When I wrote my post on how I manage my calendar, I told you I always take Sundays off, and that I would be posting about this in more detail this month because I think it’s that important. So, here we are. RELATED: Three Steps to Design Your Schedule The benefits for a day of rest are widely-known, even if the actual resting parts are not widely-practiced. Even God rested on the seventh day. From that, I don’t feel I need to pitch the benefits of resting one day a week. By resting, I don’t mean being lazy. It means abstaining from work and chores and all that jazz. It means focusing on things I enjoy.
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If you poke around in your phone for a bit, you’ll find that keyboard options usually include a personal dictionary you can use to add words to avoid the dreaded "AutoCorrect screwed me." You can use this same set-up to save time (and typo frustrations) for things you type often or don’t want to use internet slang (on a somewhat related note, if you find your phone cleans up your language, you can use this or a new contact to avoid. Read more here).
Here are some examples of shortcuts I have set-up:
A few notes:
Here’s how you can do it in iOS - we’ll go with lol and make it “Laugh out loud!” Be it an episode of Hoarders, or news of people dying in their homes (or in recent news, of an elderly, legally blind woman who had unknowingly been living with her own son’s corpse for possibly 20 years without knowing), we all watch in horror and find inspiration to clean our houses whenever we see hoarding situations. Here’s the thing - most of us are not in danger of becoming actual “hoarders.” Most of us are just regular folks who have too much stuff. (NOTE - if you are being consumed by your stuff, reach out. Hoarding doesn’t begin at the first scene of a TLC episode, and none of us plan to go through life only to end up so consumed by our possessions they literally consume us. As humans, we have a complicated relationship with our belongings and that can spill over into our mental health (and vice versa). So, if you suspect that’s you, or becoming you, again, REACH OUT.) Minimalism, a concept of owning minimal items, has taken off in recent years (I blame Pinterest, personally). While the concept of owning less and organizing what you do have better isn’t new, in my opinion, the concept of “minimalism” is relatively new. As a former pack-rat, I was intrigued by minimalism when it first started showing up in my Pinterest feed, and even more so when one of my friends started to embrace the concept and raved about how much more free she felt with less. When I say I was a packrat, y’all, I mean it. I never kept “trash,” but I damn sure kept a whole mess of stuff I wouldn’t need. I had binders of high school and college notes I kept because I may need again. Old phones, in case I could find a use for them. Toys and books from childhood. Clothes I hadn’t worn in years but they were still cute. The list goes on. I’d like to tell you all that stuff was organized. Some of it was, but truth be told, it wasn’t. Case in point: I once rented a two bedroom townhouse with the thought I would convert the second bedroom into a home office of sorts. I never did. Lived there for two years, and the room served more as storage. I would walk in with “stuff,” get overwhelmed, and just throw it on a desk and walk back out, closing the door behind me. It was embarrassing, and when my partner at the time and I moved into a new place, he convinced me to toss quite a bit. I eventually got all that crap organized, neatly packing things into tubs, labeling them, and all that jazz. It took a few years, but after all my friend’s raving about minimalism, I realized that while I had organized everything, it was all taking up space. And I wasn’t just wasting space, I was creating clutter. And so my journey into a pseudo-form of minimalism began. I started slow, but after I went paperless and realized the freedom I felt over there could be applied to other physical stuff, I wanted more. There are any number of systems and methods out there to help us all combat the “stuff;” organizing it, sorting it, labeling it. I won’t knock these - some have proven helpful to millions (and some are total crap, in my opinion, but that’s a topic for another day). But here’s the thing - above all, more than anything, the decision to go minimal begins within all of us. Not exactly groundbreaking information, I know. But I’ve read and pinned enough methods and tips and fought my own good fight against my “stuff" long enough to know all the methods in the world aren’t going to do diddily squat for us if we don’t start inward first. Most of us have too much stuff. This isn’t lecturing - we just do. Things we don’t need, things we don’t want, things we love, and things we don’t. We want more, too, so we get more only to watch it accumulate. I’m not exempt from this. Far from it. And I often think I’m controlling how much and what I own well, only to find myself finding I still have too much and want less. So now, while I won’t claim to be a full-fledged minimalist, I will claim that I only own things I want, or need, and am much happier in this state. That being said, it’s not a one and done project. I find myself having to give myself a pep talk of sorts often. Sometimes it happens when I go to find something and can’t find it. Sometimes its when I come home with new clothes and run out of hangers. Always, when I move. |