Day 32: Journaling

The Task: To start and keep a journal.

The Why:  I've never been much of a journal keeper.  I've tried, but I've always been so overwhelmed by everything I think my journal ought to be.  I get hung up trying to write the right words in beautiful handwriting with nothing scratched out or misspelled.  My perfectionism gets in the way.

But God is doing something big in us right now and I want to put it on paper.  I am the type of person who likes to make lists and mind maps, I don't feel like I fully comprehend something until I've brought pen to paper. And part of this project is to be more intentional, more aware, more authentic. Regular journaling sits well with those goals.

I was moved by this post.  It was inspiring and freeing to see a journal that was colourful, and creative.  I longed to have a time of reflection and creative expression as part of my morning ritual.

The How:  I'm using a notebook I already had and a great set of colourful pens.  I keep notes on what I'm thinking, reading and praying.  I make doodles and mind maps and lists.  I tear pages out and scribble over mistakes and I'll probably glue stuff into it sometimes too.

 I like to sit on the back porch in the morning with my journal and my bible and whatever book I'm currently reading. (Right now it's The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne.  I totally recommend it!)  I do this while the kids play in the backyard and the laundry dries on the line, and it's a part of our morning that we all look forward to.

The Verdict: Ann Voskamp describes her journal as "a place to place a day, so it won’t get lost in the dark."  That resonates with me.

 In the past, all my attempts at journaling have had a specific focus; a prayer journal, a journal for sermon notes or notes on a book I'm reading.   But that feels so contrived now.  The books I'm reading, the thoughts I'm thinking, the prayers I'm praying, they are all a piece of this journey I am on.

And I'm finding that taking some time daily to reflect on what is moving my heart and changing my mind is refreshing for this sometimes weary mama.

We are doing one small thing (almost) every day for a year to create a simpler, quieter, more intentional life. Take a moment to read all About Us, check out The Rules of our year long project and sign up for our RSS feed or "like" us on facebook so that you can follow our journey to radical simplicity!

Day 31: Cleaning out the Inbox

The Task: I promise that tomorrow I won't talk about email.  But after yesterdays post about scheduling e-mail times I decided I should probably deal with all of the stuff currently in my inboxes.

The Why: The email I use frequently had 73 emails in the inbox; all stuff I had read and failed to do something with.   My other email, the one I use mostly for newsletters and people who still send me forwards of cats and midi music, had a whopping 764 emails in the inbox, largely unread.

I was still receiving regular emails from a big-box store that we resolved last New Years not to shop at anymore.  We haven't been to this store in 8 months, and have no plans to ever go again, but I didn't think to unsubscribe from their emails?***

I even still had my confirmation email from when I signed up for myspace.  MYSPACE!?  Wow.

The How: So I went through my emails, filed things into appropriate files, deleted a lot of stuff, and unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing list, including all the mailing lists that well meaning people had signed me up for against my will so that I could receive all those handy coupons and junk mail.  Oy vey.

Time Spent:  The whole thing took me about an hour, but only because my husband has the day off today.  If he were at work and I was alone with the children I'm pretty sure the project would've taken me a day and a half. 

The Verdict:  So now, each day when I spend time dealing with my emails, I can empty out my inbox. Stuff that may be needed for later reference can be filed in appropriate folders, and everything else can be deleted once I'm done with it. No more junk hanging over my head.  I have clean and happy email inboxes ready to be used for actual communication.

Now if only I could unsubscribe from cute forwards filled with pictures of cats...

***(I'm not going to tell you what store it is, but it rhymes with, um... Doll-Cart.  Just Sayin'.)

We are doing one small thing (almost) every day for a year to create a simpler, quieter, more intentional life. Take a moment to read all About Us, check out The Rules of our year long project and sign up for our RSS feed or "like" us on facebook so that you can follow our journey to radical simplicity!

Day 30: Scheduling E-mail Times

The Task: To set a time each day to deal with e-mails efficiently.

The Why:  One of the things we are trying to accomplish this year is more intentionality in how we spend our time.  We want to be purposeful about where the minutes in our days go, and we want to be more present to those around us.

This is hard for a busy mama.  I am so accustomed to doing two or more things at once.  The problem is that my activities often suffer a little bit from not having my complete attention.  My e-mail inbox is a good example of that.

