Wonder Women

The Rebel's Guide to GTD - Rules

 
The first thing we are tempted to do when dealing with our inner brat is to give her some rules. Your brat procrastinated on that big project and you had to stay up all night getting it done? She hasn't taken advantage of that expensive gym membership even one time since January? She has been web surfing for hours while the laundry evolves into a leviathon?

You surmise that what your brat needs is some good old-fashioned discipline. From now on, she is going to be up at 5:45 a.m. so she can be at the gym first thing. She could have gotten away with working out three days a week if she had kept at it in January, but now that it's summer, she will be up and sweating every single day if it kills her. You don't care how tired she is after a long day of exercising, working, teaching, mothering, cooking, and housekeeping, she IS going to spend an hour working on long-term projects before she even touches the computer keyboard. And two loads of laundry must be washed, dried, folded, and put away each evening or she will not be able to read or watch TV. She'll learn, right?

The rebel that lives inside of each one of us revolts in response to rules. I have witnessed this time and time again in people I love who are more outer than inner rebels. Rules are quickly assessed as "stupid" and not applicable to them. As an outward rule follower myself, I marvel at their refusal to acquiesce, and deep down, respect them for it. Nine times out of ten they are absolutely right that the rule is wrong. If you listen closely, you will hear your inner rebel roar when you give them rules like:

• Absolutely no fat, carbs, or sweets
• Everything must be recorded and tagged in a to-do list
• Every decent photo must be scrapbooked and journaled chronologically
• Everything you eat must be weighed, measured, and recorded
• Every goal must be written, shared, and broken down into mini steps
• You must eat 9-11 servings of produce and drink 11 cups of water daily
• You must adhere to the schedule laid out in 15-minute increments

Most people who struggle to make meaningful lasting change are dealing with an inner rebel who hates rules. Two case studies. The first is FLYLady. I wrote a Woman's Day article about her home organizing routines more than a decade ago. Although she was an immediate success, there were as many anti-FLYLady responders as there were fan girls. FLYLady's rule that women wear their shoes all day really raised a rebel ruckus. Groups of FLYLady adherents formed whose identity was simply that they refused to wear their shoes in the house. 

A second case study. Mark Forster developed a system of task management that initially thrilled his rebel forum. Tasks could be accomplished simply by intuition, when they "felt ready to be done." The only problem was there were still a number of rules in the system. Immediately, the forum members objected to the rules and began proposing alternate rules. More than two years later, they are still at it.

If you are giving your rebel rules, your inner forum is revolting against you! So what are we to do? Don't we still need rules to get our rebel in line? Rules work better for rebels when:

• There are few of them. That's why trying to crack down in multiple areas backfires.
• There is a really good reason for the rules you have. A rebel will immediately ask, "Why should I?" You better be ready with an excellent answer!
• The rules aren't merely to please people. People pleasing isn't what rebels do. 
• The rules aren't extreme. Rebels still believe in common sense.
• The rules aren't based in fear. Rebels aren't afraid of much, especially consequences that "might, possibly" happen.

I will give you a personal example of the Rebel Rules Philosophy in action. I would like to cook healthier meals more often. So today I noted a weekly menu on AllRecipes.com that was for grilled meals, complete with shopping list. I read one review that raved about this menu and I added it to my shopping list. My kids and the cicadas outside were very noisy at the time, but I could hear my inner rebel pitching a fit. She was saying, "You're supposed to grill EVERY DAY for a week? Really? Your kids are going to eat grilled zucchini boats? Uh-huh. And you're going to make a grilled dessert every night? That is just stupid!" 

So rather than do what I would normally do and buy everything I need for the grilled weekly menu, only to let the stuff spoil because I don't cook it, and then wonder why I am so lazy, I listened to my rebel. I might grill once or twice this week instead.

What kinds of rules have you given your rebels that have been resisted? Are there any rules you've laid down that have lasted?

The Rebel's Guide to GTD - Intro

Photo Forgiveness in a Flash

A common source of guilt is piles or files of unorganized photos. I have loads of photos and guilt, too. I still have every intention of purging and sorting my printed and digital pics as well as scrapbooking them, but if and until that happens, I have a great solution: make a photobook.

I made a beautiful photobook of my mother-in-law's life in about a day and that includes the time spent scanning photos. My husband turned 50 in February and I decided to make him an even less time-intensive book. I used only digital photos. I reviewed all the photos I've taken over the past 5 years and let me tell you I have a bunch! But I was pleasantly surprised by how little time it took.

