I wanted to call this post "Purging and Listing", but that made me think of a drunken sailor, so I changed it. Two weeks back (in my weekly Tribune column) I talked about a blog that I've come across that I really like - LivingWellSpendingLess.com, by Ruth Soukup. There is so much available to read - it can be a little overwhelming. Luckily, the blog is well thought out and well laid out, so it was pretty easy for me to find some good reading on cleaning and time management, which are the two topics that drew me in in the first place.
Step 1: Purge. It's been a struggle sometimes to keep the toys cleaned up in our home. We work quite often with Micah on teaching him to put his toys away at the end of the day. For the most part, he's pretty good at it. However, two year olds have their limits, and when there are a million toys laying around, or he's in one of his two year old moods, the bulk (if not all) of the cleaning up gets left to mom and dad... and that comes after getting him into a clean pull-up, his pjs, his teeth brushed, his night light on his "blue light" on his fan on the fan outsidehisdooronbooksreadprayerssaidsnugglesandhugsand... you get the idea. And then Malie needs to be fed and changed and put to bed, dinner needs to be cleaned up after, and all of those other wonderful things that parents adults are supposed to do every day. All of which is to say that the toys, which generally need to go on shelves and in bins in very specific ways in order to all fit, haven't always made it back to their homes at the end of every day. Finally I decided that we were on toy overload, and that maybe some should get put away. After reading a post by Ruth on her taking the majority of toys away from her two girls and the wonderful change she saw, I knew it was the thing to do. Now Micah has about three sets of toys available at a given time, along with books and puzzles. My house looks better, and we're happier with the lack of clutter.
My other purge area was my closet. How many of you (women) look into your closet full of clothes and think, "Ugh. I have nothing to wear..." Yeah, I do that, too. Ruth also wrote a post on her "40 Hanger Closet". In her house, her closet now has 40 nice hangers and the clothes that fit on them. If they didn't fit, they had to go. Those shirts that you really just don't wear anyway more, or that just don't quite fit right, or that you got because it was on sale... She said that when she cut her wardrobe down to the clothing she actually liked and wore on a regular basis, she suddenly felt like she always had something to wear. This weekend, I grabbed a bunch of stuff out of my closet and bagged it up. It really is a nice feeling to look into the closet and think, "Sure, I could wear any one of these shirts right now and be happy in it." Goodbye bulky sweaters and "perfectly good" button-ups that were given to me.
Step 2: Organize I have been trying to get some organizing done, and I had a wonderful breakthrough recently. I'm one of those people who needs a place for everything, or everything goes all over the place. Case in point: our front hall closet. It's been slowly filling with shoes, until My once neat space had literally turned into a small mountain of foot coverings. A lot were shoes that are now too small for Micah, or shoes that got worn once for some particular occasion but which don't get worn regularly. However they got there, I knew they needed to go. We have a split-level entry, and both the closet by the door and the closet at the top of the stairs were offensive, though the one up top was the one with the mountain. I took the shoe rack out of the lower closet and put it in the upper closet, moving out any shoes that didn't belong there. Then I had to figure out the lower closet. I bought a shoe rack some time ago that expands, which would have been really great for the closet, except then I got it home and decided it was the stupidest shoe rack ever. It consists of parallel tubes that put shoes at an angle. Two smooth, round tubes that angle shoes downward. They just fell right off the moment the rack got bumped. And, of course, your shoes have to be big enough to reach from one bar to the other, which Micah's certainly aren't. Ridiculous! My solution? It's not exactly pretty, but it's functional: old jeans. I have a few pairs of old jeans that I keep around in case I come up with some genius use for the fabric (which I guess I did). I cut the legs off of two pairs and slid them onto the racks (the two tube for each level of the shoe rack fit into the pant leg and then re-attach to the other side of the rack). I clipped them fairly snugly, so now shoes can actually grip the rack, and Micah's shoes can sit on the fabric and not fall through.
Step 3: Plan of Attack I also hinted at the "time jar" in that column two weeks ago. Each day we are given 24 hours - our jar. How we fill those 24 hours is up to us. If we fill it first with the little things (think sand), there is no room for the bigger, more important things (think rocks. Or maybe baseballs or golf balls if you're a sports person). If we want to make sure that we are creating space for the big things, intentionality is key. And, if you want to be intentional about the big things, you have to first define what those big things are for you.
Ruth has created a Goal Setting Workbook, which is pretty straight foward. What do you consider to be most important to you in life? How are you spending your time? Is the way you're spending your time in line with what's important to you? What are short and long term goals that you have etc. As annoying as those things can feel sometimes, I actually sat down and went through most of it. I classified my priorities, made some short and long term goals, and thought about how I wanted to achieve those goals in a measurable manner.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle. If you want to be intentional, form habits. Habits free up brain space. In her post, "Filling the Time Jar {5 Steps that Will Change Your Life}", Ruth mentions the book The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg. She notes, "After reading this book, I realized that because my willpower in a given day is limited, the more good habits I create for myself, the more willpower and energy I will have leftover to use towards other things." As part of her Goal Setting Workbook, Ruth says to list five things you want to do every morning and every evening - those things you want to become habits. While I think it may change a little (and is slightly longer than five), I have created my list and will be framing it to put up somewhere to look at until I forget the need to see it every day.
Among my personal goals are keeping my house cleaner and having more "present" time with my family (which means trying to accomplish more work when I'm not with them. I do a lot of work from home, so even though I'm at home with my family, I'm often working, which means there, but not really there.) With this in mind, I created a weekly cleaning sheet for myself. Ruth has a number of really good ones on her site, based on your own personal cleaning style (see her post "How to Create a Cleaning Schedule That Works For You".) I liked her sheets, but as Neal puts it, I'm "particular" (read: anal retentive) sometimes, so I made my own. It's basically a lengthwise piece of paper divided into five long sections, with each section representing a week of the month. I listed all of the cleaning I'd like to accomplish in a given week in each space so I can cross things off as I go. The fifth space I used for cleaning items I want to try and hit once a month. I created a second sheet that's basically identical, except that fifth space is reserved for quarterly cleaning items - something I was happy Ruth brought up because I never would have thought about it otherwise (which is probably why the filter on our furnace has only been changed once since we moved in. That's now on my quarterly cleaning list).
I'm finishing this week's column on Monday night, and the morning started out with an alarm clock (other than Micah) and a walk on the treadmill, which means so far, so good. While I didn't accomplish everything I wanted to this morning, it was a good start. Now to keep my eyes on the prize when that alarm clock continues to go off earlier than I'd like!
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