Mål Paper Daily Goal Setter Planner Review*

[AD- This post includes a product I was sent in exchange for a review. As always, all photos, words, thoughts, and opinions are my own].

I've always been a bit of a stationery addict and I love organising my life with a good to-do-list, so when a new company called Mål Paper approached me and invited me to review their new Daily Goal Setter planner*, I immediately said 'yes!'

As someone who prefers to coordinate her life on paper instead of on screen, I was intrigued by the planner, and couldn't wait to find out if it could help me organise my life more efficiently.

Spoiler alert: it did not disappoint!

The Daily Goal Setter* from Mål Paper is a beautiful hardback planner made from soft textured faux leather. It features a stylish, Scandinavian-inspired minimalistic design with a tasteful modern font in gold on the cover and spine, and comes in a choice of three colours: black, grey, and pink. I chose the pink because we all know I can't resist some colour, and I know many of you can't, either! It's a pretty salmon-pink in colour, and it looks effortlessly stylish instead of childish or garish, as pink stationery sometimes does.

When the goal setter arrived on my doorstep, I was instantly impressed by the fantastic quality of it. It's sturdy and very well made, and looks built to last. I'm confident it will survive regular use and being carried around in your bag to use on the go with minimal wear and tear.

A gratitude journal and planner in one, the Daily Goal Setter, is the perfect planner to help you effectively organise your life, optimise your potential, and achieve your goals. Whether you want to focus on your work, blogging, school, or home life, this planner has everything you need to make your life as stress free and productive as possible, while helping you think more positively and mindfully.

It begins with a cheat sheet section with plenty of tips for using the planner, and how to effectively set and achieve your goals, which you should find helpful if you don't know where to start. It leads on to sections for planning long, medium, and short-term goals with room to include when, why, and how you hope to achieve them, and motivational quotes at the bottom of each page to inspire you.

Next you'll find month and week in-review pages where you can record important tasks, and review and rate your month or week. 

The month in review pages also have room for notes, and include an undated calendar which could be helpful for tracking blogging or business stats and expenses, noting down appointments, or using to keep track of schedules. I see myself utilising this section for planning blog content in the future.

Pages for daily tasks naturally make up the majority of the planner, with a full page provided for you to fill each day. Half of the page is allocated to a to-do-list with a column for prioritising your goals beside it, and you should have more than enough room to jot everything down even on the busiest of days. The daily task pages also give you the opportunity to switch off from the stresses of work for a moment and take a few minutes to reflect and appreciate the little things in life each day, which I love as I try to look for the good in every day. It encourages you to list three things to be grateful for, pen some daily affirmations, record some great things that happened, and also rate your day, so even if you've been having the worst day, you can try to finish it by focusing on the positives instead of dwelling on the negatives. These are definitely my favourite features of the goal setter and I really enjoy taking a few minutes to reflect on them whenever I use the planner.

This 244-page planner has room for six months of planning in total, and it's filled with quality 100gsm ivory paper. The paper is a decent thickness, and should accept most pens with no or minimal bleeding.

The great thing about the goal setter is that the pages aren't dated like a traditional diary. You just fill in the next page as and when you need to, so it's ideal if, like me, you don't have a busy schedule every day of the week, and don't want to have a planner full of wasted paper. Not only is this kinder to the environment, but it's more cost-effective, too. 

At the back of the planner, you will also find lined pages for notes, a calendar for 2019 and 2020, and a document folder attached to the back cover to keep important slips of paper safe and secure. There are two grey ribbons for helping you keep your place, and influential quotes from the greats are dotted throughout the planner to inspire you. They really have thought of everything.

Overall, I think the Mål Paper Daily Goal Setter Planner is a fantastic planner. It's beautifully designed, great quality, well structured, and has everything you need to help you stay organised and turn your goals in to achievements. It's an ideal planner for organising everything from work to blogging to uni, and it even encourages us to be more mindful of our lives. What more could you ask for from a daily planner?!

The Daily Goal Setter is reasonably priced at just £20.95, and and you can buy yourself a copy from Mål Paper here.

Do you think the Daily Goal Setter could help you organise your life more efficiently?

*The Mål Paper Daily Goal Setter Planner featured in this post was gifted to me in exchange for a review. As always, all photos, words, thoughts, and opinions are my own.

Q&A A Day: 5 Year Journal Book Review

I recently bought myself a creative journal book called Q&A a Day: 5 Year Journal. It's a book which has been on my wish list for a year or two, and I'm pleased to say when it made its way in to my hands last week I wasn't disappointed.

Q&A a Day: Five Year Journal is exactly what it sounds like; a five year journal book with a different prompted question to answer every day of the year. Each question is returned to each year for five years so you can look back and see how much your life changes over time, and in the process this little book will help you to create your own personal little time capsule. Sounds fun, right?

The book is filled with a wide variety of prompts to ponder over, and there are many you're likely to never have asked yourself before. You only have one question to answer a day, so this journal only takes a minute of your time a day and doesn't need much commitment. It's ideal if you want to journal, but rarely have the time to stop and write an entry; and perfect for anybody who enjoys creative journaling, but regularly struggles to find the inspiration to write.

With 365 different questions to answer a year, there's no shortage of inspiration, and there's a great variety of questions and topics to keep things interesting, including:

♥ How would you describe your victory dance?

