As a mom, wife, business woman, as well as a family and
household manager, I live by the schedule that is created from obligations and
priorities but, life disregards the best laid plans for projects and priorities
step in front of the ToDos at every corner.
There is still an opportunity to check that box to the left on the list
without stopping life. Look at it as a speed
bump, not a crash and move on.
The best example of late is our daughters’ hand-me-down
rotation. Let me explain…
Our family grew about the time our friends’ families grew so
we participated in an ongoing ‘clothing circle’. Our rotation included approximately 6
families and 11 children – our second child being near the bottom of the age
range for this cooperative. As a child
grew out of a size, the clothing was collected and forwarded to the next family
based on age and gender until something needed to be retired or the sizes in
the clothing swap were no longer appropriate for your offspring. After a family moved away, we became the last
drop off before the new influx of families and we were storing a large cash of
cotton. To elaborate, the clothing
inventory we held included 2 full dressers, a tightly-managed closet, and a
stash of 5 beer cases full of clothing either out of season, outgrown, or
duplicated (I mean seriously what 6yo needs 7 pairs of jeans?).
I recently completed the final purge of this inventory and
it was a doozy. Previous rotations would occupy a full day to accomplish the
shift in clothing – receiving inventory from one family, rotation of inventory
for our family, forwarding inventory to another family. Simple, but an average rotation of clothing
was at a minimum of 4 bags, per child and the non-seasonal clothing would often
be at the top of the pile leaving me to look thru every article of clothing to
find something appropriate. This last forwarding included 7 beer cases and 15
paper grocery bags full of clothes that no longer fit or were superfluous. It was that task that I simply did not have the
ability to commit a single chunk of time to, so I broke it down into several.
I took 4 weeks to accomplish this project without taking a day
off of work, dedicating a weekend afternoon to, or staying up past my bed time
(I couldn’t anyway because this was all in our girls’ bedroom). So, I took 1 drawer at a time, 1 side of the
closet at a time, one stashed box at a time, and processed it. I
limited my work session to fit within a fixed period that I had available (approximately
5-10min on any given day) by opening a drawer, purging into a labeled bag,
moving the bag to a staging area, and walking away. The next session would initiate by picking up
the labeled bag appropriate to the dresser drawer scheduled to be addressed and
continuing the pattern.
I didn’t work every day and there were times I wished it was
over, but the result was the same. The
new parental collective was forwarded the bags to continue the tradition and I
got to mark this project complete.
In order to make
headway on a project and still take care of responsibilities, consider a few
things…
First reevaluate the
list. See if there is the opportunity to break the project up into smaller pieces. There is something to be said for taking
tasks apart and tackling it as piece work.
Allow for a change in
deadline. What is driving the
project and is there compromise? If the movers are coming next week, getting
the purge completed is important, but if it is merely an annoyance that has evolved
because of neglect, allowing more time to eradicate it is a reasonable
solution.
Delegate what you can.
Working with another interested party or a hired assistant can rapidly move
the list in the right direction if you have the resources.
Be content with slow
progress – it is still progress. It’s hard to finish 1 drawer out of 10 and
feel accomplished enough to mark the box with an X, but it is finished, so
cross it off.
In the end, remember to be flexible, there is always another
way to reach the end of the ToDo List.
Oh… and I have to give a shout out to this hand-me-down-circle
as it was an amazing connection to our community – we are forever grateful because as
our kids grew, and well, they grew like kids and this kept them dressed.
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