Welcome!

Lemonade Planner is just new to the world.

The ideas behind Lemonade Planner have been brewing for quite some time (about 25 years by my rough calculations), but 2020, the revolting lemon of a year as it was, forced me to reassess almost everything I held dear. I write this from my experience of me living my life with my hubby, two kids, a cat, and a dog in the regional Victorian city of Geelong. Still, you may find many of the experiences familiar - I know that I'm not alone in any of this. Lemonade Planner came about out of the need to find a better way to balance and manage organisation and expectations.

My Organisation

Organisation has always been my comforter. In a chaotic and disordered world, I have my lists to fall back on. I can put everything in a neat little row and soothe my mind. I still love my tech tools - I doubt anything will ever get in the way of my love for Trello, Confluence and Slack when it comes to all things team communication and organisation. Still, the act of physically writing something down does something lovely to my brain that I can't fully explain.

Our ventures in and out of lockdown and remote learning were challenging to say the least, and at a time that I felt should have really had fewer pressures on my time, I suddenly found more. My day no longer revolved around appointments and deadlines but became crammed with seemingly endless to-dos. Not a moment went by when I wasn't pulled away from what I was doing by a phone call, a remote learning question, a call to stop the dog from licking people; the list literally went on all day, every day, often in circles. I would lose track of where I was and what I was supposed to be doing and would often get to the end of the day without having achieved anything that I set out to in the morning. Familiar?

The planner created a practical structure that keeps me organised across projects and day-to-day life. It's genuinely the thing that kept me afloat in 2020 with some semblance of sanity.

My Expectations

I have high expectations of myself. I need to do things, or at least the things that are important to me, well. Nothing half-arsed. I do it properly or I don't do it at all. Sadly, this had lead to a big problem for me. All those things that I had not done at all had stacked up. I looked around my home, the same home that I have worked and lived in for the last decade, but hadn't really dedicated myself to and realised that I needed to make a big change.

I needed to create a shift in my expectations. My high expectations could no longer be on the outcome but on my approach to the journey. Repeated doses of small actions eventually lead to bigger things, and documenting your progress along the way is really important to that feeling of success that you would normally get from doing something big and getting it done quickly.

Dealing with the overflow of the laundry cupboard for 10 minutes a day eventually results in a clean cupboard that you would not have had if you'd waited until you had a weekend to apply yourself. And so I applied myself, in small daily steps, until the job was done. Now you may read this thinking that my house is now spick and span, but you would be mistaken. There is still much to do, but there are now aspects of our little house that are actually looking pretty manageable right now, and that's not to be scoffed at.

My expectations are still pretty high. I have grand plans of what I would like to do with my life at various intervals, but I don't expect to suddenly wake up and find myself there. As I journey along, I plan to fill my memories with all the wins I experience along the way. The unexpected note from kids on my desk or a walk with the dog without lead pulling are moments to be treasured.

Lemonade Planner's focus on setting and achieving goals is balanced with a daily reminder to value the wins in life, no matter the size. 

Creating Balance

You may have picked up that I can be a bit of an all-or-nothing person. My life is pretty frequently taken over by the big thing that I'm currently working on. I tend to become a bit last minute on things that really should be thought through and prioritised, like meal planning and exercise.

Without a Meal and Exercise plan as part of the weekly planning session, it's just too easy to keep pushing it further and further back on the agenda until you get to the point that the only exercise is running to school pick up and drop off, and meals are delivered at 9:00 pm.

I don't claim to be any kind of fitness superstar, actually, I'm pretty much the exact opposite. Due to consistent goal setting, and reflecting on why it's important to me, I'm getting better. I can now run for 30 minutes straight. Not quickly mind you, it's really more of a shuffle, but it's done without stopping and I'm really proud of that achievement.

As my attempts at running, my journey will be slow and steady, with a daily step taken in the right direction and the occasional allowance made for a rest day. Without a rest day every so often, we really have to ask ourselves is it worth pushing ourselves? At a certain point, we have to stand back and appreciate how far we've come. We are, after all, making pretty amazing progress.

My Original Lemonaders

The planner worked for me, but I wasn't sure how it would relate to the rest of the world's time-stressed and ambitious people of the world.

I invited a group of remarkable women I know personally - people with multiple time pressures on their life from sometimes complex work and family situations, with different approaches to organisation. They have a number of things in common. They all have very high expectations upon themselves, are incredibly generous with their time, and very honest in their feedback.

It's their influence that pulled the published planner back from being very me-centric and broadened the application of the principals behind it to something accessible to anyone.

The Future of the Planner

The 3-Month Undated Planner is here to stay, there should never be a fixed start date for starting to make Lemonade Plans, but there are plans for potential tweaks to future publications and some new products. We hope to bring out some dated versions in the not-to-distant future.

We would love for you to be involved in product development. Join The Lemonaders to stay in the loop with all the announcements about opportunities to be involved.