by Tessa | Personal Development
Have you ever heard of how to eat an elephant? You eat it one bite at a time. It’s a pretty similar process when you want to live better.
This is the continuation of my previous post. In that post I gave you a partial list of my lifestyle improvement goals and asked you to make your own list. I hope that you now have your own list made and I hope that you went nuts on it and made a great word picture of how you want your life to look. If you haven’t done the assignment there yet, first head on over to read about taking steps to live a better life and then you’ll be ready to come back here to learn about using these 3 steps to live better.
1st Step to Live Better:
Choose an area or two that you feel the most overwhelmed with or that you feel are the most important areas to move forward. I chose housework and Jesus. (Remember when the answer to every question asked in Sunday School was “Jesus?” He’s the answer here too.)
2nd Step to Live Better
Choose one sub-topic in that area.
If something feels impossible, focus on doing just one small thing at a time.
3rd Step to Live Better
Make a simple plan and jump in:
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So let’s recap:
First you will need to choose a major area or two of importance.
Second you will need to find your bite sized piece.
Third is to take a bite. And then another. But just start with one bite.
You may not have conquered the world but you are one bite closer than you were 10 minutes ago!
What is the bite-sized improvement that you working on right now? A really great way to work through a life improvement brainstorm and then track your results is with my custom Habit Tracker and Workbook. Enter your email to get the free printable and get started with your personalized steps to live better.
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by Tessa | Homemaking
Head over to my Facebook page to access my free planner printable available to my fans!
Last week I shared some of the things that I’ve learned about myself while doing research on how to get my life and home organized before my family welcomes another addition in November. I promised to share with you this week what I’ve learned about home management binders. So I’ll dive right in:
Even though all those free printables and different section ideas are very tempting, I don’t need them all. Some things come more naturally to me than others. I don’t need to organize areas of my life that are already organized. For example: My bill paying and savings plans are second nature to me. They don’t require a section in my binder. I also don’t have any need for a lot of space for appointments because, let’s face it, my schedule on paper is very boring. I made and tried a daily planner. I had used a two-page-per-day planner for years before I had children so I thought this would be the best method for me, but found that it was just not working this time around. Then I read this article about different levels of planners and it became clear to me what the problem was. I was much like her and started off with the “nerd planner” when I really only needed a Week-at-a-glance. I have found it makes more sense for me as my tasks are not usually day dependent because the amount I can do in a day varies so much.
I have since upgraded to a color printer so my weekly pages are color coded into different sections. Keeping the boxes and line space to smaller amounts has meant that I can only add so many tasks to my list, so as not to overwhelm myself. I took a lot of inspiration from the Uncalendar and tweaked this idea to suit my personal and business life. First, I made a list of things I wanted to keep track of: personal to do, blog to do, kids to do, meals, habits I’m working on, people I need to get in touch with, a weekly memory/focus verse and a simple “catch all” area for when I don’t want to pull out the specific list or project sheet for thoughts that pop into my head. That’s a lot of information that I was trying to get out of my head and onto paper!
I also have a very simple list of regular housekeeping tasks, broken down into daily, weekly, and monthly. I put them in a page protector and I just lay it on top of my binder. One side has my brief daily list and a section for each day of the week. On the reverse side I have a 4 week rotation of monthly tasks and I will choose one week at a time to complete. I found it much simpler to make my own lists rather than print or purchase those made by someone else because, others’ lists just don’t suit me. There are certain cleaning tasks that I just don’t care about (at least in this stage of my life) and I do different things on different days than or not as frequently as premade lists tell me.
I’ve been using my weekly calendar for a few weeks and it has been working very well. I leave it open on my counter so I can see it and add to it throughout the day. This method has eliminated the need for me to write out my to do list every evening and transfer everything that I didn’t accomplish to the next day. Planning my day in advance takes just a couple of minutes and having the whole week visible allows me to shuffle tasks around easily.
I am still using a lot of the tips I learned from Planner Perfect when it comes to projects, lists, goals, and having all of my brain’s information available at my fingertips. My mind feels much less cluttered and, surprisingly, my energy levels have increased! It has been great to use this newfound energy to play more with my kids and actually stay (mostly) caught up on my housework.
Do you use a home management binder? I’d love to hear about it or see photos because I’m on a constant quest of tweaking mine to perfection.
Linked up at:
Head over to my Facebook page to access my free planner printable available to my fans!
by Tessa | Homemaking
It has occured to me how complicated we can make our effort to living simply. We feel that we need to do it all and then some. We read blogs and books and feel like if we aren’t growing everything we eat and making everything we use, we must be doing something wrong. This revelation came to me when I was reading an article on how to simplify your DIY.
Or maybe I’m just talking about myself here. I know that I have a tendency to over complicate things. I have a wonderfully annoying habit of researching the pants off of anything and then trying to dive in head first. I really should remember what my goals are for changing our lifestyle.
