SISTER WISDOM : build a better life

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Simple living won't just become your standard one day, when you happen to wake up and everything is suddenly infused with great clarity and meaning. The world, our work, people, media, everything around us conspires to add more clutter to our already filled lives. You have to take steps and make changes every day to move away from a cluttered and unfulfilling life toward a simple and meaningful one . The good part is that many changes you can make are very simple, but all will contribute toward your ultimate goal. Try implementing a few of these changes today, or take the next month and make one small change every day.
1. Throw something away. Yes. Into the garbage can. Out of the house. To the dumpster. Stuff is a big part of the complication in our lives, so give yourself permission to get rid of something you no longer need or want or find useful. It may be that old collection of VHS tapes that you know you'll never watch again, or a pair of shoes that is way too uncomfortable, or a pile of papers to read. Just get rid of it. It's taking up valuable space in your life and making you feel guilty about not getting to it.
2. Get up at the same time every morning. It doesn't have to be at some unnaturally early hour, just the same hour every day. You'll have to be super-consistent while you're establishing the habit, but once you do your body will automatically wake up at that time. Your mornings will be smoother and you won't have to go through that snooze-button struggle.
3. Clean out a drawer. Pick that drawer in the kitchen that you always spend five minutes rummaging through to find the garlic press, or the one in the bathroom that seems to eat your floss, or the one in your dresser that refuses to return socks. Dump the whole thing out, throw away or put away (in an appropriate place) anything that you don't use on a regular basis, then replace the items that should actually be in the drawer. Use a drawer organizer, or small boxes, or anything that will create boundaries for that stuff in there can't get free again.
4. Give away your old clothes. This doesn't have to be a big project. Grab a box or garbage bag, go to your closet, and quickly, without stopping to talk yourself out of it, toss in all the clothes you haven't worn in the last six months (unless they're seasonal and you store them in there). If you are storing out-of-season clothes in your closet, consider boxing them up and putting them out of sight until the appropriate season. A clean, roomy closet makes getting dressed a much more pleasant activity. Take your now-full bag or box to the car and drop it off at a charity next time you run errands.
5. Clean off your bedside table. You don't need so much stuff there, and it's only distracting when you're trying to relax and go to sleep. A lamp, one or two books (no more!), a paper and pen if you often get inspired at night, and one or two other necessities. I have to have my Burt's Bees Lip Balm handy. Put the rest of that accumulated stuff away: books go to the bookcase, lotions to the bathroom, jewelry to the jewelry box, papers to the filing cabinet or desk, etc. You might even find that you have room for a vase of flowers. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Everyday for a week, fill a shopping bag with things you don't want/need. At the end of the week, take them all to your local thrift store and donate.
2. Set up a basic food schedule for your family, weekly or monthly or however works. You can be as general or as specific as you like: Monday/ Chicken, Tuesday/ Pasta, Wednesday/ Sandwiches/ etc.
3. Carry a "Need to Buy" list with you - in your planner or just a notecard in your purse. On it, have a list of the items you need to buy in the near future - clothing for family, supplies for projects, furniture, decorations, gifts. Then when you see a great deal you'll know if you should take it home or just take yourself home.
4. Purge your bedroom. Clean off your night tables and keep only a minimum - lamp, one book, one bottle of lotion - your minimum.
5. Empty your laundry basket everyday and sort the clothes into marked baskets in your laundry room. You'll know as soon as you need to do a wash, or if you have a set laundry day it will go much faster since everything is already sorted. Plus your bedroom or bathroom will look better when the hamper isn't overflowing.
6. Install wall-hanging magazine racks anywhere you read Read the rest of this entry »

Challenge Update: Day 6 was a bit choppy but good, overall. I checked off items on my Master Task List this morning and was amazed at how many I have gone through. March Madness, truly.

We are on a somewhat self-imposed deadline right now to get lots of things done around the house. My family (Dad, Sister, Sister's two kids, Sister's boyfriend) is coming to visit next week. How many of you can give me an Amen on the powerful motivation of family coming to visit? Somehow, even though I know these are the people who know all my strangeness and love me anyway, I want to make things perfect for them. Maybe it's because they are the people who know all my strangeness and love me anyway.

So we have been spending every night working on the basement bathroom remodel or making trip to Home Depot or both. I've been cranking through lots of organizational stuff: cleaning, decluttering, rearranging. It is all stuff that needs to be done and I am excited to see it happening. I do long, however, for an evening when we come home, take more than twenty minutes to eat dinner, and then just relax. Ah. You don't know what you got till it's gone.

