Month: July 2023

7 TIME WASTERS

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Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to share with you ways that we can waste our time. Especially if you are a homemaker, it can be easy to fall into these habits of wasting time. I hope by sharing these 7 time wasters with you, I can encourage you to be more efficient in your day, giving you more margin to do the things you love!

The first time waster is inefficiency in chores, responsibilities, or activities. I have found it really helpful to batch activities for efficiency. Running errands is a perfect example. It makes more sense to run all of your errands at once while you are already out and about then to do them throughout the week. This is especially true if you don’t live close to stores. Another example is checking your email or other notifications on your phone. Set aside times during the day when you will check email and other notifications to respond to emails or social media comments at the same time. It can be a big time waster to continually open your phone to respond to things like this throughout the day. Included in this is even batching your rest time! I personally have found it really helpful to have one day a week where I do not do any work!

The second time waster I wanted to share with you is the amount of time we spend choosing our clothes for the day. Now, if you’ve been around for a while, you will not hear me tell you to become a minimalist and wear black t-shirts everyday! That is not my style at all. I love having lots of options and being able to creatively put together outfits. However, I did want to suggest having a uniform. I do like to wear a uniform. In the summer I wear shorts with a t-shirt or button up, and in the winter I wear jeans with a t-shirt, button up and layer with cardigans and sweaters. I will say, more recently I am rotating in some dresses and skirts as I have been trying to wear everything in my closet. I am really enjoying adding these pieces into the rotation! And of course there are some days where I just stay in my workout clothes all day! Having a uniform cuts down on the time it takes to make that daily decision, and it prevents decision fatigue. 

The next time waster is trying to remember everything that needs to get done. I absolutely love lists! Having daily to-do lists helps me to get these things that need to get done out of my brain and onto paper. You could use digital to do lists if that is your preference, I just love writing things down with pen and paper! In addition to daily to-do lists, I would also suggest keeping a running master to-list – everything that needs to get done at some point but you’re not necessarily going to do it today. You can reference this master to-do list as you are making your daily or weekly to-do lists to incorporate these tasks throughout your week. Again, just getting these tasks down on paper relieves your brain from having to remember them!

Similar to that, we waste time trying to remember all the appointments and where everyone needs to go. I would recommend keeping a calendar – either a physical calendar, a digital one, or like me you could use both. When my kids were younger, I liked to color code my calendars with a color for each person so it was easy to know who had activities or appointments for each day. You could also color code the activities. Perhaps errands could be one color, chores another, and desk work another color.

The fifth time waster I wanted to share with you is trying to figure out when to do what needs to get done. This would be more so for chores or tasks that need to get done each day or each week. I like to have a regular schedule of when I get my basic chores and errands done so I don’t need to waste time thinking about when I will get each task done. Each week I have set aside time to get these chores done. I find that it works best to do two to three chores each day of the week and then you don’t need to worry about it for the remainder of the week. For example, every Monday I do our laundry; every Tuesday I give our kitchen a deeper clean; every Wednesday I pick up our groceries. By having the same schedule each week, I don’t have to waste time thinking about when these tasks will fit into my schedule for the week. 

Along those same lines, we may waste time by not having a regular sleep schedule. When our sleep schedule is unpredictable, we won’t know how much time we will have each day to accomplish our to-do lists. Studies have shown that it is far more healthy to stick to a regular bedtime and wake up time. Yes, even on the weekends! When we have a regular sleep routine, not only is it a healthier way to live, but it also allows us to be more efficient in our work. We are also less likely to feel tired when we keep a regular sleep schedule and so we are able to get our work done!

The last time waster is an obvious one, and I know it’s a tough one as I myself struggle with this… we waste time on mindless entertainment – either scrolling social media, or watching Netflix or YouTube. I understand that these things are a part of our lives, but I wanted to encourage you to unplug from time to time. Ideally we would come up with appropriate boundaries for ourselves on how much and how often we engage in this entertainment. I think we could all stand to cut back on our social media usage and tv watching, ME INCLUDED! I used to not open any of the social media apps on my phone on Sundays as a part of my rest day, but slowly it crept back in. Not to scroll, just to keep up with chats, DMs, and notifications. However I really think it would do me good personally to get back to the habit of not looking at social media at all for that one day a week.

