New Years Resolutions

If you are like me you make resolutions each year and many times they are similar to the previous year.  One of mine is that I always want to improve and grow in my art.  This year I realize there are two things that I have to do first if I want to grow in my art.

The first thing I have to do is take care of my health.  For me that means loosing a little weight and getting into a regular exercise regiment.   If I feel better I will have more energy to devote to the things I enjoy.  A great tool I found over the last year to help me with this in myfitnesspal.com.   It has a database with over 6 million items of food and makes it easy to track what you are eating.  It also allows you to track your exercise and see how many calories you are burning.  And best of all it is free.

The other thing I need to do is get my house in order.  If my house is somewhat clean, organized and things have a home it is much easier for me to create.  I must confess this does not come easy to me and because I am creative I have lots of little stuff that can create clutter pretty quickly.   And I don’t want to spend all of my time cleaning.

A number of years ago I read a book by Marla Cilley called “Sink Reflections”.  In the book she helps you get your house organized by eliminating clutter.  She also helps you establish simple routines to get your house clean and keep it that way.  After reading the book I started implementing some of the routines like making my bed every day and doing a load of laundry each day.  But I was never consistent with the rest of the routines.

Once you get your house decluttered you only need to spend about 1/2 hour a day with your routines to keep it always looking nice.   Marla is also known as The Flylady and has a number of different ways to declutter but my favorite way is to set a timer for 15 minutes and declutter in one area. When the timer does off you are done.  It is amazing how much you can get done in 15minutes.

This is a quick little summary of the different tasks:

• Morning routine – make bed, get dressed, swish and swipe your bathroom and start a load of wash.
• Evening routine – clean your sink, lay clothes out for next day.
• Weekly blessing – set your timer for 10 minutes for each task and do as much as you can in that time: dust, vacuuming, mopping, etc. You can do this all in one day or spread it out over a number of days.  Or, even better, have your family share in the tasks and be done in no time.
• Zone cleaning – the house is broken into weekly zones, each day you can do something in that zone for 15minutes.  If you don’t have time that day to do it all, let go of it and work on it next time.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but I am going to try to do it this year so again I have more time to create.  If you would like to know more about it you can go to her website, and if you want you can sign up for daily reminders. Here is her site http://www.flylady.net/

Working on these two things will hopefully give me the energy and peace of mind I need for working on my other goals.

I am sharing these tools in hopes that they will also be a help to you.  I am not compensated in any way, and these are my honest opinions.

Happy New Year,

Jane