Calendars, mostly. I have 2 in the kitchen. One kitchen calendar is about regular scheduled things like recycling, contractor visits, and special TV shows. The other is for medical appointments (both me and The Mews). It helps to keep those things separate.
The basement door has a calendar for my planting schedule. I mark each weekend with a countdown number toward and after average last frost date in Spring and the first frost day for Fall. Seeds can demand rather specific timing. It really helps.
There is one in the computer room too. Since that is where I post about The Mews, I add all their Birthdays and Gotcha Days. Otherwise, sometimes I forget.
So I always have 4. Mid-December, I go shopping for them at Walmart (they sell them cheap). The computer room gets a cat calendar, the basement one is just a note-pad (no pictures), the main kitchen one is either butterflies of hummingbirds, the other is astronomy pictures (because it's about "time"), LOL!
Yeah, I could probably do better using my computer calendar app or even delayed emails to myself, but I'm old enough that the computer is not my main form of record-keeping. And I like to see nice pictures on the walls as decorative anyway.
The other major New Year chore is to review my spreadsheet list of refrigerated seeds. I keep them in numbered specimen vials in a tray. The tray has 2 layers drilled with holes (so the vials stand up and kept in numerical order). The spreadsheet has the vial#, seed name, purchase date, and expiration date.
So, I can skim down the list and see what new seeds to reorder. A gardening forum I participate in has a list of the top 20 catalog companies and I only order from them. There is another site that helps you cancel delivery of any catalogs you don't want to receive, and I have reduced my mailed catalogs to just a few garden companies and a few specialty companies for other products. Saves some trees...
The garden catalogs usually arrive by end-of-year, so I will sit down with my list and the catalogs. That can be a bit of work. Not all sell each variety of seeds I want and it changes year-to-year. So I have to make a list from each. I wouldn't mind ordering some seeds from each, but the shipping fees are often quite high so I end up going with one company or another each year and making some variety adjustments.
