Hi friends, Just wanted to send a quick note and say we are still alive and working on our new app. We are really looking forward to sharing it with you all! We’re sorry that we didn’t manage to release it in 2024 as we intended. At this time of year, all the social media messages are pushing the idea of huge, aspirational goals – “A New Year, a New You.” I am myself not immune to thinking a new journal and a nice new…
Hello friends, I hope September treated you well and that you are safe and sound from the terrible storms. It’s springtime here in New Zealand, but we still enjoy some of the trappings of the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn. (I do look forward to my yearly pumpkin spice latte as we get further into the month) The teens have already dragged Tim down to the local beach for their first swim of the season, but it is far too chilly for me at this stage! ⭐️ New features survey results…
Hello, friends! How is your June going? It’s the middle of winter, here in New Zealand. Where we are (Auckland) it’s pretty mild, so for me this just means a light cardigan on errands day. Or a puffer jacket if I go for a walk down the chilly beach (for mental health purposes, and to say hello to local dogs) ⭐️New Home Routines app later this year!⭐️ We’ve been working hard at a refreshed version of Home Routines. Our first version was released in 2010…
Recently I’ve been really enjoying catching up on the excellent videos and resources produced by Steph at The Secret Slob. She has a great speed cleaning hack that she calls “5×5”. She uses a timer to keep on task, and zips around cleaning five rooms, for five minutes each. If she has extra time at the end of a room, she pops back to the “worst room” to do a little more there. (There is so much more on her Youtube channel, have a look…
“Half-tidying” is when you only sorta-kinda put things away. You know, you open the bathroom cupboard, scrunch up your eyes and just shove that new shower-puff into the nearest space. I’m prone to this because if I look properly I get stressed about where the “correct” place is to put that thing, and in order to locate that “correct” place I think I need to empty everything out of the cupboard and have an extended Tetris-type arranging party and it will take hours I tell…
Here are some things I have “just” put in the wrong place “for now” in the past day or so. You know. Then Dan Howell (Danisnotonfire) from the You Tubes talked about it better than me. (note: video includes cussing) One week ago I did a hard-core complete tidy of this room and yet here I am standing in a post-apocalyptic laundry pile. … So, how did this happen? I’ve thought about it and I think it’s because people tend to only ever do half-tidies….
Here’s the thing. There’s a lot of productivity advice that says, well, if you don’t know what to do, do the thing that’s in front of you. If a job is going to take less than two minutes, do it NOW. Put on your big girl undies, lace up your Doc Martens and get the heck on with it. This advice is just jolly splendid when I’m well rested and having a good mental health day and I’m right up for the kicking of butts…
I’m kind of fond of frogs. My maiden name was a little bit froggish (well it had a “croak” in it!) and I used to love the Mercer Mayer books about that mischievous wee froggy and his shenanigans with his boy. Anyway, there is a lot of advice shared about eating frogs in the productivity-sphere of the internet. It all comes back to a quote from Mark Twain, who said: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to…
I wrote yesterday about rocking your timer, but this morning I read Steady Mom’s post about Suffering for 15 minutes and it was groundbreaking to me. A lot of advice seems to assume that once you decide to set your timer to do something that you’re immediately going to spring up full of vigour and wipe the aftermath of toilet training from your bathroom floor while singing Happy Happy Joy Joy and doing a vigorous, improvised toilet-cleaning boogie. But Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project)…
Take five minutes. Just five. Set a timer. If you’re on the couch or in bed, look to see the closest surface to you. It’s probably the coffee table or your nightstand. For those five minutes, just focus on that one surface. Clear it off, throw stuff away, maybe even dust it. So when your five minutes is done and you’re back in bed, you have one clear surface to look at. You have an accomplishment to focus on. You did something. You don’t have…