I am enjoying the fruits of our labor. The kitchen looks great. I should say, also, that lest you think I am Superwoman for cleaning and organizing all my kitchen cabinets in one day, be aware that I have a petite kitchen. 3 full cabinets. 1 drawer. Organizing my kitchen is a continual necessity.

Better Life Tip: Eat breakfast. If you don't have time to cook something for breakfast, keep easy options on hand: bananas, yogurt, granola, muffins, bagels. Something healthy and good in the morning will make your day better.

SCHEDULING, SCHMEDULING (YAWN). WHAT'S THE POINT?
Some of us resist schedules because they seem restrictive, anti-creativity, control-freakish. Certainly some schedules are that way. If you're scheduling your time down to ten-minute sections, I think we might need to work on your control freak tendencies. On the other hand, if you schedule nothing and live to follow the natural flow, you not only stifle productivity but you will also end up stifling creativity as well. You live by a schedule whether you admit it or not; a schedule is simply a matter of doing a certain thing at a certain time. When you take initiative to set your own schedule, you can do so according to your own priorities. When you don't set your own schedule, you are not only at the mercy of your own whims (which very often do not line up with your bigger goals and priorities) but you are also at the mercy of others who will not hesitate to impose their schedules on yours... or your lack thereof. So it really comes down to whose schedule you want to follow: yours, thoughtfully laid out, or some haphazard construct of circumstances. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but take the time to think it over if you must.

BASIC SCHEDULING
I like to keep my schedule pretty basic. It includes 1) A Beginning and an End and 2) Time Blocks. There are multiple planning calendars in as many formats as you can dream up. I find them all too complicated for my simple living preferences. This is not true for everyone; my husband loves his Franklin Covey planner and uses it faithfully. I feel restricted by all those boxes with lines and titles. The perfectionist in me just can't leave well enough alone, so I spend more time scheduling in all the pretty boxes than I do actually implementing my schedule. Since the point of a schedule is to simplify and to increase productivity, and I find that the more complex planners accomplish neither goal for me, I stick with my basics and forgo the professional leather-binder look. You might find that a combination of methods works best for you. My advice is this: start simple and be diligent with your simple scheduling techniques. Once you know they work for you, you can tweak and add on and adjust to your heart's delight. Don't start way at the top of the complex calendar hierarchy. The very complexity is too overwhelming to keep up when you're first learning how to schedule, and you'll get discouraged and drop it all.

A BEGINNING AND AN END
This topic makes me think of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, when she first attempts to teach the Captain's children how to sing: "Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..." Of course, she drops her little Happy Beginnings song in favor of the inexplicably popular Do-Re-Mi. We, however, shall carry our Happy Beginnings all the way to Happy Endings.

What needs a beginning and an end is your working day. Your entire day is capped on both ends automatically by your bed. You wake up and get out of bed, your day begins. You get sleepy and get back in bed, your day ends. I see no reason to mess with that kind of perfection, unless you need some help on the waking up and getting out of bed part. We'll get to that in another article. For now, we're dealing with the workday itself, the part of the day that begins after you've been awakened by the sound of bluebirds (or the alarm clock) and, I hope, have eaten a halfway decent breakfast. Oh, also, you should get dressed. Maybe even before breakfast.
Your workday beginning may be set in stone already. You have to be at the office at 9:00 am. There you go. 9:00 am it is. For those of us who work in more flexible fields, in which the office hours dictate next to nothing, setting a Beginning is a matter of choice and convenience. If you're a stay-at-home Mom trying to wake, dress, and feed three kids, then give yourself enough time to do that before you try to get down to the rest of your work. If you're a work-from-home small business owner who likes to start the day with a two-hour gym session, then set your workday beginning accordingly.

The End of the workday is just as important as the beginning. Again, this may be dictated by office hours, or it may be a matter of choice and fitting in with what happens in the rest of your day. Perhaps it's 3:00 pm when the kids get home from school. Perhaps it's 6:00 pm when your spouse gets home from work. Perhaps it's 9:00 pm when you realize you haven't eaten anything since noon. (I don't recommend that last time option, by the way.) Choose an End. Put a cap on your working hours. Sure, you can always choose to do "extra" work or finish up projects in the evening if you want to, but that should be something you do because you really want to, not because you have to, and it should never interfere with your family time or social obligations.

My workday beginning is 8:00 am and my workday end is 5:00 pm. Of course there is more that happens before and after those times, but it is within those times that I block out time for work and have specific goals to accomplish.

BLOCKING OUT YOUR TIME
I learned this one from my husband, who implements the concept with his Franklin Covey planner in a way I can only admire. The idea itself is Read the rest of this entry »