Do you like to add pops of color in your planner? Do you appreciate knowing what you are doing, as well as what others in your family might be doing? Or maybe even tracking extra-curricular activities that you or your family might be participating in? The color coding could and should be your jam!! Let’s talk about what it is, how it can help you with your planning and what purpose it serves to rock your planning lifestyle.

What is Color Coding?

Color Coding is a way to highlight like items in the same color for quick reference purposes. This is something that can be done with stickers, highlighters, markers, washi tape, different colored pens. It will help you to be able to differentiate between different categories in your planner, your calendar, task list, or weekly plan. Adding color in your planner brings awareness with various tasks on your to do list.

Creating a Color Coding System:

When you start with color coding the best key of advice I can give is to create your system before you start. This is important because it is the system and the key that will help you stay consistent and make it possible for you to quickly recognize what you might have going on in your day to day activities.

Some of my favorite color coding systems:

1. Using the TRADE method: this is a method of task list organization that I created which makes it possible for you to organize your brain drop box before you start your tasks for the week.
2. By Category: examples of categories might be family, home, work, finances, health, or play.
3. By Person: each person in your family would get their own color to assigned to them so that you could recognize who needed to be where for what activity.
4. By Time of Day: each time of day, morning, afternoon and night would receive a color, and you would color code your task list accordingly.
5. By Energy Level: whether you have more energy in the morning or more energy in the evening you could color code based on the energy level it would take for you to accomplish that task.

Create Your Color Coding Key:

When you are creating a color coding system you want the color of the code to make sense for you. You can even make it cliche if you want to. Here are some examples of what that might look like:

• Green: business, money, starting a task, activities
• Blue: son activities, self care and serenity, calm activities, evening or night activities
• Red: urgent, bills, end of activity, deadlines
• Yellow: fun activity, high energy, morning or daytime activities
• Pink: daughter activities, personal care

Color Coding Tools:

This is probably my favorite thing because I love school supplies and stationary items. Take a look at some of my favorites.

• Markers and Pens
• Color Coding Dots
• Post It Notes
• Washi Tape

You can check out all of my Amazon favorites in my Favorites List or click on each of the links above separately.

Color coding is a personal preference. You don’t have to use color coding in your planning, but if this is a practice that you would like to adapt I recommend taking a look at some of the tools listed above and then working it into your current planning routine. It just takes a minute to determine your key and then start using it.