♥ Who would you trade places with for just one day?

♥ What is your most cherished memory of the year?

♥ What is your most recent act of generosity?

♥ How do you feel about your body?

♥ What's the best part about your life right now?

♥ Today was unusual because __________.

♥ Write a phrase to describe your year so far.

♥ What's the next book you want to read?

♥ What are the top songs on your recently played list?

♥ What do you feel grateful for today?

♥ Today you wore __________.

♥ How do you want to be remembered?

♥ Are you seeking contentment or excitement?

♥ Who do you want to be?

This journal is such a fun way to challenge yourself daily. It will not only get you thinking about what's important to you, but it will give you somewhere to record the little things about your day you might otherwise forget about.

I think it will be interesting to look back on each year's answers and see how much life has (or has not) changed over the years. We don't always realise just how much we evolve as people from year to year, and I think the changes could surprise us. It's the sort of memento that would be interesting for you or your family to rediscover in a box in years to come, and a great way to remember a particular period of your life.

So, each day of the year is given a full page with the date and prompt at the top, and each page has five sets of lines, one for each year's entry. There's room for a few sentences each time, which should be plenty of room for each answer.

You can start the journal on January 1st and write daily for the next five years to keep your journal entries consistent throughout. You may prefer to start the journal on whatever day of the year it makes its way in to your hands, as I've done, because you just can't wait until January to get started! You don't even have to answer questions each day, if you don't want to. You can fill in an answer to today's date on whichever year you're inspired to pick up the book from today until the end of the year 2099! It's your journal; you have the freedom to use it how you wish!

The book itself is a small hard back measuring  16.5cm x 11.5cm x 3.5cm. It's smaller than A5 and about an inch and a quarter thick. I was surprised when it first arrived because I was expecting it to be much larger; although, I think its compact size is a good thing, because it's small enough easily carry around with you to use on the go.

The covers and spine of the book are covered in brown card / paper, and feature an attractive black font.

The pages are golden edged, so the book is such an attractive little thing, and it won't look out of place on anybody's bedside table- male or female. 

The book retails for £14.99, although you can find it much cheaper online. I purchased mine from Amazon, where it is currently on sale for £8.81, but it should also be available from all good book shops.

It's a fantastic little journal and I'm so glad I purchased it. I always look forward to picking up the book each night to fill in another answer before I fall off to sleep, and for once, I think this will be a journal I'll actually be able to write in every day. 5 thumbs up from me!

If you love to journal, I'm confident you'll love this book, too! Why not treat yourself to a copy today?

642 Things To Write About Book Review

I've got something a little bit different for you this morning; something I think might be of interest to the bloggers and creative writers among you. A review, of sorts, of a creative journal book.

I'm constantly looking for new ways to challenge and occupy myself. With most of my time confined to bed day after day, my life does tend to get quite repetitive, so I try to throw something different in to the mix every so often to keep myself on my toes.

So, for that reason, I was doing some research on Smash journals on Amazon last week, thinking about purchasing one, when something else caught my eye. It was a book called 642 Things To Write About .

642 Things To Write About is by The San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and is quite simply, a book filled with 642 writing prompts to spur your creativity and inspire you out of your writer's block. That's right, 642! Now you might be thinking, there's no way that there can possibly be that many original ideas to write about, but I can assure you, this book will prove you wrong.

This book has page after page of ideas to evoke the writer within. The book is the thickness of your average paperback, although the pages are much larger- so that's a lot of inspiration to play with!

Each page has one to four unique prompts to respond to, with either lined or blank paper beneath it to write your tale.

The ideas themselves are in a variety of different styles of creative writing, from fiction and memoirs to personal opinions, and challenges. If you enjoy creative writing, I'm confident you'll be inspired by many- if not all- of the prompts laid out in this book. The following photos show just a selection of them.

Here are just some of my favourites:

♥ Think of a person you despise. Now describe all the wonderful things about that person.

♥ Write your obituary.

♥ The thought of the first man to eat an oyster.

♥ Choose how you will die.

♥ Write an anonymous letter to a stranger detailing the things you've learnt about life.

♥ You realise you have inadvertently become a stalker.

♥ A piece of clothing you keep just for the memory.

♥ You wake up in an open field wearing an astronaut suit and lying on a surf board. What happened?

♥ Describe the sinking of Titanic from the point of view of the musicians playing in the ballroom...

♥ Write a story that ends with the line "And this is the room where it happened."

I've personally enjoyed creative writing for as long as I can remember, although it had been a couple of years since I last wrote any. I was intrigued and fascinated with the idea of this book, and I can happily say that this book didn't disappoint when it made it's way in to my hands. It's filled with ideas which have been provoking an endless stream of thoughts on to paper, and it's been encouraging me to think out of the box and break away from my usual style of writing for a while. I think this book is really fun to kick back with for a while each day, and I'm enjoying writing creatively again.

While the book is a fun creative writing journal, I believe that a lot of the prompts could be turned in to blog post themes, and others could easily be tweaked for blogging, too. There's are so many ideas that could be interpreted in any way you please to get you thinking outside of your comfort zone, and could easily be turned in to interesting blog content. So if you enjoy creative writing or are perhaps looking for some new ideas for your blog, I recommend you check out 642 Things To Write About.

I can't wait to work my way through my copy!

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