This site contains affiliate links from which we may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support!

Welcome to Day 21 of 31 Days of Getting Organized!

Yesterday I showed you screenshots of how to set up a notebook in Goodnotes. There are probably heaps of good Youtube tutorials out there, but I just wanted to give a quick look at how to do that. Today I am going to show you how to use printables in Goodnotes…. rather than making notebooks from Goodnotes itself.

I must admit, I love printables ~ planners, checklists, diaries… Over the years I’ve made many of my own, but also used ones from other people. There are so many free printables on the web….. I’ve signed up for heaps of them 🙂

When we were homeschooling, I would make my own, because in the early days there weren’t as many around. Now I use a mixture of ones I make myself, and ones from other sites.

Probably the main reason I bought the ipad was because Goodnotes imports pdfs… which meant that all the planners and checklists that I have made or downloaded, could be imported into Goodnotes… and once there, I could write all over them with my Apple pencil like I would on paper.

Take for example one of the printables from my Sewing and Quilting Notebooking Pages… Instead of printing the page out, I can just write on it with the apple pencil:

(As you can see, I only wrote two new projects to start at the beginning of the year… I was trying to work on UFOs… haha!! I did start the Rainbow Challenge, but haven’t started My Small World – I blame too much traveling 🙂 )

Across the top of the screen shot you can see the various notebooks I have open. Like in an internet browser, you can open as many pdfs as you like and they will show up in the various tabs.

So I have my grocery tracker open, note taking pages, blog binder, sewing & quilting binder, a recipe book and a pattern…

I usually have a lot more open 🙂

I then switch from tab to tab depending on what I am doing.

I usually work in landscape so that I can zoom in a bit…

I could have bought a bigger Ipad, but I wanted one that I could take with my in my handbag… of course if I wanted I could turn the Ipad around to portrait….

….but I prefer the writing and everything to be bigger, so I just use it in landscape mode and zoom in.

Another printable that I made two years ago during my 31 Days of Quilting UFOs series is this free ufo tracker:

Two years ago I printed it out and put it in my sewing and quilting binder… and filled it in, which resulted in discovering I had (ahem) 182 ufos…………

By the way, that printable and others are still free in my Craftsy store.

Since I printed out and filled in that UFO list, I have moved.. um… at least 4 times? And I have no idea where the list is… I think I kept a picture of each page somewhere, so today I am going to see if I can find it and transfer it to the pages in Goodnotes… which is backed up on Icloud so I shouldn’t be able to lose it again 🙂

I don’t know about you, but out of sight is out of mind for me, and this year my UFOs have been more out of sight than they should have been – also because I lost the list. So part of getting organized this month is to make that list again as best I can, and then get stuck into finishing…

So there you have it – importing planners and checklists into Goodnotes helps me to stay organized…. tomorrow I’ll show you what I do with patterns and quilting ebooks…