The video I posted on my YouTube channel in conjunction with this blog post.

COMFORT CULTURE + WHY PAIN IS IMPORTANT

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Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about comfort culture and why it’s dangerous. Somewhat adjacent to that idea, I wanted to talk about the importance of pain in our lives!

So before I get into this conversation I feel like I need to make a disclaimer. I want to acknowledge that dealing with pain – whether physical or emotional – is challenging. I don’t want to minimize what some of you may be going through on a daily basis. Also, putting yourself through pain and discomfort just for the sake of it with no goal in mind is not necessarily beneficial. We do not need to be martyrs. But I will get into that pain/pleasure balance later. 

The first thing I wanted to talk about is self care. I feel like in our culture these days there are a lot of people promoting self care and the importance of self care. However, often I think this term “self care” is shared more in the context of self indulgence. Like: take a bath, get your nails done, get your hair done, go on a shopping spree, buy that fancy coffee. I would like to argue that self care is not always self indulgence. Self care is not always something that feels comfortable. In my opinion, a lot of healthy self care is not comfortable or easy. Take exercise for example. Moving your body every day is self care. Quite literally taking care of yourself. Can self care be those more indulgent or comfortable things? Of course! But I want to encourage you to think of ways you can take care of your body – self care – on a daily basis! Like exercise, getting plenty of rest, eating healthy foods, or other healthy habits.

Next, I wanted to get back to that pain/pleasure balance. The other day I watched this really fascinating video on YouTube about finding balance in this age of indulgence. It was shared on a YouTube channel I really enjoy, After Skool. I will do my best to concisely explain what the doctor in this video explained about the importance of balancing pain and pleasure. 

She explained that the same part of our brains process both pleasure and pain. She described the need for balance of pain and please like a see saw or scale in our brains – with pleasure being on one side and pain being on the other. Our brains want this to stay level. When we experience pleasure, our brains release a chemical called dopamine, which I am sure most of you are familiar with. But as soon as our brain produces this chemical, it tries to regain balance by downregulating our dopamine receptors. She described this as little gremlins jumping on the pain end of the see saw for this balance to be achieved. If we stop the pleasurable activity, those gremlins eventually hop off of the other side. But if we continue to indulge in something pleasurable, then the gremlins continue to multiply and eventually we change our homeostasis set point. Now you need to continue doing that pleasurable thing just to feel normal. She explained this in the context of addictive behavior and how we keep going back to that behavior in order to feel normal. One of her suggestions to this problem, and what she had suggested to clients, is to do a dopamine detox where you cut out whatever that behavior is: watching tv, scrolling social media, or playing video games, for a period of time in order for your brain to reset and for all the gremlins to jump off the see saw. The video describes everything in more detail, so I highly recommend checking it out! But it reminds us of the importance of balance and why we must fight against constantly seeking out comfort.

I have talked about the importance of stepping outside of our comfort zones in life. I even had a whole series on my YouTube channel where I challenged myself to do things outside of my comfort zone. It’s when we challenge ourselves in this way that we grow and become stronger – either physically and/or emotionally. Unfortunately that is not an easy thing to do in this day and age when so much entertainment is available to us! We must be intentional with pushing ourselves away from constant indulgence and towards things that will be better for us in the long run!

I wanted to share with you about a book I read quite a long time ago, however it was so impactful that I remember it to this day. The book is Where’s God When It Hurts by Philip Yancey. I specifically remember a story he shared in this book about how people who contract leprosy do not always die from disease itself. They die from the effects of the disease. What happens with leprosy is that you can no longer feel pain, therefore you might cut your hand or stub your toe and not notice it. Oftentimes these things will get infected, but because they don’t feel pain they might not notice that a body part is infected. His point is that pain is an indicator for us. Pain lets us know that something is wrong. Because of this, we can have a different perspective about pain, and be thankful that we can feel pain so we know when something is wrong. This can be physical pain, but even emotional pain helps us know when something is wrong, and therefore we can respond to it!

Like I mentioned, in this day and age it is not easy to remain disciplined in how we spend our time. I just wanted to encourage you today to see the value in doing things that are not easy, doing the things that are outside of your comfort zone in order to become the best version of yourself! I find it funny that this was what I had planned to talk about in conjunction with the back yard clean up YouTube video {{linked below}} because while I didn’t think about the connection at the time I was planning it, it was certainly not an easy task to clean up this back yard, but as I lay in my hammock this morning I realized it was so worth it!

