Product Review of Organizers - Daily Home Planner

As promised, I will review several organizing tools as a follow up to our survey in March asking which tool do you use most often to organize your time. The survey results were: wall calendar 17%, PDA 14%, cell phone 7%, pocket calendar 14%, notebook/spiral 42%, and other 10%.

I'll be looking at several different styles to give you a variety of options to explore. Today I'll be looking at the Daily Home Planner by Sarah Kimmel.

Sarah Kimmel has an amazing product – her Daily Home Planner! The Daily Home Planner is a computer-based system that helps you organize your time, finances, menus, goals, contacts, journaling, and lists. It’s a one-stop organizing system for all areas of your life.

You can document a daily routine for yourself and for other family members. So when you look at your day, you see the routines and appointments for the whole family. Sarah especially recommends this system for home-schoolers, where each child’s daily school routine is readily seen. When you switch to a monthly view, just your appointments show up, without all the daily routines.

The Daily Home Planner helps you set up a budget and allocate income to the categories you have chosen in your budget. As you spend and record, each category shows the current total.

Planning menus is a snap, too. You enter recipes onto your program, and you can click and drag them to the day you want to serve them. The ingredients are then transferred to your shopping list!

There’s a section for journaling, including things you’ve learned that day and a place for pictures. And for list lovers – you can create to do lists, grocery lists, and any other list you can imagine!

Create a contact list for the whole family using the reference section. There’s lots of room for information for each contact. And there’s a box you can check if the contact is one to be called in an emergency.

There’s even a babysitter’s list! Print out the routines for each child during the period of time covered, as well as your own specific instructions and the emergency numbers you designated.

Sarah provides a demo on her site for each section of her planner. She also includes a detailed printed list of instructions in her help section on the program, to get you started. And all for only $34.95 at www.dailyhomeplanner.com.