Write on: New Year’s hustle

I was always the kid who cleaned my room by shoving everything under my bed.

Becoming organized was an uphill battle for me growing up. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way. Everything in my apartment has its place in bins, folders, trays and shelves.

But as I think about the new year, I recognize that I could do so much better.

I knew I liked this month’s People to Watch cover model Roxi Victorian as soon as I saw her computer.

Her MacBook Pro keys are covered with a vibrant keyboard skin. Each letter and number is a different color of the rainbow.

“That’s kind of my style,” she told me. “I like colors.”

The longer I talked with Roxi—a woman who went to Oxford as a teenager to study Shakespeare, who today balances running her own dance company with teaching middle school and a loaded schedule of community activities—the more I wanted to know how she keeps herself so together.

The answer is in a giant binder, organized neatly into folders. Here she keeps track of her business and her class curriculum. Of course, everything is color coded.

We bonded over planners. She told me about her new planner for 2016. It comes with stickers in different colors to highlight special occasions, deadlines, events and other reminders—like a grown-up version of Lisa Frank stationery. There’s a tabbed section for customer contact info, another section for to-do lists and goal tracking and calendars for tracking each day down to the hour.

I told her how much I love my Day Designer, a giant planner that has a full page for every day of the entire year. I use the planner to plot my daily schedule and to-do lists. I love the planner’s black and white striped cover and gold hardware. It makes me smile every time I look at it.

It’s a great trick I’ve learned over the years—make organization fun. If you’re going to spend hours working on your computer, jazz it up with a colorful keyboard skin. If every day is a never-ending to-do list, write it in a notebook that fits with your style or personality.

My quest to find my own organizational style has led me to spend hours on sites such as The Everygirl, which profiles the careers of women in industries as varied as magazine publishing and finance. I love reading about how they got their start, what challenges they’ve overcome and what apps and tools they use to keep track of the minutiae.

But it’s even more inspiring to meet thriving professionals in person, which is what made putting together this People to Watch issue so rewarding.

As I fight my own organizational struggles in 2016, I’ll think back to their stories and remember that in the end, hard work always pays off.