My e-mail inbox is one of the tabs set to open every time I open my browser.  Which means that even if I'm just turning on my computer to look up a recipe for dinner or check the weather report, I always have that little tab telling me whether or not there are any new e-mails to attend to.  And more often than not, there are.  But instead of waiting for a time when I can deal with the e-mail properly, I quickly skim it, and often mark it as unread so that I don't forget to deal with it later.

This is not only hugely inefficient, but also a whole lot of mind clutter!  It's like I'm inviting my work into every part of my day!

 The How: I am setting up two times a day to check my e-mail; once in the morning, and once during our afternoon quiet time.  I've removed my e-mail account from my homepage tabs, so that it no longer automatically loads when I open my browser.I have to actually go to my e-mail to check my e-mail.

This way I will only be dealing with e-mails when I have time to respond to them and archive them appropriately.

The Verdict: I already feel more free! And I believe that by scheduling times for tending to e-mails I will become better at promptly and efficiently doing so.

I considered having a third e-mail time in the evening, but I've decided that since the evening is when Luke and I spend our time together, e-mails can wait for the morning. 

And finally, I have one less thing to procrastinate with when I should be working on something else.  For example, I wrote this entire blog post without  once drifting over to my inbox... I think I just made personal history!

Do you have a scheduled e-mail time? 

We are doing one small thing (almost) every day for a year to create a simpler, quieter, more intentional life. Take a moment to read all About Us, check out The Rules of our year long project and sign up for our RSS feed or "like" us on facebook so that you can follow our journey to radical simplicity!

Day 27: Decluttering the Kitchen (Part Two: The Minimalist-ish Kitchen Tour!)

Welcome to the longest post in the history of blog posts.  Don't say I didn't warn you...

As I mentioned yesterday, Luke and I have been working hard at radically decluttering the kitchen.  We are eager to embrace the less is more philosophy in this space that we spend so much of our time.

But I'm hesitant to call it minimalist.  We are a large family that cooks from scratch, entertains often (just last weekend we had nearly 40 people at our house for a birthday party!) and decorates cakes for fun...what is minimal for us would be excessive for many others.

We did try to eliminate multiple items.  We've really discovered that having one of what you need, washing it and putting it away is far more efficient than having half a dozen of them that could at any moment be in the drawer, the dishwasher, the sink or the counter top.  So we have one wooden spoon, one casserole dish (for a baptist homeschooling mom, one casserole dish is pretty radical!)  and one turkey roaster (Yes, I had two of them.  Don't ask....)

I'll confess that a few times I found myself wondering "would a minimalist have this?" and I had to remind myself what we're doing here.  It's not about roughing it or having some bare minimum list of essentials, but about only owning the things that are helping us to lead the extraordinary life we're choosing to lead. It's not about having less for the sake of less, but refusing to consume more for the sake of more.

So come, snoop through our maybe-sorta-kinda almost minimalist-ish kitchen.

We are keeping 1 casserole dish, 2 muffin tins, 2 cookie sheets, 4 cooling racks, a cast iron skillet, 2 pizza pans and a big beautiful woven trivet tray thingy.

I took a very scientific approach to deciding which  casserole dish to keep....I kept the prettiest one!

 

I suggested to Luke that we probably don't need to own chopsticks and he suggested that we don't need any silverware except chopsticks and I took that to mean that the topic was not up for debate.

In our cooking utensils drawer we have 3 knives and a knife sharpener, kitchen shears, a pizza cutter, a cheese grater, citrus press, 1 flipper, 1 wooden spoon, 1 ladle, a kitchen scale, a set of  measuring cups and measuring spoons and miscellaneous small tools like the vegetable peeler, can opener and meat thermometer.

We had a whisk too, but I broke it yesterday making buttertarts and discovered that a fork accomplishes the same task pretty well. 

I use dollar store cork tiles to keep things from slipping around inside the drawer.  This doesn't work if you slam the drawer, but if you're gentle it works quite nicely!

I finally have a baking drawer!  I've always wanted to put all my baking supplies together in one drawer but have never been able because I had too much stuff!

We have 4 mixing bowls, a dough cutter, a pastry blender, a set of biscuit cutters, 4 ramekins, 3 spatulas (probably a little excessive, but I like them all...), a funnel, some measuring bowls, tea towels for covering dough while it rises, and some cupcake liners.

That nifty white device is a whipped cream dispenser. You put cream in it and it comes out like store bought squirty cream but without all the weird additives. Which may seem rather indulgent but we are kinda whipped cream snobs;  in our 7 years of marriage we have never once purchased a can of processed squirty cream, and we wear that fact as a foodie badge of honour!

