Category: Lifestyle

Time Tracking w/ Toggl

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Long-time readers may recall that about a year ago I actually said I wasn’t a fan of time blocking because I hated planning out my days in excruciating detail. Yet, here I am today about to tell you how I’m tracking my time.

I’ve read countless books that recommend tracking your time. I’ve never doubted that it’s a valuable exercise. That being said, I’m also lazy, so I’ve avoided doing it because, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

In the world of customer support, my days are pretty reactionary. My core work is providing support for the projects others have rolled out. Most of my time doesn’t fit neatly into deliverables, milestones, and deadlines, but is instead reserved for being available and ready to help someone in the event things happen to go wrong.

The project I’m currently working on, however, does fit neatly into deliverables and deadlines, and the people I’m working with on it are used to tracking their time to make sure they hit their milestones. We’ve also been given a particularly ambitious go live date for this particular project. Not only was I not about to oppose how my colleagues usually do things, but I also saw the value in being able to document how much time I’m spending on this project, and equally as important, why I’m not spending more time on it as a way to manage expectations around a realistic scope and timeline.

I’m also not one to do something half way, so if I was going to be tracking time for this project, I might as well track the rest of my time too.

I settled on using Toggl. It’s free, highly recommended, and also syncs with Exist.io which I’ve been using for years (albeit with a brief hiatus) to discover trends in health, activity, and other aspects of my life. The Mac and iOS apps for Toggle do what you’d expect, and I also appreciate that they include a Pomodoro function. More on that in a bit.

Because Exist considers time tracked in Toggl productive time, I settled on tracking the time I spend on things on my Today list in Things, with the exception of workouts. While I definitely consider working out as productive time, Exist already tracks working out via Apple Health. Tracking it with both Toggl and Apple Health effectively double counts it in the weekly summary report it sends out which I don’t want.

I also track a few things that aren’t on my list, like the amount of time I spend providing customer support. Because I don’t know when a customer is going to reach out with a question those tasks generally aren’t part of my daily task list.

After tracking my time for a little over a month, I have noticed a few benefits:

  • I’m more productive than I thought. It may be shocking to readers to know that I don’t feel a productive person. Like I said earlier, I’m admittedly quite lazy. The systems I use in my daily life are there so that I can work through my to do list as quickly as possible because I want to be able to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. Tracking my time showed me I’m more productive than I was giving my credit for. It’s hard to argue with actual data.
  • I batch my tasks more. Again with the laziness, constantly starting and stopping timers in Toggl got old quickly. Not only was I forgetting to start and stop timers, I didn’t like seeing my day broken up into tons of little time blocks. As a result, I started batching my tasks so that I could set one timer and work through multiple related tasks at once.
  • I’m less distracted. By now we know multitasking doesn’t work. Batching my tasks already helps with that, but I also find that I’m less likely to switch out of a task to go do something like check my email because I don’t want to stop a timer.
  • I procrastinate less. For tasks that I feel inclined to defer to another day repeatedly, I’ve been using the Pomodoro function. I tell myself I’ll just work on the task for 20 minutes set the timer and work until it’s done. I’m doing it right now for this blog post. I hadn’t had much success with the Pomodoro method in the past, but combining it with checking something off in my task manager and not wanting to pause or start timers seems to be the the magic combination to making the Pomodoro method work for me.
  • I get things done faster. Laziness here again, I want to get things done as quickly as possible so I can do nothing, so I try to check of as many tasks as I can within a timer, particularly if I’m using the Pomodoro function. This morning I had a few extra minutes before I had to leave and I had a Chores timer running, so I looked back through my to do list to see if there were any additional chores I could tackle before stopping my timer.

The jury is honestly still out as to whether I will continue tracking my time beyond this project. That being said, after reading all those books that recommend tracking your time, I can now say I’ve actually done it. I can also say it was a worthwhile exercise even if I choose not to continue.

2 Years with Apple Fitness Plus

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Yoga mat, yoga blocks and hand weights sitting on floor

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

Obligatory disclaimer here: I am not a doctor. Anything in this post is what has worked for me. Consult your doctor, not the internet, for actual health advice, folks.