I have a number of reasons: frugality, health, appreciating the simple things, teach my kids the importance of work and more. But, when I dream about my goals for my life, I don’t picture money in the bank, or being superfit/healthy. I picture being able to take the time to enjoy my family. Working alongside them without being tied down by the craziness of this world. Slowing down. Peace.
Now I need to ask myself, will what I’m doing lead me to that life? I’m pretty sure that, if I attempted to learn and do everything at once (garden, canning, herbalism, soap making, cheese making, weaving, knitting, sewing, building and wood working and the list goes on) that I would just burn out. We are not designed to do it all. And very few people are able to dive in head first without drowning. That doesn’t sound very peaceful to me.
So, instead of my grand plan for our garden this year, I managed to move one step further than last year. The only vegetables I planted were tomatoes and carrots. Oh, and onions because I saw an idea on pinterest and thought it would be a simple way to use up the space where I planted my chamomile (that didn’t come up). I planted in containers because I figured it made sense to have a portable garden due to our impending move. I watered with a bucket from my kitchen sink because I have no faucet on my house. And I watched and waited. I did very minimal weeding (one of my favorite parts of container gardening) and only a little bit of fertilizing.
My garden took about 10 minutes to care for every couple of days and I didn’t lose my mind. I learned a lot about growing tomatoes and carrots. I didn’t get a huge and bountiful crop this year but I did manage to learn enough to point me in the right direction for next year’s garden.
Next year my goal is small: plant enough of a garden so I don’t need to buy veggies through the growing season. If that goes well, the year after next I’ll plant enough so that we can store some for the winter.
But, for now, 10 minutes extra into my schedule is simple. Because simplifying should be simple to do.Another couple great posts that I have recently read that are great grounders when you’re feeling overwhelmed or like you’re not doing enough:
How Do you Know When You Are Natural Enough? (Cheeky Bums Blog)
dear sweet mom who feels like she is failing (Finding Joy)
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by Tessa | Personal Development
In the midst of
Pinterest,
Facebook fan pages and all of the really great blogs and articles out there, it is very easy to get overwhelmed and intimidated when it comes to making lifestyle changes. It seems like everyone else is living the lifestyle that you want and, if they can do it, why can’t you? I think it is fair to say that we read all these great ideas, see all these projects ideas, organizational techniques, and recipes, and we don’t know where to begin. So we don’t ever begin. We don’t ever move ahead.There are many areas that I want to change for my family. I’ll give you a partial list:
Food:
- Make bread weekly (from flour I grow and grind myself)
- Make yogurt weekly
- Make cheese quarterly
- Make butter monthly
- Cook healthy dinners from scratch
- Raise chickens for the eggs
- Tap trees to make maple syrup
- Homemade vanilla coffee creamer
- Homemade pasta
- Make freezer meals monthly
- Well stocked pantry so I can do one-a-month shopping instead of weekly
Garden:
- Tomatoes
- Carrots
- Herbs: garlic, basil, thyme, rosemary, ginger, chives, calendula, motherwort, St Johns Wort, chamomille, mint, lavander, plantain, comfy, lemongrass, hyssop
- Lettuce
- Cucumber
- Broccoli
- Cauliflour
- Strawberries
- Raspberries
- Apple trees
Home:
- Always clean enough to have company over
- Decorated and matching furniture
- Declutter – clothes, toys, books, and kitchen stuff
- Wood burning fireplace
- Organized bookshelves
- Chemical free cleaning and body care (toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo etc)
- Line dry laundry
- Build my dream home for my family
Christian Living:
- Attend church every week
- Read the Bible through every year
- Keep a prayer/miracles journal
- Have a Bible study journal
- Study scripture with my family
- Memorize passages regularly
- Have regular a family worship time
Education:
- Read daily something to expand my mind in a subject of interest
- Read daily to my children
- Write and publish a book (or two)
- Learn a few languages
Business:
- Meet my sling sales goals every month
- Do 1-2 trade shows per year
- Get 1000 followers on my blog by the time I write/publish my book
- Get the farm to the point that Adam can take regular days off
Family:
- Two weekends of camping every year
- One family “field trip” per month
- One date with Adam per month
- Institute a weekly family games night
- Crafts with the kids weekly
That is a long list. And that is not even the complete list! If I look at my complete list I can get very overwhelmed. I think that if I actually was doing everything on my list then even I would not want to read my blog! The reality is that I’m more like you: big dreams that I haven’t followed through on.
Instead of focusing on what I’m not doing, I’m going to fill you in on a little secret. This secret revolutionized the way that I look at my life goals. And now for the cliff hanger: I’m going to put it in another post because this one is getting too long. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, I have a challenge for you: Grab a pen and piece of paper. Make your own list. Break it into different areas of your life and list (in as much detail as possible) how you want those areas to look and what you want to accomplish in those areas.
