I’ve felt less sick all day than yesterday, but I’ve also felt more disoriented and weak. Cabin fever/lack of exercise? Could be. Or PMS. Anyway, it wasn’t the most satisfying first day after my complete reorganization. I woke up not wanting to do anything, and I only got crankier from there. But it was a good opportunity to test what I told Erik last night about the new action list system: I’ll never have any excuse for doing nothing, because there’s always some small action I can do. This proved true, unfortunately for my lethargy. Here’s what I worked through today:
- morning pages
- picked out fabrics for a yoga mat tote and found the appropriate fabric care instructions (I store instructions and fabrics separately, which is a pain — I think I’ll change this when I reorganize my craft supplies)
- selected fabric scraps to make some pins for the shop (didn’t want to do any actual crafting while I was sick, so I just picked out fabrics)
- recorded the locations of all the people who’ve favorited my shop or items in it (to see if there are geographical patterns of any sort — so far I think my sample size is still too small!)
- read tips on how to write better shop descriptions, and updated some of mine accordingly — this took me an hour and a half and I didn’t even get through most of them
- bookmarked some more helpful Etsy pages
- looked through sewing books to see if they had any tips for organizing fabrics (none that I hadn’t already thought of myself)
- assembled and baked a weird, complicated sweet potato cobbler
- read a few quick books on my to-read shelves (children’s books and manga)
- read up on how to draw mandalas (use a compass and a protractor)
- when I started feeling really cranky, drew one:
The mandala took me the longest, about two hours. I was tired of it by the end, and I wish I’d been able to fill more of it in, but I’m already looking forward to trying another one sometime. I’d like eventually to redo my long-neglected website with a mandala as the main image, so I need to get better at drawing these.
You can see I didn’t get much serious work done today, but I did at least plow through a lot of these “little” tasks on my lists — and found that some of them were much less little than I anticipated! Also, picking out the yoga tote fabrics probably took me the shortest amount of time, but it made me feel more productive than any of this other stuff. Strange. These action lists are already making my life more interesting!
I suspect I might be all better by tomorrow, but we shall see!
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
i like that the phrase “action list” has the word “action” in it! hehe. such a take charge, go get ’em, get things done, kinda word.
in this past year i started keeping a “master” to-do list (in addition to my daily to-do lists) to house all those things i needed to do but i knew i wouldn’t get to, or weren’t a priority at the moment, or were too big to finish in 1 day. it worked well, but i think it’s time for some “new year’s” cleaning to be done; the master list has become a daunting, massive conglomeration. i think i’ll take a leaf out of your book and try to categorize things within the master list (computer, errands, etc.). that should help me feel less jumbled and anxious 🙂
I like it too. 🙂
My master to-do list also got insane; I usually had to break it up after a while, but sooner or later one of the lists would end up taking over again. 😉
David Allen suggests keeping two folders exclusively for stuff you know you want to get to someday, but not right now: a “reference” folder and a “deferred” folder. In the reference folder, you put things you want to remember but don’t need to take action on. In the deferred folder, you put actions that you don’t need to take just yet.
It’s soooo helpful to organize the action lists by context. I recommend it! It saves time, because you don’t have to read over (and thus think about, even if only for a half-second) all the things you can’t do at the moment. And it saves decision-making, because you don’t have to re-process every item by saying “how would I do this?” every time you read it.
Oh, and of course you have to review the reference and deferred folders every now and then. 😉