My inbox at zero

I have (basically) no e-mails in my inbox. I’m not talking about work. I’m talking about the hundreds of personal ones that are about all my stuff and my kid’s stuff and sometimes my husband’s stuff. A fair percentage of these e-mails usually need some sort of attention, though not particularly urgently.

It’s taken me the better part of a year but I’ve finally gotten my e-mail to a happy place. It’s not exactly rocket science, but I did a few things for a long time and slowly but surely it got better, and I got better. Before I go on – can I just tell you how awesome it us to not be using my e-mail in box as a weird sort of to-do list? All that blankness is inspiring. Continue reading “My inbox at zero”

4 days: 30 minutes at a time

Making a plan for every 30 minutes of your waking life (as discussed here on Monday) is easy.  It turns out making reality look anything like that plan is tricky.  Go figure.   Now, I’m not looking to turn our lives into some perfect utopian thing where every moment we are perfectly engaged and we are doing exactly what we planned. The goal was/is just to do more of the things we want to do and get some stuff off the master project list we made up for the month. Continue reading “4 days: 30 minutes at a time”

Time and Potential

My life is full of potential.  My house is proof of it.  There is potential absolutely everywhere.  Clothes I could potentially wear, cookbooks filled with recipes I could potentially cook, chairs on which I could potentially sit – but never do.  A look just around my office/craft/laundry room shows off so much potential it almost makes me feel ill.  There is fabric I could potentially sew into amazing things, textbooks for that foreign language I could potentially learn, stacks of keepsakes I could potentially turn into something meaningful. Continue reading “Time and Potential”

What on earth is “extra” money?

The current Woman’s Day magazine has an article talking about “extra” money and how it often gets “frittered away”.  I had to stop right there.  What on earth is extra money and how do I get some?

Well, it turns out that by “extra” they really meant unexpected, unplanned for or forgotten money.  Let’s break these down for a minute. Continue reading “What on earth is “extra” money?”