It’s been a little over two years since I did my first Apple Fitness+ workout, and since then I’ve completed over 500 more, which is surprising for me because I’ve never been an “exercise person”. I played softball as a child, but only because I was forced to, and I took physical education classes in high school and college, but only because they were graduation requirements. Even then, I usually found the lazy way out. I convinced my PE teachers to help me lead the class so that I didn’t have to do the actual exercises, and one of the classes I took in college was Tai Chi Chih, a series of moving meditations that can be done entirely seated.

Working out was something I knew I should do but found any way to get out of if I could. I tried all the tips and tricks to get myself to work out. Gym memberships didn’t work. I was too self conscious to go to the gym, too cheap to pay for a gym membership, and quite honestly too much of a homebody to want to leave the house. Pre-paying for group classes wasn’t an incentive either because I’d happily trade my sunk cost of a prepaid class for an extra hour of sleep and I could never find a friend to go with me and serve as an accountability buddy. The only thing that sort of worked was fitting movement in throughout my days in various ways like parking further away, taking the stairs, or getting in a walk during my lunch break at work, but that was really the extent of my exercise. And of course, queue the pandemic, the thing that upended all of our lives in a myriad of ways, and those little bits of movement went away too. My Apple Watch showed I was averaging a dismal 1 minute of exercise per day, and so I made myself a goal to do one minute more than my average each day.

In December of 2020, Apple released Apple Fitness+, offering a free trial to get people hooked. I figured I’d try it, and hopped on my stationary bike for a quick workout. I was pretty much instantly hooked. I loved that the workouts pushed me more than I had been doing on my own. I loved that a month’s worth of classes (at the annual rate) only cost a little more than a coffee at Starbucks, and I loved that I could pop on a 10-minute workout at any time throughout the day.

Eventually I got bored with just doing cycling workouts every day, (I also wore out the resistance knob on my spin bike which put my bike out of commission while I waited for replacement parts.) and so I decided to try some of the other Apple Fitness+ workouts. I tried yoga, pilates, HIIT, and strength training workouts, and I actually found myself getting excited to try new workouts. More importantly, I found myself looking forward to working out.

These days, I close my exercise ring most days. I try hard to not miss a workout (I’m currently on a 33-day streak), and I make sure to vary my workouts as well. My weekly routine looks something like this:

  • Mondays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Upper Body Strength
  • Tuesdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Wednesdays: 10 Minutes of Core + 20 Minutes of Lower Body Strength
  • Thursdays: 30 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Fridays: 30 Minutes of Pilates or Total Body Strength
  • Saturdays: 45-60 Minutes of Cardio (either cycling, kickboxing, HIIT, or walking if i’m feeling lazy or pressed for time)
  • Sundays: 30-45 Minutes of Yoga

I keep track of my workouts in Things 3, of course, in a project called Weekly Workouts. On Friday afternoons, during my weekly review, I scroll through the Apple Fitness app, picking out workouts for the upcoming week. I copy the link to each workout and include it in the corresponding task in Things, that way throughout the week, I can just check them off as I complete them.

When I started working out, I was doing it out of obligation because that’s what “healthy” people do, as well as, a desire to lose weight. Three years later, my goals have shifted. I did eventually hit my goal weight but have since adjusted my goals to account for the muscle mass I’ve gained along the way. I work out now, not because I should or have to, but because working out makes me feel better and, I daresay, I enjoy working out. I finally work out because I want to.

A New Normal?

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People have been talking about getting back to normal (or at least a new normal) post-pandemic for months now.

For the past few months I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like for me. While my particular office functioned well remotely, the university I worked at understandably wants folks back in the office for the students that are on campus.

The months leading up to this past week (the first week of classes) felt like I was in limbo. Somehow I was faced with planning a socially distant office space having never done so all while dealing with the reality that my time working from home was about to come to an abrupt end. Queue anxiety.

Thankfully for now, I’ve been able to continue teleworking 2-3 days a week, but it’s far from the telework environment I’ve gotten used to.

My team is now split pretty much 90% remote and 10% on site. For the staff working on campus, we’re faced with a new challenge of managing our usual workload plus, often times, singlehandedly managing the workload of customers who walk in with questions, most of which isn’t even related to our job but rather to the building we’re in. Pre-pandemic, that walk-in support would have been split among 3-5 people instead of 1-2.

Did I mention we’re also navigating this through our busiest time of the year where our work quadruples anyway?