To make a quick, guilt-reducing photo book, first begin looking through your photos of your subject. If you have printed photos, pull them out and put them in a separate box or envelope. Before removing them, note where they're taken from. Use a sticky note to mark the page of albums where a photo has been removed. For digital photos, create an album file or tag to indicate which photos will go into the book.

The second step is to organize your photos. Because I didn't have exact dates for my mother-in-law's book, I realized that the photos would be easy to organize by decade. For my husband's book, I found that I could organize them into shots by himself, with me, with each of the individual children, with the kids in groups, with our family in groups, with his extended family, and with his friends. Once you've decided on your organizing structure, you'll want to either scan or add photos into subfolders. For example, my mother-in-law's book had one large file with subfolders for the 1960s, 1970s, etc.

The third step is to choose a digital photobook maker. You can drive to the photo developer and have them organize the book for you. You can also choose software like Creative Memories' StoryMaker Plus or Shutterfly which will give you fancy, decorated pages. I chose Creative Memories for my mother-in-law's book and had the book published through a different online developer. For my husband's book, which I didn't want to be fancy or have much journaling, I chose Walgreens. Their software was easy to use. Work on just one subfolder at a time! This is key. As you work, you may decide not to use certain photos to fit the templates your software provides. Try not to sweat that. :-) You can always print those photos or use them in another project.

My husband's book arrived about I week after I completed it. He was thrilled and I felt forgiven for my failure to print photos or to scrapbook them at all. He now has a short book with the most treasured photos in it from the last five years. It's not as great as having a paper scrapbook with tons of journaling, but he sure didn't seem to mind. You could make a great photobook this weekend and be guilt-free...for a while anyway.

Another Brushworks Class Assignment

Thanks to my friend Barbie for her help with this LO. I've really enjoyed doing this class and I highly recommend it for people who know basic digital scrapbooking using Photoshop Elements.

Get the Big Picture

Several years ago I became enamored with Simple Scrapbooks magazine and with its founding editor, Stacy Julian. The Simple philosophy saved me from the stress of thinking I had to scrapbook every decent picture. I always felt hopelessly behind!

Today I scrapbook what I want, when I want, and that includes doing some digital scrapbooking. I took an online class from Stacy Julian's website, www.bigpicturescrapbooking.com and unfortunately I was disappointed. I wrote asking for a refund and got the nicest response back from Stacy Julian herself! I was so impressed that I gave them another try. This page is the result of my first lesson! I'm delighted. If you'd like to learn more about the delightful craft of scrapbooking (paper or digital), get the big picture and sign up today. 

The Cart That Has My Heart

If you've read my book or heard my get-organized talk, you know I don't think bins and drawers are all we need to get organized. But when we have the Super Power, we can make real use of these organizing tools. I am on a quest to get all my photos in order after reading the ebook, Save Your Photos and Your Sanity at www.organizedphotos.com. The ebook is overpriced in my opinion, but it DID motivate me and gave me some keep-it-simple advice to get the whole lot of photos and memorabilia tackled. The photo envelopes and negative envelopes they sell are also quite expensive, but I have been unable to locate an inexpensive and equally useful alternative. Just as an aside, I am using the cropper hoppers and photo boxes to organize my photos and am going to give their negative envelopes a try.

Save Your Phots and Your Sanity motivated me to once and for all get my memorabilia safely stowed and organized. I researched 12 x 12 file folders, but the expense (or time to modify regular files) is prohibitive. I have some excellent art files from Exposures for really oversized items, but needed something to store the run-of-the-mill memorabilia. I found the 7-drawer craft cart from Target and I am thrilled! Each drawer is a self-contained unit with a lid that stays firmly in place. In other words, you can just grab one of these drawers, stick it in your crop bag and go! Layouts, memorabilia and albums will not fly everwhere and won't be bent.

You say you're not a scrapbooker? This is an excellent way to store momentos, but the sky's the limit. You could use this as a project case. Put your taxes, your kids school projects, work projects, craft supplies, puzzles, games, etc. and you are organized and ready to go. If you have kids in the car, you could stow different activities to occupy the kids each day of the week, for example. I think I need more of these! If you come up with a different way to use this fantastic product, let me know!

Save Your Photos and Your Sanity also has me committed to getting all my digital photos tagged in Photoshop Elements 5.0. When I'm done (and even before I'm done), I can quickly put together albums using www.creativememories.com and www.picaboo.com free software. If you've never seen how beautiful these photo books are and how simple they are to make, take some time today to check out these two programs.