☆ Spark Notebook: A Place for your Life Plans & Great Ideas

I was fortunate enough to have been contacted by Spark Notebook to try out a few of their sample pages & share them with you. Honestly, I had never heard of this campaign/brand before but I'm so glad I know now.

I think how it works is that you make a 'pledge' (right hand side of their site) and that is basically the cost of product you want to buy. The notebook itself looks so sleek & sophisticated, the pages are ink-proof, super high quality & perforated, not to mention their pages are so useful to life, work & school.

The $1 pledge gives you all of the page layouts in PDF form, which I was lucky to have been sent to try out. It includes Monthly Goals, Weekly Outlook, Project Planner & 30 Day Challenge. I think the PDF version will be super handy for people who don't mind printing off their own pages because then you might be able to resize them to fit into your Filofax, etc. (e.g. A5 pages).

But of course, I'm not one to resist sexy looking notebooks. That's right, I just called a notebook sexy. But that is how I feel about them by just looking at the images. The pages are just so useful. I honestly can't stress that enough and I think it'll help me stay on track with tasks & challenges I set for myself. And I know a lot of you like to set monthly challenges & so I thought I'd share this amazing system with you.

So what do you think? For a dollar, you really can't go wrong. And they do ship anywhere in the world (a constant struggle living in Australia) so that's a nice bonus as well. The only downside is that time is running out, as well as stock so if you wanna get your hands on them, I'd recommend you do them ASAP. They'd make great gifts as well & would be a great way to ring in the new year.

I can't wait to start using my pages & I'm even more excited to share how I use them with you so stay tuned!

Love Always,
Anna Banana ♡

TIP TUESDAY: How To Organise Your Planner

As promised, today's post is about how to stay organised in your planner. I thought I'd whip out my much-neglected Lilly Pulitzer Agenda & set up a few fake pages. I know, I know, faking pages is cheating, but I didn't have any uni things going on at the moment & I thought that planners would be most effective to help with school work and whatnot, so you understand, right? :-)

First off, these are my planner essentials. Washi tape, stickers, post-it notes, coloured markers & highlighters. A lot of planners have pockets for you to keep your bits & bobs so stickers fit nicely in there, as well as notes from school or important receipts & papers from work. The Marvy Uchida Le Pens are nice & thin, fitting nicely into my pencil case, as well as the Stabilo highlighters. I'm the kind of person who LOVES to use colour for anything & everything. In my opinion, they're great for colour-coding your subjects or allocating various things to different colours. The Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto pens are also great for those with limited pencil case space :-)

Monthly calendars often have space on the side for To Do lists. Sometimes I like to put my colour-coding system there to remind me which colours are for what. And this way, you can change them up each month if things happen to change (different subjects, extra curricular activities, etc). Washi tape is also great for highlighting/blocking out holidays or special dates.

While I'm doing my homework, if there are questions I want to ask teachers about, I write them all on a post-it note & stick them in my planner to ask at school. Post-it's are great because you can just stick them anywhere & throw them away once you're done with them (or keep them to make your pages pretty & colourful :D)

If you're not a colourful pen user, you can use highlighters to add a little bit of colour while helping you still colour code. I did this before & liked it quite a bit. It kept things simple yet colourful & organised without being too over-the-top. And some highlighters could bleed through the page or be too neon-y so sometimes I like to go back to the good old coloured pencils.

As you can see here, I assigned my subjects different colours so that anything I had to do for that particular class can be written in that colour throughout my pages. ☑︎ Check boxes are also a great way for you to keep track of what you need to do. And let's face it, that feeling you get when you tick things off is oh-so-satisfying. I tend to use check boxes for things I need to do & stars or bullet points for reminders or meetings, etc.

And your planner doesn't have to be strictly for work or school. I like to almost use it as a journal in some way, recounting things I did that day. For example, date night got a special little sticky note :D And I like to go all out for birthdays & holidays as well.

Having a planner can be really fun. I remember getting my first Filofax and being so excited to use it whenever I could. And that actually distracted me from my studies quite a bit, having the opposite effect a planner should have. Not to mention, I spent my days on Instagram & Pinterest, stalking amazing photos of planners and getting inspiration. So I think there needs to be a balance. Balance is so important in everyday life, and I guess once you get over the initial hype, you really do start to use it effectively & get the most out of it.

I hope this somewhat helped you to get an idea of how you might want to set up your planner & stay organised. I'd love to hear your thoughts & tips on how to organise your planner so please leave them down below.

Love Always,
Anna Banana ♡

ORGANISATIONAL TIP TUESDAY!

Happy Tuesday! You may be wondering what this 'Tip Tuesday' is but I went shopping for new bed sheets today & when I was putting some stuff away, just sort of stumbled upon a cute little organisational thing. It may seem dead obvious but I just thought I might snap a few pictures because, hey, I was so excited.

This is one of the quilt cover sets I got at Adairs from the brand Mercer + Reid. I just loved the colour combination & it's such a nice, lightweight yet warm quilt, perfect for the Spring time. As soon as we fitted set it all up, it instantly lit up my whole room giving it a whole new feel. The other set I got was from the Home Republic brand that has a bit of yellow and some darker, brighter blue triangles that I think will be perfect for Summer.

I was quite surprised at how expensive quilt covers & bed sheets were but I guess there's a good reason for it. The quality of these are amazing & definitely worth it. Oh, and I would highly recommend the Adairs membership. It's about $20 for a 2-year membership but you can save so much. My Home Republic one, it would have been $180, but with the sale that's going on right now, it's $100, and on top of that, the Linen Lovers Membership gives you a 5% discount so only $95. Same goes for the Mercer + Reid one pictured above. RRP is $230, the sale makes it $130, and my membership makes it $123. It's not a lot, but when you're buying as much as we did, it all adds up. Not to mention how adorable the membership card is. Seriously. Swoon.

Unfortunately, the quilt cover you see in the picture does not include the pillowcases so that's a few extra dollars. But I reckon this will last quite a few years & I've got others to switch occasionally so I'm set for a long time now.

Now, that's enough rambling. How about we actually get into the organising tips, huh? When I bought the quilts and the cases and all that jazz, they came in awesome plastic cases. So, being the organised freak that I am, I whipped out my DYMO labeller & got to printing some unnecessary but cute labels.

I don't know if you have the same problem, but we have a lot of bits & bobs and can never find the right plastic for things. So this time, I made sure to label EVERYTHING! I think they look quite nice. And what makes this even neater is that all the smalled ones fit nicely into the big one that the quilt came in. It was like playing tetris in real life &  I was so excited about it all. You get me, don't you?

So now, all I need to store in the cupboard is this neat little package. I'm thinking of reorganising our entire linen cupboard & using this 'system' to not only keep it neater & more organised, but to save space.

Let me know what you think & I'd love to hear your ideas as well. I looooove organising anything & everything so tips & advice are much appreciated. I'll try and make this 'Tip Tuesday' a more regular thing but I may lack the creativity for it to happen every week. But I'll try. And who knows, there might be a 'Tip Thursday' or something like that as well?

Love Always,

Anna Banana ♡