• finish
    Productivity

    Give Yourself A Productivity Boost By Finishing Something

    I am very good at starting projects. Not so much on bringing them to completion, especially if they involve crafts. During a recent vacation, I forced myself to take two projects that hadn't been worked on since the previous summer with the aim of making significant progress on both of them. I finished one of the sweaters, and I was buoyed by the boost it gave me on the other project. I thought about why this might be, and how it might apply to other projects. Here is what I came up with:

  • shower
    Uncategorized

    Easy Ways To Clean The Shower

    Cleaning our shower is hard work. Since Scrubbing Bubbles took the one product that made it easy off the market, I haven't found anything other than hard work with a Mr. Clean eraser. But I knew there had to be a better way.

  • Simplify

    Getting Out From The Magazine Slushpile

    Slush piles are the piles of manuscripts that appear on editor's desks. I realized the other week that with the addition of my daughter's subscriptions, our common room is beginning to have a very large slush pile in the corner. Since this is my daughter's first venture into regular magazines, I am teaching her how to get out from under the pile of magazines. These tips also apply to catalogs and newspapers, so read on if you are buried in paper!

  • timer
    Uncategorized

    Using Timers To Keep Kids Focused

    I've talked about using timers before. Mostly it is to get me going, or keep me going on a task. But there are other ways that I use timers that allow me to focus on something else, yet still accomplish the task at hand.. You can use this type of timing to help keep your child on track as well.

  • Planning,  Simplify

    Prevent Predictable Annoyances

    One of the funniest phrases I have heard in the past few months is "Pigeons of Discontent." This was meant as the opposite of "Bluebirds of Happiness", and I find that it is very apt. Essentially it is the category of items that are annoyances. And like pigeons, these are the common, garden-variety, everyday annoyances that can peck away at our happiness and contentment.