little bites & tasty chunks

gorgeous miniature pink rose cuttings from my neighbours rose bushes - I'm determined to propagate

and I bet you thought this post might be about food or at the very least maybe about roses - na uh !

little bites & tasty chunks or attempting to get a grip on the dirty words - time management skills & increased productivity s'il vous plait. I want them both and I want them bad ... I want them good, I want them way better. So ...

In my ever so geek chic manner while writing in my journal and having coffee in bed this very morning (my everyday early morning ritual beginning 6:00ish) avec coil bound jumbo size eco jot journal (fav), my pen a sharpie no bleed medium (fav), a clear plastic ruler (one never knows when I might need to draw a perfectly straight line or measure out increments of something or other) + my hot pink Cavallini day planner ;-) it occurred to me that I need to divide my days & thus weeks into little bites (30 mins of time) & some larger tasty chunks (multiples of those tiny bites). Turns out there are 28 usable tiny bites in my active day from 7am until 9pm (from 6am-7am and anything past 9pm I consider to be la la time, reading, dreaming, waking up and/or letting my mind go blank time).

As my days fill up with more & more creative work projects, I have several such fabulous, take my breath away with goodness BIG jobs coming at me almost now and I expect the steady stream to continue through the remainder of 2013 I need more time. Well what I need is more time management. I need to put my time on a budget. I also love being involved in some sort of learning at all times - education/e-courses & am signed up for 3 this fall including the killer Part B to Lilla Roger's Make Art That Sells e-course), plus there's my ever growing desire to do other things - draw, paint, garden, cook, de-clutter, reorganize, make new personal work, create 2014 calendars, kick back, exercise, spend time with Winnie Dixon, take photos, relax, revamp my Etsy shop, impress my 2 retail stockists (Inkwell Modern + Dots & Loops) with fabulous new products, play with Oliver more ... yada yada yada - you get the drift. I want lots more on my plate, I want to waste less time. I'm craving efficiency & variety & productivity.

Efficiency, variety (the spice in my life) & productivity are the things that make my heart sing. Figuring out what makes your heart sing and then allowing the time & space for your heart to begin belting out those tunes is what life's all about.

With 28 little bites in each of my days I will now attempt to combine some of those bites into tasty chunks while also reminding myself that any heinous job* (ie vacuuming & most house keeping tasks) can ideally be tolerated for a tiny bite of 30 mins ... I'm off now to set the timer. Not unlike creating a financial budget for oneself the first step is finding how much time different tasks actually take. Walking the dog, preparing dinner, cleaning the bathroom, errands, blogging ... I'm actually pretty good at estimating my creative work project times because it's how I spend almost all my time - I've had lots of practice - but I'd love an organized office, a tidy house, a sensible etsy inventory system - I know these things would make me start singing.

Long post - big topic - much more on my progress later

* I use the word heinous because I am such a bad housekeeper but I love, LOVE a sparkling, neat, tidy, uncluttered, spare work & home environment so I'm gonna have to get to know heinous hopefully in some very small bites, maybe half tiny bites

the first in a new music series heard in our grocery store - they have a fantastic muzak tape it's the best o' Bruce