While I’m thankful to be able to not be fully back in the office, it’s safe to say that I feel as though my routine is now thoroughly upended. Because my teleworking schedule changes every other week, I now understand my partner’s tendency to never know what day of the week it is. I also can’t seem to get into a normal rhythm of work. All in all, I just feel disheveled.

So what’s next?

I find myself wanting to make a weekly plan, but the day to day unpredictability of tech support has proved that to be challenging.

I’ve also found myself revisiting the maker/manager schedule. My current telework schedule is structured such that the weeks I am in the office 3 days a week also tend to be my meeting heavy weeks, so I’m toying with the idea of a accepting that those weeks will simply be distraction heavy and using my three telework days the following week to really focus on projects.

Anyway, this is a bit of a rambling post, but I wanted to throw my two cents out there in case anyone else is struggling or has struggled with something similar.

Better Late than Never – My Yearly Focus for 2021

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As many of you might have noticed, I ended up taking a much longer break from the blog than anticipated last year, but I didn’t want to miss out on posting my yearly recap and focus for the new year.

My focus for last year was health. Little did I know a pandemic would send that goal into a tailspin, but hindsight is 2020…

In all honesty though, my year of health turned out to be a success. By implementing little changes consistently, I was able to increase my daily activity from around 6 minutes of exercise to 28 minutes. Technically, I’m on a streak of closing all of my activity rings including 30 minutes of exercise for 51 days straight though, and for once, I’d consider myself a person who works out regularly.

Apple’s Fitness challenges along with their recently released Fitness Plus service have played a huge part in my progress by not only motivating me to be more active but also making it easy to fit exercise in throughout the day even if it’s 10 minutes at a time.

In many ways, 2020 was not the year I expected it to be, as I’m sure was the case for many. Many of my goals had to be postponed (like our wedding) or abandoned entirely (reading) in order to just maintain sanity. Other goals seemingly appeared out of nowhere and exceeded my wildest expectations, but as we come out 2020 and move into 2021, it’s clear to me that my life has changed for the positive despite all the obstacles that were put in front of me.

That’s why for 2021, my focus is progress.

The incremental changes I made for my health have become an ongoing area of focus that I hope to continue making progress.

Another area I made huge strides in last year was my finances, which I expect will be the biggest area of progress for the year. I’m already working on refinancing my condo to a better rate, and after becoming debt-free other than the mortgage last year, I’m now working towards financial independence.

Here’s to 2021, and good riddance to 2020.

Yearly Theme Update & How I’m using Streaks to Stay on Track

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If hindsight is 2020, maybe 2020 wasn’t the best year to pick health as my yearly theme. Nevertheless, here we are.

I’m nearing my 4th month of working from home due to the pandemic, and the biggest lesson I’ve learned during those 4 months is just how easy it is to slip out of a routine.

Skipping things I didn’t pay much attention to, like my afternoon walk, now suddenly have an incredible power to spiral my default behavior right back to sitting on the couch if I’m not careful. At the same time, I’m also being mindful that it’s okay that I’m not performing at the levels I normally would. These, after all, are not normal times, and giving myself a break is necessary at times.

With that being said, my intention for this year was and still is to focus on my health. I’ve just had to readjust my expectations to effectively fight the gravitational pull towards my couch. For that, I’ve been taking a page out of the ideas in James Clear’s Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits and accepting that doing something regularly, even if it’s small, is better than doing nothing at all.

I’ve been using a combination of Apple’s Activity app and Streaks to set my goals. Using the Activity app’s trends tab, I set my goal to be only slightly above my average. If the app says I’m getting about 9 minutes of exercise a day, I’ll set my goal to 10.

Right now I have goals set in Streaks for “Move” calories, walking distance, stand hours, exercise, sleep, and meditation. Streaks syncs with Apple Health as well so the actual effort of tracking my goals is minimal, and because the goals themselves are only slightly more than what I usually do in a day, I’ve actually been meeting the goals almost every day. In fact, most days, I exceed them. Contrast this to a few weeks ago, when the idea of meeting any of them let alone all of them seemed out of reach – this is a win in my book.

Because I’m going off of the average trend, the goals feel achievable even on my worst days. More importantly, as the trend goes up, I’ve been incrementally increasing the goals (albeit slowly), which much to my surprise hasn’t felt as onerous as it had in the past.

Maybe, by the end of the year, I’ll be back up to where I’d hope to be, but for now, making progress a little at a time feels good. And feeling good is something we could all use a little more of right now.

