I have friends who have different colour handbags for different outfits. It appears that they transfer the contents of their bags on an almost daily basis. And that they must have a shelf of handbags somewhere in their houses.
I also know people who change handbags every few months, buying new ones just because they feel like it.
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In a recent blog post, I said that I thought there were three key mantras for living: saying please, saying thank you and tidying up after yourself.
After I had written it, I realised I had forgotten one other important thing: saying sorry.
2020 is my year of doing things differently.
Of course, it is everyone’s year of doing things differently.
But in the time before the Great Entroublement, I decided that I would spend this year thinking about what I am doing, instead of running from job to job, client to client, crisis to crisis.
When my son was little, and I was on older mom (I had him when I was 40), my mantra was to pick my battles. I decided I didn’t care if he used the couch as a jungle gym, or refused to eat anything but noodles and apples and bacon. I did care though about safety and teaching him not to hurt other people. And manners. Manners were important.
So I made him say please when he wanted things, and thank you when he got them, using that old trick of asking for the magic word. He has always been a quick study, so pretty soon the magic word was an emphatic “please and thank you”, said really fast. He figured if he said all the magic words at once he would get results.
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I come from a family of list-makers. My mother, my sister and I make lists for all sorts of reasons – sometimes we even make lists that list our other lists (think particularly about moving house).
I maintain a system of to-do lists for my working and personal life – I currently work for three different clients and could not possibly keep it all straight in my head if I didn’t have a list for each of them.
Those lists are simple affairs – the things I need to do on any given day, in my diary, ticked off as I do them. The key thing about them is that they differ from day to day.
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April 2020 update: I wrote this post in February, when the world was as it was. Pre-pandemic and pre-lockdown and pre-catastophic economic meltdowns. The world is now a very different place, and I hesitated before sharing it, but I think it still has validity. The world has become a much smaller and scarier place for all of us, and much of that is out of our control. But we can control how we think about things. We can hope for a better world, and give thanks for what we have now. There is still abundance, if we choose to look for it.
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My Moleskine diary for 2018.
I have a working system for getting things done. It wasn’t always that way.
Years ago, going back to work after three years at home with a baby/toddler, I was overwhelmed.
I am widely thought of as an organised person, but being a working parent meant I needed to up my game. I started out with complex task lists in the systems that come bundled with Windows, and added similarly complex calendars that linked to my email and was still swamped (and spending a lot of time just maintaining the lists).
I went looking for help and Google found me Bill Westerman and his GSD system.
He says of his system:
I wrote it up and gave it a name: “Getting Sh-t Done”, or GSD. It’s quick, it’s dirty, and it doesn’t require a lot of preparation, special materials, or rigorous thinking.
