Erin Condren Teacher Planner

I am a very organised person. My classroom is organised, my house is organised (well, most of the time!) and I get stressed out when there is clutter in my life - both tangible and metaphorical. So I am a real list writer/label user/diary user type.

A few years ago my teacher friend Abbey showed me her amazing personalised Erin Condren life planner and I salivated over it!! I spent hours on erincondren.com looking at the different covers, the different upgrades and drove my husband Andrew nuts talking about how much I wanted one. Now if you haven't been to the Erin Condren website and seen her products before, first of all you have to go! You will be instantly obsessed if you're anything like me. But you will also be a bit bummed out if you live anywhere outside the USA, because the international shipping cost (US$40) is crippling... Especially when you are already paying US$60 for the planner. But, I'm going to tell you why it is totally worth every penny!!!

When we moved to the UK I thought it would be a great opportunity for me to invest in a life planner, as they run July to June like a US school year, and pretty similar to a UK one. I always was weary getting one to use in the NZ school year (January to December) as that would mean a diary swap half way through a school year. The other option is an 18 month planner so you would only have this problem every two years. So anyway, I got online and discovered that since my last forlorn visit many months before, Erin Condren was now making TEACHER PLANNERS!!!!!! A specialised take on her famous Life Planner with features designed to make a teacher's life more manageable, organised and stylised (as Erin herself puts it!).

I was so excited and ordered one straight away. Andrew always says the reason I like shopping online is the excitement I feel while I wait for it to arrive.. Well, an Erin Condren planner takes a few weeks to arrive, so I drove him nuts talking about it, updating him on the parcel tracking and literally squealing when the courier arrived with my special parcel!

It arrived about a month ago now and I have been using it to organise myself while I set up my new classroom. I LOVE IT! Every single penny (even the surprise £25 VAT invoice I got from DHL last week) was worth it.

I love having something personalised and the personalised labels it comes with are so cute! I spent hours deciding which cover to get, so when the labels arrived with the designs of different covers I couldn't choose, I was excited! Who knows if I will ever use them - not that I don't have a need, but more likely that I won't want to part with them!!!

The big selling points that Erin Condren mentions in the video (check it out on erincondren.com) are the sturdy aluminium coil and the tabs. And I have to say, these two features are amazeballs!!! What I love the most though is the colourful pages. My teacher planners of old have always been grey or even just plain black and white pages - not inspiring and certainly horrible to look at for hours every day!

Before I hit purchase for this planner I had a good search around the internet and tried to see if there were any cheaper but similar alternatives. After hours of searching I found that NO! There is nothing remotely in the same category as Erin Condren! The designs are so carefully thought about, not just thrown together. Plus you can provide feedback on the products and when the new design comes out every year (about March I believe) Erin does a video to talk through the new design and discuss features and why they have kept them/changed them - this is all about feedback they have from their users. So I guess I'm saying I really like that they listen to what the people who use the products have to say.

Anyway, who would have thought I could write so much just about a diary!! Ridiculous!!!! I better go - the list I wrote in my beautiful teacher planner tells me I have a lot to do today!!