Some Tips for Working from Home

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As I’m sure many of you also are, I’ve been working from home due to the current COVID-19 pandemic for a little over 2 weeks now. Previously, I’d been teleworking one day a week, but working from home full-time is an entirely different experience. While I adapted quickly to teleworking, I quickly realized working from home was going to take some extra considerations on my part, so I figured I’d share some of those tactics I’ve been using with you all.

Get Dressed Every Day

While it’s tempting to wear comfy clothes all day, I’ve made it a point to still get up and get dressed as though I’m going to work each morning. I get to sleep in a little extra because I’m not actually commuting, but I’m still at my computer every morning at 7:45AM ready to work and also ready for any surprise Webex meetings.

Fake a Commute

Two issues with working from home are the tendency to sit all day and also the lack of a concrete beginning and end to the workday. To solve both of these, I’ve started hopping on my spin bike for 15 minutes at the beginning and end of each day. It not only closes my Apple Watch’s exercise ring for the day, but it also creates a beginning and end to my workday that has been sorely missing now that I’m not driving to and from work each day.

I also rigged up a makeshift laptop stand for my spin bike with some random things lying around the house, so if I’m feeling restless during the day, I can get a bit of additional activity in.

Engage All the “House Bots”

I think I got this idea from CGPGrey, but it’s simple and oddly effective. If needed, I try to start my dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, and/or robotic vacuum before I start working. It seems sad to say but I almost feel a sense of guilt for not working if they are. I also employ this on particularly lazy weekends or sick days, with the understanding that even if I feel like I’ve not done much, the “house bots” have at least done something to keep things moving.

Create a Dedicated Workspace

This one seems obvious, but I honestly put off having a dedicated workspace for much longer than I should have. When teleworking just once a week, I didn’t really see much of a point. I just grabbed my laptop and rotated through several locations (couch, patio, dining room table, etc) depending on the time of day and lighting in the house.

It took about a week of working from home full time to realize I missed some of the things I had at work like my extra monitor. I also realized how darn uncomfortable my dining room chairs are for sitting any longer than about an hour. Buying a chair cushion and pulling my old Apple Thunderbolt Display out from the depths of my closet were a must.

Do a Daily House Reset

This is a habit I got into before having to work from home, but I’m glad I did. Each day, I make sure to do a few basic things to keep the house in order. I don’t do them all at once. I generally spread them throughout the day whenever it makes sense so it doesn’t feel like a lot but doing them makes spending all day every day at home a little more tolerable.

At a minimum, these are some of the things I do as part of my daily house reset:

  • Make the bed when we wake up (This is actually possible right now since the other half is waking up with me.)
  • Scoop the cat box while I’m in the bathroom getting ready.
  • Empty the dishwasher while making my morning coffee.
  • Pick up anything that’s out of place as I’m walking around the house. I try to drop it off as close to the room it does belong in on my way to wherever I’m going. Our condo is essentially one long hallway so things are generally going one way or another down it.
  • Before bed, pick up any dishes and start the dishwasher.

Practice Self-Care

Let me start by saying I hate the phrase self-care. At the same time, I feel like we all really need it right now. For most of us, our lives have been upended by what’s going on. We’re having to deal with the reality of an awful pandemic that’s affecting just about everyone we know and love. We’re having to find creative ways to socialize with friends remotely. We’re learning to cohabitate (read: not fight) with housemates in closer quarters than usual, and if you’re like me, you’re also probably having to rebuild your entire work-life remotely in a time when work doesn’t always seem quite as important as everything else going on. None of this is normal, and it can be pretty overwhelming if you don’t take time for yourself.

I realized it’s way too easy to get caught in a cycle of scrolling through news, and if that’s the only thing you do, things start to look pretty grim. I’ve made it a point to carve time out of each day to practice mindfulness and think about what I’m grateful for, while also intentionally limiting my news consumption. I’ve also lowered some of the expectations for myself during this time. There are more important things to worry right now about than depriving myself of a piece of cake after dinner.

I hope everyone is doing well. If there’s any way I can be of help during this time, don’t hesitate to reach out.

More Efficient Meal Planning

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I wanted to take a bit of a detour on the blog today and share something that I’ve been trying out recently to simplify things at home and save us a bit of money in the process. (Added bonus, it’s also helping me be more healthy so it’s also contributing to my year of health).

