Staying organized.

I don't pretend to have it all together. That would be lying. I do like to think that I have most of my life organized.
I've been running a household of 6 for four years (with the help of my husband). In that time I think I missed one doctors appointment. No bad, right?
My mother-in-law has a clock in every room. This used to make me laugh (who am I kidding it still does). Clocks are everywhere. She always knows what time it is. It turns out that her clocks are my calendars. In the kitchen I have three calendars up right now.
Calendar 1 - is on the side of the refrigerator. This one contains the meals we plan on eating for the week. We typically go food shopping on Saturdays. I have never been all that good at shopping with kids so we wait until the weekend when one parent can go with one child. So our food planning runs from Saturday to Friday. Friday night Paul and I mull over what we want to eat for the week. We consider what food items we have in the house and what is on sale. Most of our meat we buy in bulk at BJ's and that plays into what we are going to eat for the week. When food planning we consider the weather for grilling options and nighttime activities for early and easy meals. We frequently find ourselves putting the same things on the menu so we will regularly pull out the recipe books for new ideas, but with picky eaters we have to be careful about having too many adventurous meals in one week. (We don't cater to our children's pickiness but we also won't cook them out of dinner every night)
Calendars 2 and 3 are white boards. One is this month and one is next month. In the old house I had one white board mounted on the wall and attached was a paper calendar that showed the upcoming month. In my new house I have not found a good place to mount my calendar on the wall, so it sits on the kitchen desk. As part of a housewarming gift my mom got me a new one because the older one is kind of gross looking after years of use. For now I am using both of them when I figure out a good hanging place I will get rid of the old one and go back to my former system.
My white-board calendar is ridiculously organized. It's color-coded. Every person has a marker and I even went as far as marking the markers with the initials of each person. Everything goes on these calendars. Sports practices/games, doctors appointments, special events, even when the bigger kids are buying lunch. It's a rainbow of reminders, and I look at it all the time to ensure that I know where I am going and when.
My other calendar is my iphone and that too gets updated regularly. I have reminders built in so that while I am out and about I can't forget about certain events. My iphone also has tons of alarms programed. Alarms to get the kids on and off the bus, and the younger ones to and from pre-school. I am a very forgetful person so I set alarms for daily things so that I don't forget.

Staying organized is key to my success. It's not just keeping everything written on calendars. It's putting things away in places that make sense. It's sorting through the kids clothes every season (separating out the things they have outgrown from the things they might be able to wear again next year). From there I can see what they need versus what they have too much of.
It's getting a routine down and sticking with it. My kids bring a lot of papers home from school, daily, and I need to stay on top of all of it. I recycle completed assignments after reviewing them. I keep some art-work but not much. I hang it for a while then take it down when more comes home.
I respond to papers immediately rather than thinking I'll get to it later. Inevitably piles of papers show up places. On counters and desks and tables. My daily goal is to eliminate those piles as much as humanly possible.
The more I take care of these things the more I can relax. Clutter makes me stressed. And so being organized eliminates this clutter. I will say it again. I don't pretend to have it all together. I am the very real life model of Forgetful Jones. My house isn't even all that clean and uncluttered. There are still sewing materials out from a hemming project I did last week. But I still try to keep most everything as organized as I can. In my own imperfect way.
My daily goals include- not being late to an appointment and not forgetting something important (today I forgot to defrost the meat for dinner).
I am imperfect, but I'd like to think my system helps me overcome that.