It is the fourth month of 2012 and time to reflect on my New Year's Resolution Progress. My top New Year's Resolution is always the same: organize my house. And now it is organize MacSoph also. I have endless needlework stash everywhere in my house and everywhere on MacSoph.
More than a quarter of this year has gone by and how am I doing? Not as well as I hoped but better than I feared. I have a way of starting out the year all enthusiastic about organization and then about 2 weeks into the process, life takes over and I fall off the band wagon.
Well this year is different in a couple of respects: I've fallen off any number of times but I have picked myself up and started again.
So what has made the difference?
My mother-in-law who was one of my favorite ever people taught me a trick: don't try to do it all at once, do a bit a day. She was fond of saying, clean out a drawer a week and at the end of 52 weeks, you will have cleaned out 52 drawers.
A couple of years ago I made up a small program for stitching based on my mother-in-law's idea: 12 Stitches a Day. I usually double or triple the number of stitches, or simply stitch one strand, and it has helped me get through very tedious parts of any number of projects.
A bit a day works too for organizing stash, except I get bogged down: I begin sorting a box and I can't decide what to keep and what to toss. Oh, I say to myself, I can't decide this now -- and that's how I abandon organization.
Now I have found a supplement for my mother-in-law's notion: MacSoph streams the program 'Hoarders' for me. If I watch an hour of Hoarders on MacSoph, and then within 24 hours I tackle a box or two, it is amazing how quickly I can decide to get rid of things. So I've been watching Hoarders on MacSoph and then sorting and tossing. I am supposed to watch an hour of Hoarders each week and then work on stash control for 5 short sessions during week.
That part doesn't work. I can't bear the program so I treat it like an ill-tasting medicine, and like a child I find all sorts of ways to avoid it. But when I look around and reflect on the state of my still out-of-control needlework stash, I sit down and watch, and then I have a flurry of clean-up activity.
Is there much difference around here? Well, not a lot but definitely some. Does my cleaning lady still stand in the doorway and cry when she looks into my work spaces around our house? Yes. But there is a bit of progress, and I still have almost 3/4's of the year to improve.
Reflecting back over the first quarter of this year, I would give myself a grade somewhere between C- and D+. I know that might look dismal to many, but this is the first year my grade by this time hasn't been an F.
Hope springs eternal.
Gay Ann
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1 comment:
But it's a start and that's very important. My resolution was not to buy anything new for stitching for as long as possible. I made it to the past week and bought a pattern I want to do and 2 painted canvases at a very reasonable price. Now to dig into my own stash and find the threads to stitch everything.
My "philosophy" has always been to empty a box or drawer and only put 2/3 of it back. The rest should be thrown away or given away, etc. We'll both do fine this year, I'm sure.
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