My Categorized Daily To-Do List

Hey friends! How is it July already?! The first day of a new month always seems like a fresh start. Today I’m super excited to be sharing something with you that I use daily to organize my life – a system I LOVE and hope will be useful to you as well!

I recently talked about how I’m being intentional about this summer – a post which involved making a more general list of our summer plans and goals. Well, since I know many of you are fans of list-making and organizing and planning…I just had to share my other list with you: the to-do list I designed for daily and/or weekly use! I really rely on this thing. 🙂

Before I came up with my own uniquely categorized to-do list, my lists for the day (whether on my phone or written out) looked a lot like this:

To Do:
-do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-and do this
-Aaaaaah!
-get overwhelmed and possibly give up…or do things half-heartedly.
-have a mini panic-attack because of a lack of order and an inner struggle as to what should be prioritized.

Can anyone relate? As you can see, that’s not an entirely pleasant list to haul around all week.

I finally had to sit down and sort out what my goals typically are during a week or during a given day. I asked myself, what categories do these goals fall into? Little by little, I was able to tease out certain topics that often found their way onto my to-do list. And finally, a to-do list was born – one I was truly happy with!

The finalized Just Bee To-Do List categories,
with explanations:

DWELLING

Anything having to do with the home, cleaning, organizing
Examples: “Vacuum guest room,” “Clean Bathroom,” “Bake birthday cake”

ABIDING

Staying close to God. Things that will encourage me in my faith journey. Now, I know that for some people, it may be deemed inappropriate to put “read Bible” on one’s list because that is something we desire to do anyway, but I use this category for other more specific reminders.
Examples: “Order Naptime Diaries Scripture print for kitchen,” and “Start my 1,000 Gifts journal again”

THRIVING

Staying healthy food-wise and exercise-wise (though I’m not great at the latter)
Examples: “Meal plan for the week,” “Find healthy recipes in Sprouted Kitchen cookbook for the week”

ENCOURAGING

This is a fun one to include. Ways to build others up. (Sometimes this category is the first to go when life gets crazy! We turn inward and use our energy to get ourselves through the day without thought of helping others get through theirs.)
Examples: “Anniversary card to college friend,” or “Send that funny article to Mom”

OTHER

Self-explanatory. 🙂

( BLOGGING )

I use a version of this to-do list that includes a section on blogging. To be honest, this is often the longest section for me! There are always brainstorming sessions to have, design things to iron out, people to e-mail or reply to, photos to edit…oh, and the actual posts to write! 🙂 It’s all super fun and something I’m very passionate about – I just needed a way/place to keep it all straight!

Let’s try to conquer our week using this system! How about we sort out our weekly to-do’s with these categories? Having an organized, categorized to-do list is not meant to tie you down; its purpose is to rid your life of that feeling of overwhelm. 

I’m so excited about these wonderfully manageable categories! Please let me know if you use this type of list this week – tag me on Twitter or Instagram… or, even better, for those of you who enjoy hand-lettering or graphic design – if you actually CREATE a to-do list with my categories, share it with me via email (justbeeblog [at] gmail.com) and I would be thrilled to link to your creation or embed it here in this post!

Have a lovely, productive week, friends!