The Organised Mum Life Book can truly help revolutionise a busy mum’s life.But the key to becoming organised is to invest a little time in making sure the Life Book works perfectly for you.

First take the colourful Life Book stickers and mark out everyone’s birthday for the year ahead. Also make a note the week before each date to buy presents and cards.Next mark significant dates such as term times, school holidays and half terms.

Now spend five minutes finding all your important paperwork and make sure car tax renewals, MOT dates and tax return deadlines are all marked out with the handy Organised Mum stickers. Don’t forget important reminders such as dental check-ups and annual eye tests. At the same time use your paperwork to fill in the first Budget planning page in September. Make sure you note down all the essentials such as mortgage payments, council tax, telephone, electricity and gas bills and it will make budgetary planning a whole lot easier in months to come.

Dig out your address book and transfer all the important details of friends, families and colleagues to the back of the Life Book. Make sure you have the address of everybody whose birthday you have listed to make posting cards as easy as possible. The next job is to turn to the sizes page near the front of the Life Book and fill in the clothes sizes for all the family. Ensure children’s sizes are entered in smaller handwriting so you can alter the information as they grow.

Turn to the Weekly Routine pages at the front of the Life Book and assign a page for everyone in the household – including the adults. Finally enter in any other important reminders such as out-of-school activities and reminders to pack PE kits/swimming bags/musical instruments for the school term ahead.

One last tip, which was sent in from Organised Mum reader, Nicole. She said: “ I keep my Life Book on a recipe book stand in the kitchen - not in a drawer - so that it is to hand and you can tuck things behind the book without losing them!” Now all Life Book owners should be ready to tackle the year ahead with a little more organisation.

Organised Mum’s Family Diary, the Family Life Book

This might be the first year that you’ve used our diaries or you may have moved over from the Life Book to the Family version. It is proving very popular so I’m sure that many of you are considering just how to use it to get the very most of it.

It’s unheard of to have a diary with space for up to seven people. But you don’t need to be my friend Michaela with her tribe of five kids to use this to its very best potential. If you’ve got a lot of events going on for committees or charities that you’re involved with or would like to include some space each week for your work commitments, this can make an excellent way to split the space between your different commitments.

The other idea is to use one column to plan the weekly meals and then transfer the ingredients you need to the shopping list.

But we did design this family diary to be as flexible as possible, allowing you to combine two or three columns to allow a huge space for very busy family members or simply to ensure that you could use every inch of the space to its very best potential.