Happy 2023!

Happy New Year!

Hello internet friends!

(Yes, I realize it is February, and not really close to the new year, but it was just the lunar new year too, so I can maybe say that’s what I mean?)

It has once again been way too long, but I won’t stress about that too much. In my last post I gave myself permission to do away with perfection, and so I’m going to try and walk-the-walk, so to speak, and publish a post that is definitely not going to be perfect…

When the new year is approaching, I always get excited at the idea of a fresh start and setting new goals. (It was December when I started this blog, way back in 2014…) This year was no different. The end of a year and the beginning of the next always gets me thinking, dreaming and planning. And this year I was fortunate to be on a little weekend getaway for the new year with my husband. (Without the kid too – thank you to the in-laws!) This gave me more time to relax and ponder where I am in life and what things I might want to work on or improve. While I was exploring these thoughts, I started to think about blogging again. It has basically been 5 years since I stopped blogging regularly (if I’m totally honest, I was never blogging regularly, but I was at least putting in a reasonable effort at it). It pretty much lines up with when my kid was born. I guess the extra time that I used to have for myself to do creative things and blog has been taken up by caring for him and doing things with him.

But blogging has always been something that I want to come back to. I always really enjoyed it and it was a great way for me to express myself creatively, while also giving myself motivation and accountability to get other tasks and goals done. So as we move in to a season of life where my little guy is starting to be able to do a few things for himself and is also getting in to activities and playing with friends, I am going to try and take those snippets of time that I am getting back, and put them back in to blogging.

So, what do I have planned? Well nothing too exciting, but I’m going to try and aim for one post a week. And it will mostly probably be about my dabbling in the flylady system (if you don’t know about it, it’s sort of a system for household/life management and organization). To start, I will probably just use the blog as an accountability partner and post about my goals for each week and the results from the previous week.

And with that, I will leave you this week and come back to you next week with my summary from January…

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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January 2018 Bullet Journal Set-up

It has been a while since I did an updated show and tell of my bullet journal.  I still use it daily, and have made some adjustments throughout the months, but rather than going through all of the various iterations, I will just show how I have set everything up for January.

I don’t normally have a title or intro page for my months, but I figured the start of a new year deserved something special.  I got inspiration from Pinterest (so I cannot take full credit for my designs).  I also added a washi tape border so that I could flip easily to the beginning of the new year.  I am very happy with how it turned out, so I may continue doing something like this in the future… We will see…

Oh Emails… You Multiply like Rabbits!

I have written about my emails a few times before… Back in 2015, I had grand ambitions of a weekly decluttering goal and one of the weeks was my email inboxes.  I made progress, but didn’t get the job completely done…

It was about this time last year that I felt the need to revisit my email clutter… I did pretty well, emptying out 4 of my 5 email inboxes.  But… I have let it all slide…

At the end of the last round of email decluttering my inbox totals were looking like this:

December 1, 2016 Total: 6452 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 6452

And today, my total is looking a bit more like this:

Current Inbox Total: 7487 + 8 + 22 + 7 + 3 = 7527

So, that’s actually not that bad… But what that doesn’t show is the emails that I have “sorted” in to my GTD folders (as I explained in that last post – and for those that aren’t following what GTD is, it stands for “Getting Things Done” and is the acronym for a methodology from David Allen’s book of the same name.) and haven’t done anything about… That’s not really the point of those GTD folders… They are supposed to help you “Get Things Done”…

Anyway, since I’m waiting for renovations to be completed before I can do any more traditional decluttering, I figured I could spend some time sorting through these email inboxes and GTD folders, and either do stuff, or delete stuff…

New Kitchen Layout

While we’ve been waiting for the renovations to proceed, I’ve been looking for ways to keep my spirits up (it’s hard living in chaos), and since I am excited about the new kitchen, and the cabinets are finally getting installed in the kitchen, I thought it might be fun to explore where I would put everything when the everything is done and we can move all our stuff back in to the kitchen…

I’m actually pretty excited to start organizing things… Does that make me a complete dork?  Probably, but so be it…

The List

First step is to make a list of all the things that I want to store in the kitchen, or all the “stations” that I want to have… Basically, I just thought back to every cupboard that  I had in the old set-up, and made a list from that… Here’s what I came up with:

Old Posts & Updating Things…

I have a lot of blog posts that I have started writing, but either they required me to do some more research, accomplish some sort of task, or work through some thought processes before finishing them up.  Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of these may never be finished…

Whether or not it was his intention, a recent post published by Steve over at ThinkSaveRetire got me motivated to revisit these posts…  (I realize that his post was intended to help us revisit posts that have already been published, and it may help me do that as well, but it reminded me that the drafts that are sitting unloved in my WordPress account could still be worth salvaging if I update them to my current status and mindset.)

