Almost a routine

I found this post at Laine's Letters...Revisited! a few months ago, and it has been very helpful.

In particular, I took the advice about setting down my daily routine on four index cards. Nothing is scheduled by time, it is just a sequence of tasks to go through. Start at the top, and work my way down, and when there are interruptions, that's okay.  When one card's tasks are finished, flip to the next one. I do try to make sure that our meals land at regular times, though.

It very nicely solves the perennial daily problem of Too Many Things To Do And No Idea Where To Start.

Core dump

As I was taking my Sabbath rest, I picked up my husband's copy of David Allen's Making It All Work and read a bit.  Allen is the creator of the Getting Things Done method of self-management.

According to Allen, the biggest obstacle to productivity is all the thoughts of undone tasks that are floating around in our heads; the mind won't let go of them until it knows they are safely done, or at least written down.

So his first step in Getting Things Done is to write all these tasks and projects down in a list.

This seemed like a good idea to me; I have a system where I capture most of my to-dos, but some of them slip away before I can write them down, and others have gotten left behind in the flow of life and written notes.

So I started my list, and I ended up with over two hundred things that I have been thinking about doing. Many of them are quick, five-minute tasks, and some are full-scale projects.

If they were all five-minute projects, it would take me only 17 hours to complete them all, not including the time spent on transitions, equipping, interruptions, and clean-up.

How to do something that you don't have time for

Three ways:

1.  The Gordon MacDonald way (from Ordering Your Private World):  schedule it far in advance, and let the other obligations flow around it.

2.  What I am doing now:  give it a temporary boost to top priority, and do it before everything else.

3.  What I should be doing:  work faster to get everything else done, to make time for it.

Fix it or lose it

I've been playing a game around the house that I call "Fix It or Lose It". This is for our possessions within the house, not for the house itself.

So far I have repaired a wooden toy and a child's rocking chair, and I have decided not to repair (or re-repair) another wooden toy and another chair, because I couldn't fix them well enough for them to last much longer.

Repairs are not always something that you can just push through on the spot. Sometimes you have to wait for the right time, energy, parts, tools, or ideas. For the rocking chair, that meant not fixing it first thing in the morning yesterday; I didn't have the energy. Later in the day, I went back to it and everything came together without too much trouble.

A good start

I'm gone back to the practice of writing three pages by hand each morning--the "morning pages" from The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. It is a very helpful practice, on a number of levels:

Emptying my brain of thoughts that it just wants a chance to say

Capturing the tasks that need to be done, and getting them on my to-do list

Stopping other activities long enough to get the perspective to determine which of those tasks I should actually do, and which I need not do, or really shouldn't

Processing incomplete thinking, and harvesting and recording the conclusions

Loving myself by actually listening to myself; which is a prerequisite to loving others

Connecting to the Spirit of God, and listening to what He has to say



With those things done, it is then easier to focus my efforts on getting things done, both practically and creatively.
   

Read the fine print

I was reading the Terms and Conditions for a regional bank that recently bought up a local bank, and I was struck by the blatantly hostile tone throughout the whole mess of legalese. Their terms, needless to say, are extremely unfavorable, from a potential customer's point of view.

The tone of their big pictures-low text sales piece was completely the opposite:  "Happy Happy Friendly Bank, Happy Happy Sunshine You:  Happy."

It took me a bit to figure out that both of these tones were completely intentional. The Terms and Conditions are hostile on purpose; they are meant to drive away potential banking customers:  the ones who can read, and do math, and plan ahead for any length of time longer than two minutes.

The customers that they want are the people who will only glance at the fluff sales literature, and never read the Terms and Conditions of how their accounts can and will be pillaged.  "Pillaged" is not too strong a word here...it was that bad.  This bank is going to take their hard-earned money and use it to gobble up some more small banks...then rinse and repeat.

Jesus, remember me in your Kingdom.

While thinking about this, I randomly found Isaiah chapter 17, where God promises that plunderers will themselves be plundered. Immediately after reading that, I randomly opened my Bible to Jeremiah chapter 30, where God says basically the same thing (but to a different prophet at a different time in history). The message here seems clear:  Justice is coming.

