Determined to be productive

With no real schedule to keep during the summer, it is very easy for me to somehow be doing something all day and still manage to not get anything done. But I’m determined to be productive this summer. The list of things I want to get done is too long for me to not get a lot of it crossed off.

The main things I want to do this summer are finish up all the sewing projects that are in some stage of completion, purge my storage, and scan in all the documents I’m holding on to so I can store a few CDs instead of boxes of papers. This will involve a LOT of recycling/shredding (must find a shredder), a lot of trips to the DI, and of course a lot of sewing.

But I know me. If my list for the summer is just those three things, even if I break down, “sew all the projects” into a list of the individual projects (I’ve already done that), I’ll freeze up at the overwhelming nature of that list and do absolutely nothing.

This is where my daily to-do list comes in. While I do have a list of all my sewing projects and such and what-not, I’ve had to break it down even more. My daily to-do lists this summer are going to be real interesting.

At the top of each list is: scriptures, exercise, and water plants. Those need to be done every day (except the exercise, it’s not on Sunday’s list). Then throughout the week I’ve added a load of laundry here and there (today it’s a colored load, tomorrow it’s sheets) as well as the various other household to-do items like vacuuming and grocery shopping.

But I’ve also taken my big summer tasks and broken them down into very easily managable bites. Today for example I’m finishing the quilting on a wall hanging and cutting out the borders for another quilt. Over a week ago I pinned down the binding on a third quilt (it’s easier for me to sew binding if its been pinned for a while and knows where it’s supposed to be). So I’ve also added sewing that binding down to today’s list. I know that I don’t have the calouses on my hands to do a lot of hand sewing, so I’m perfectly fine with only getting half the binding sewn on today and the other half on Saturday when my fingers have rested a bit.

By breaking down the big tasks into very small daily tasks, I have more realistic expectations for what I can do in a day. Yes, I can do a whole quilt start to finish in a day. But if I put that on the list, I don’t think I’d get much else done. And I get bored. So putting a lot of different small things on the list means I can bounce from one spot to another all day and in the end I’ll have accomplished something.

The list itself makes me accountable at least to myself. At the end of the day I can easily look at what I’ve done or not done during the day. I like seeing all the little x’s next to the things I did. However, I’m not going to post my lists on the internet for all to see and add that much more accountability to it. I will provide updates on the large project progress from time to time.

So here’s to my summer to-do lists. I’m anticipating a very productive summer so I can start back to school in August with a cleaner and more organized space, and with fewer sewing projects to tempt me away from homework. 8)