed day!