 

The never-ending punch list

In building or interior design, a "punch list" is a list of details that need to be attended to before a project can be declared Finished. I keep a similar list of little things around the house that need to be dealt with.

Most of them take only a few minutes each, once I get a chance to actually get started. The hard part is remembering them long enough to put them on the list in the first place.

Read the manual...again

At the beginning of the new year, I was reading my sewing machine's manual and reviewing all the fancy stitches and features that I never use. I noticed in the basic instructions, that I had been making a small but consistent error in threading the machine, by not pulling the thread fully into one of the thread guides. I've had the machine for six or seven years, and I've been making that error the entire time. Sometimes it caused problems with sewing, although usually not.

There was another one, a few months ago. We received a steamer/rice cooker as a wedding gift. I memorized the amounts of water and rice needed, after a few uses, and used it for years. Then my husband came along and read the instructions, and pointed out that I had been using the recipe for a different kind of rice than I was actually cooking. The correct recipe yields a somewhat larger of amount of rice, and works out better for our now-larger family.

Just doing the work this year

I'm going to have to make a tag on this blog for George MacDonald, I think, if I'm going to keep quoting from him.  Anyway, one of the things that he was adamant about was the importance of being obedient in the smaller tasks that God sets before us, throughout each day.  That is where faith and love are (or are not) made manifest in action.

Elisabeth Elliot, also, taught "Do the next thing." (And then the next, and the next....)

Sometimes it is hard to think of what to do, while at other times it is hard to decide what to do first. In either case, one can ask God for direction and wisdom.

Once you get moving in the little things, bigger things mysteriously start to happen. There are testimonies of this all over the place, from MacDonald to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I had an example or two of it in my sabbatical book, even. A family member, who felt creatively stuck, recently started sorting through old boxes of stuff, and found in them enough of what he needed to get going again.  "Shop at home", Myquillyn Smith says; you may already have everything you need.

A secular book, The Lemming Conspiracy, said there were basically four methods by which one could succeed:  manage the details of your work well, manage the big picture well, be good at brainstorming new solutions, or copy someone else's successful work.  MacDonald said that if you do your daily work (the details), God will take care of the grand plans (the big picture), and provide solutions to the problems that arise.

My work at the moment, besides the usual routine, is to work with a box of fabric that I received for Christmas. It's from some old lady's fabric stash, and contains mostly polyester fabrics, in one- or two-yard pieces. It's a challenge, because usually I strongly prefer natural fibers. But some of it would work well for recovering the couch cushion--the old quilt that I have been using as a cover has worn right through in the middle. I've been doing some sketches and studies of how to put a pattern on the fabric, since it is plain woven. I am also trying to not hurry, but to take the time needed to do it well. (Not perfectly, just well.)

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Edited to add:  Sometimes the Next Thing is to rest...!!!

Challenged

I'm in the middle of a stretch of involuntary overscheduledness, but I am.doing what I can:

Making little creative choices in how I do the things that I have to do.

Editing our possessions down a bit, to make room for things that matter more.

Taking a little time here and there to dream about what to do next.

Reading and research; prep work for upcoming projects.

Mop-up work to get some lingering projects done and out of the way.

The hardest part of the work

I've been spending my days researching, thinking, re-thinking, and deciding on my next steps for several projects. There's nothing to take a pretty picture of yet, but I have made a lot of progress.

The saving game

We have a new medium-term saving goal, along with the same moderate income as before. So the money for this goal is going to either have to come from increasing income, or reducing expenses. Reducing expenses is the easier of the two in the short term, although there is a limit as to how far you can realistically go with it.

So, the game:

1. For an upcoming planned expenditure, determine what the cost would "normally" be for you.

2. Try to beat it...by smarter shopping, creative improvisation, or doing without. Or a combination.

3. Put the difference into savings.

For example, I have been in need of AA batteries recently,  but I have been going through our accumulation of dead, half-dead, and unused but rather old AA batteries to see which ones are still usable, instead of buying new batteries at this time. I won't count this as fully saving on the cost of new batteries, but it is still a success at leveraging two or three dollars of value out of things that we already have. So I've put three dollars of what I would have spent on batteries into savings.

Step 3 is the most important of the three, otherwise you're just saving the same few dollars over and over and over.