But… As is typical with me, I always have grand plans but then fail to follow through.  So, I’m going to use you, my faithful readers, as accountability partners.  Here are a few posts that I am now committing to finish up and publish in the next few weeks:

A New Morning Routine

On Tuesday, I posted about my personal goals for 2017.  Goal #4 was to complete a monthly focus.  For January, I have chosen my mornings.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my old morning routine is no longer working out as well… The new puppy has added in a whole new set of tasks and requirements.  And I wanted to re-think it, and re-work it to fit my life now… Of course, as she always seems to do, just when I needed some inspiration on the topic, Cait Flanders posted about her slow morning routine that she is working on for January.

Unlike Cait, however, I am not trying to slow down my mornings… As much as I would love to…  I’m more interested in making sure that I get the important tasks completed.  I already naturally have very slow mornings… If I make a cup of tea, I sometimes just sit and drink it staring out the window…  And that is fine, if it fits in to the timeline of getting to work on time.

 

So, what do my mornings need?

2016 in Review: My Bullet Journal

This post was supposed to go up yesterday… but, well, it didn’t… Here it is a day late… 

2016 was the year I started my bullet journal.  Okay, if we get technical, I experimented with it briefly during the holidays in 2015 so that I would have a better idea of what I liked for the start of 2016, but really it was started in earnest in 2016.

For my first two goals of 2016 I was basically wanting to start using a bullet journal in earnest to organize my life and to also create good habits.  So, while these “goals” were only #1 and #2 on my list of goals, and #1 was really vague and not “SMART”, goal #2 actually consisted of various goals that grew and changed over the year.

Goal #1 – Bullet Journaling

To review this goal for a specific pass/fail type result would be very difficult because, as I mentioned already, it was not a “SMART” goal, so I had no definition of the end result.  However, I have indeed stuck with my bullet journaling and can definitely say that I feel it has helped me stay organized and focused, as much as is possible with a scatterbrain like myself.  (Ooh, shiny!)

I reviewed my bullet journal set up, back in September, and honestly it hasn’t changed much, and I don’t foresee any major changes in the near future because it is working for me.  I don’t think that “using my bullet journal” will be a goal for 2017, but it will be what helps me keep with my goals and I am definitely not going to stop, so I figured I’d give it another review for the end of the year…

21 Day Paper Declutter Challenge

Anne Lene over at Minimalist Sometimes hosted a 21 day paper decluttering challenge that was scheduled to officially end tomorrow…

The idea was that she wanted to tackle her paper clutter and she was asking others to join her.  Although things didn’t quite go as planned for her, the goal was 60 minutes a day working on sorting, scanning, filing and shredding her paper clutter.  There were a bunch of other bloggers that joined in.  I don’t really have that sort of time to commit to the task these days, so I said I would try for 60 minutes a week… (I was thinking that I would work on it for an hour each weekend that occurred during the 3 week period.)

Of course, I have done some paper decluttering before… but unless you get a good system to keep the paper clutter at bay, it just piles up again… And so it has accumulated in our house once again… all over the place…

Follow-Up On My Email Decluttering

As a part of my 2015 decluttering goals, I scheduled week #3 to be decluttering my email inboxes.  I posted my results after my first round of decluttering, but I didn’t make huge progress, so I left is as a sort of “to be completed and maintained” type of task.  I have just recently totally changed up my email process, so I thought it was about time to do a quick follow up post.

My original total of emails was: 9300 + 1000 + 100 + 100 + 30 = 10530

After my first round of decluttering my total was: 6170 + 850 + 0 + 20 + 20 = 7060

And then Alicia from Financial Diffraction (who is no longer blogging it appears) introduced me to the Email Game.  It changed my email decluttering task from boring and monotonous, to a game to get points.  I like points.  🙂

It worked for a while, and I was slowly bringing down my total… but then I got lazy… and well… I stopped playing the game and stopped deleting emails and just started letting them add up again… Every so often I’d take some time to delete emails, but most of the time, I’d just let them accumulate…

But that has all changed now!  Last week, while I was finally attempting to finish reading the “Getting Things Done” book by David Allen, I decided to check the totals again to see where I stand, and start implementing the GTD process with my emails.  (Side note, I once again did not finish reading the book before I had to return it to the library…)

Bullet Journal Update: The Evolution of my Weekly Spread

This post was supposed to go up last week… but I got busy and couldn’t finish it in time… In any case, here it is… I’ll work on getting my posting schedule back up to twice a week… 

As I promised last week two weeks ago, I am going to share with you today an update on my bullet journal.

I started my first bullet journal in January, and have really been enjoying it.  On my honeymoon I bought myself a Leuchtturm 1917 notebook (one of the most popular notebooks for BuJo enthusiasts) and I started using it in May.  I’ve shown various bits and pieces of the bullet journal over the course of the last few months, but I wanted today to discuss how my daily/weekly spreads (the meat & potatoes of the BuJo) have evolved over the last few months.