We kept only one frying pan, but it's a huge one! We also have a set of 4 pots (we keep two of them on the pot rack, along with a colander), a sieve, a steamer basket and a stick blender.  I heart my stick blender....

Some bbq tools and 3 flexible plastic cutting boards.

We didn't declutter the spices at all, but we probably should because I can't remember the last time I put marjoram in anything. Ever.

By streamlining the number of cake and dessert pans I own I believe I have also greatly streamlined the amount of curse words I will need to utter when retrieving my spring form pan. Just sayin'....

 

For small appliances I have a kettle and a french press coffee maker, a stand mixer (with some attachments), a food processor (with a blender attachment), a salad spinner, a toaster, a crockpot and a hand crank ice cream maker (which, um....we used three times last week...)

One thing we did that we should have done sooner is we got rid of all of the food processor attachments we never ever use.  We've been housing parts for years that we don't have any interest in using, just because they came with the food processor.  Ditching them was somehow freeing!

We have 2 tea pots because I have a favourite and Luke has a favourite and if we had tried to figure out which one to keep, one of us would have been sleeping on the couch.

I have everyday white dishes plus white china dishes that we use frequently.  When we have both of our families over for one of the kids birthdays we rarely need to use disposable dishes, so I consider our massive amounts of dishes to be a great thing!   The baskets hide the kids cups and baby bottles.

That cake plate on the top shelf is probably going to get donated to the thrift store, I just put it there for the picture because that shelf was empty....

All of my cake and cookie decorating supplies now fit in two labelled shoe boxes that I store in the pantry.

We also have a stock pot, a 22 x18 sheet cake pan, and a turkey roasting pan stored in the basement.

The verdict:  We are donating 4 diaper boxes and a laundry basket full of kitchen stuff!

 I think we will probably eliminate even more as time goes on.  There were a few things we were uncertain about, so we kept them tentatively in order to avoid a massive case of purger's regret sending us frantically to the store. 

After this experience I would say that emptying the entire contents of your kitchen for a big giant purge is A) a little bit crazy and B) a great way to do it.  After having the entire contents of our kitchen laid out to be seen all at once, neither of us has any doubts about whether or not we own enough stuff!

We are doing one small thing (almost) every day for a year to create a simpler, quieter, more intentional life. Take a moment to read all About Us, check out The Rules of our year long project and sign up for our RSS feed or "like" us on facebook so that you can follow our journey to radical simplicity!

Day 26: Decluttering the Kitchen (Part One!)

The Task:  We've been decluttering from the kitchen since the beginning of the project (the knives, the polka dot dishes, the microwave!) But the kitchen really needed a big overhaul.

The Why:  We've come to see that stuff begets stuff.  The more we accumulate, the more we think we need. A serving bowl to match that serving plate, a pretty tea towel for the new bread basket, a set of martini glasses to use with the cocktail shaker.  By getting rid of stuff we aren't just making our kitchen an easier place to cook and clean and entertain in, (and investing in a lifetime of much simpler moving days!) we're also choosing to be content with just enough and learning to be honest with ourselves about what we need and use.

The Plan:  Both Luke and I felt that it was important to go through the kitchen stuff together.  We both love to cook and bake and entertain, so we both needed a say in what stays and what goes.

So last night after getting the kids to bed, we decided to take every single item out of the kitchen, discuss whether to keep it or not, wash out the cabinets and put everything we were keeping back.  We wanted to take everything out rather than do a cabinet at a time so that we could really get a feel for how much stuff we've accumulated.  Then I was going to take pictures of my fabulous new minimalist-ish (I know that's not really a word) kitchen to share today.

The Reality:  We underestimated what a huge job it would be.  Where did all this stuff come from???

At quarter after ten the house looked like this... (and there's Luke, taking a well deserved break!) 

By 12:30 I was lying on the kitchen floor trying to do the math to figure out whether the narrower/deeper casserole dish or the wider/shallower one holds more food.  Luke wisely suggested that we give up and go to bed. 

Here's all the stuff we've committed to get rid of so far.  But we aren't done!

So tomorrow will be the minimalist-ish kitchen tour.  Today I'm going to drink good strong coffee and calculate the volumetric lasagna potential of all my casserole dishes.

We are doing one small thing (almost) every day for a year to create a simpler, quieter, more intentional life. Take a moment to read all About Us, check out The Rules of our year long project and sign up for our RSS feed or "like" us on facebook so that you can follow our journey to radical simplicity!