It's that time of year again... the weather is changing, the holidays are approaching, and we're getting ready to wrap up 2013. Just over seven weeks left until 2014 (can you believe it?!)

Before we know it, the new year will be upon us and we'll be focused on getting our lives organized for the next twelve months.

Since I can't personally live without this and many of you have made requests, I've updated my monthly planner for 2014 and today I'm happy to be sharing for free it again!


For those of you who haven't used my 2013 planner—this thing has seriously helped me so much this past year. Gone are the days of scribbling down notes and lists on rotating pads of paper that go missing or forgotten. I can just leave my calendar open to the month and keep it on my desk for easy reference. It's held together beautifully too—I've taken it on all my trips so I don't get behind with work.

And it's so easy to put together! After getting the hang of it the first time, it took me less than an hour to print it all out and another 20 minutes or so to trim the pages. Then I simply handed it over to the folks at Staples—$8 and 15 minutes later and I'm all set for the year.

If this is your first time, you may want to recap my original step by step post. Here's a condensed version:

The overall design is 7x9". Each month gets four color coordinated pages. A cover page, two pages for the calendar, and a Notes page, like this:


The pages are printed front and back, so each month uses two sheets.

I also print out several pages of notes (front + back) and add them in at the end (I used them all up for 2013 so I printed extra for this year).

For the paper, last year I bought this matte cover stock at Office Max, 250 pages for $13:



Luckily I had plenty leftover so I didn't have to buy any more paper.

From the PDF, you'll just print one page at a time in order. Print page 1, flip it over, print page 2 on the back. Print page 3, flip it over, print page 4 on the back, etc.



Then you just trim each sheet down (they might not line up exactly but they should be close—just make sure you set them to print centered on each page for consistency)


Here's all the pretty pages after they've been trimmed:


And that's it, your part is done!

Last year I took them to Office Max and they laminated the front covers and spiral bound the book for $5.56. We only have a Staples here and it was $8.61, so just a heads up (although Office Max may have raised their prices since then, who knows). The local Staples also didn't have any white binding if that's important to you (blue or black only). Still a great deal.





I'm excited to start marking this baby up!

Ready to get started on your own planner? You can download the free PDF here. (Once you've opened the PDF, click the little down arrow on the top left to save it to your desktop).

I'm offering it to my Facebook fans, so if you aren't one already you'll just need to click "Like" and then you should have access to it.

I hope this will help you all stay organized and on track next year. We need all the help we can get, right? If there's any questions, let me know in the comments and I'll do my best to answer!

For my next post we're jumping back in to some more house hunting... and I can't make any promises, but I may possibly have an exciting update. We'll see ;)




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