Here is the YouTube video I posted in conjunction with this blog post.

10 MINDSETS THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU DECLUTTER

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Hey friends, today for my Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to share with you some thoughts about decluttering. I know I have talked about decluttering quite a bit on my social media platforms. I have shown the process of decluttering, what I’m decluttering, and why I am decluttering items. But today I wanted to share with you mindsets that will change the way you declutter. Hopefully by sharing these mindsets it will give you a new perspective as you move forward in your decluttering journey. Today I am sharing 10 mindset shifts to help you declutter better!

The first thing I wanted to share with you is to have a positive perspective versus negative. Oftentimes when we approach decluttering we can feel like it is a negative thing: it’s difficult, time consuming, and maybe even tiring both physically and emotionally. When we have this mindset shift that decluttering is a positive thing, moving us towards our life goals, helping us deal with anxiety or other mental health issues, and making our external environment one we love to live in, we will be excited to start the process of decluttering.

Along those lines, another mindset shift around decluttering is to focus on what you are working towards. What is the end result you want? When you create a vision for your life and have that picture in your mind it can spur you on to take the necessary steps to achieve that life you are working towards.

The third mindset shift I wanted to share is to focus on what stays instead of what goes. Sometimes it can be helpful to choose the items you love and know you use regularly and set those aside first. Then you can evaluate what is left. I have done this with clothing for instance where I choose my top favorites, then evaluate if I really need to keep what is leftover. When we focus on what is staying it can help us to appreciate what we have and have an abundance mindset versus a mindset of lack.

Another mindset shift that is similar to that is to think of decluttering as curating. You are curating your collections – anything from clothes to kitchen items. When we think of curation, we may think of a museum. Museum curators are intentional and thoughtful about what they bring in. So much like this curating, it is an intentional process of only surrounding yourself with the things you love and use and removing everything else so it’s easier to enjoy the items you own.

The fifth mindset I wanted to share with you is to focus on the inflow as well as the outflow. Sometimes we don’t realize how important it is to change our spending habits as we work towards decluttering our homes. If we don’t change the inflow, then we will quickly come back to square one and the decluttering progress we made will have made little difference. Sometimes we must be ruthless with ourselves and implement a spending freeze or a no buy period in order to change our habits.

Another mindset shift is realizing you do not equal your stuff. Your value is not in the clothes you wear, the car you drive, or the stuff you own. Finding our value in something more important like in our faith, in our ethics, or in the way we live our lives makes more sense. If we find our value in our stuff, this is a very unpredictable thing to put our value in as we could lose our stuff or lose our jobs and not be able to continue to buy more items.

Something else I wanted to remind you of is having the mindset that the money is long gone. You cannot get your money back after you have purchased and then used an item. Some people find it difficult to declutter because of the money they spent on an item. If an item is sitting in the back of a drawer or cabinet going unused for years, it does not help us financially to hold onto it. Let go of the guilt you may have for spending money on items and then make better decisions moving forward in the future.

Speaking of guilt, let go of all of the guilt around getting rid of items. Whether it is guilt over spending money on the item, or maybe it was a gift given to you and you feel bad getting rid of it, or perhaps it’s something you inherited. If the item is no longer serving you, let go of the guilt and let go of the item.

The ninth mindset change I wanted to share that is adjacent to the feelings of guilt is that memories are not stored in things. You can have memories of a certain time in life, or of a person without holding onto items. Sometimes it can help to take a photo of something if you are struggling to let go because you have memories attached to the item. I do recognize that sometimes tangible things can spark our memory of a time or person, but ultimately the item itself does not hold the memory. The memory is in your mind!

Lastly, I wanted to share that decluttering doesn’t have to be a sprint. In spite of what Marie Kondo told us, we do not have to declutter our whole house in one day! I understand that different decluttering processes work for different people, but sometimes this mindset that we have to declutter all at once or set aside a big chunk of time to get decluttering done prevents us from getting started in the first place. If we have the mindset that we can do a little at a time it will feel more manageable. Oftentimes once you get started the ball starts rolling and you want to continue on, but you can have the mindset that it can be a slow and steady process!