I received a copy of Cook Once Eat All Week for Christmas, and it’s been getting used just about every week since.

In essence it’s a cookbook centered on meal planning, but if by meal planning, you’re thinking you have to eat the same thing packaged into containers for a week straight, think again. The recipes are each quite different.

Meal Prepped Food In Containers

Prepped Ingredients from Week 1

The title itself is actually a bit of a misnomer. You don’t actually cook once. You actually cook throughout the week. What you actually do once is most of the meal prep, which cuts the time you spend on cooking during the rest week down to 10 or 20 minutes.

There are a few things about the book that have made it work for us more-so than other cookbooks or recipe services we’ve tried in the past:

  1. Each week is based around 3 main ingredients (usually a protein, a veggie, and a starch). This means we can save by buying things in bulk even though we’re only a household of two with limited freezer space.
  2. Each week features 3 recipes that serve 4-6 (plus two bonus meals). Well before this book, I found that planning for 3 dinners at home is the perfect amount for us each week. Three dinners (plus our usual night or two out or ordering carryout) usually leave just enough leftovers for lunches or nights when only one of us is home without throwing away a ton of food. This has taken a lot of the guesswork out of which meals to make each week. I just pick a week and those are my three meals. For larger families or those who prefer to eat in every night, I realize 3 meals isn’t enough, but for us, it’s just about perfect.
  3. Grocery lists are already made. Each week also comes with a pre-prepared grocery list meaning as long as we stick to those 3 meals, our grocery list is practically made for us give or take a few usual extras like milk, coffee creamer, or some time of fruit.
  4. Ingredients are straight forward. I’ve tried meal planning services in the past, and the one thing I couldn’t stand was always having to buy some obscure ingredient. Not only did this require a special trip to a grocery store other than Aldi, I often never used the items again. This book seems to feature pretty common ingredients. There have been a few items Aldi hasn’t stocked but they’re often pantry items I’ve reused in subsequent weeks. As we start to stock our pantry properly, I’m finding that our grocery list is becoming mostly just meats and produce.

Unexpectedly, I’ve found a couple unexpected bonuses as well:

  • Prepping everything on a single day means the kitchen only gets really messy for one day versus multiple days. Most of the messy steps requiring pots, pans, knives, and cutting boards have already been taken care of prior to cooking during the week.
  • It simplifies trash and compost. We tend to do our shopping and meal prep on Sundays or Mondays which happens to be around the time we set out our trash to get picked up for the week so most of the packaging gets thrown out almost immediately. I also keep our compost bin out and open while prepping so the bulk of our scraps get tossed into the bin all at once rather than having to open it several times throughout the week.
  • Last but not least, I find I’m getting more confident in the kitchen. I don’t mind cooking, and I’ve never been told I’m terrible at it. That being said, I tend to gravitate towards making what I’m comfortable with and that tends to be some variation of a cheesy chicken casserole found on Pinterest. This book has pushed me out of my comfort zone both in terms of flavors but also by helping me improve overall skills.

The book is composed of 26 weeks of recipes. Rather than working straight through from Week 1-26, we’re working through the weeks based on what’s in season (based on a chart included as an online extra). Thus far, we’re halfway through our 5th week and have made Weeks 1, 3, 4, and now 8.

Food in Casserole Dish

BBQ Chicken Broccoli Cauliflower Rice Casserole Before it went in the oven

Admittedly, some weeks have been home runs (e.g. Week 1) and others not so much, so I’m recording our thoughts on each week in Evernote in hopes that I can find at least several to rotate through. As an added help on my part, I’m also snapping photos of each week’s worth of prep and recipes and including them in Evernote as well. Not only does this allow me to have the recipes on my iPad while I cook, which I prefer, I can also pull up the recipes or prep instructions while I’m away from home if I need to. For our home run recipes like the Loaded Cauliflower Casserole from Week 3, I’ve also added just the recipes themselves directly to my recipe manager, Paprika, in the event we just want to make the recipe on its own.

All in all, this book has taken most of the guesswork out of cooking for the week. Cooking is almost fun again. We’re eating at home more and we’re eating much better too. Two thumbs up for this book from me.

One Word for 2020

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Each year I try to set a one word “theme” for the year. It’s not a goal, but more of a guiding principle to keep in mind.

Another yearly tradition I try to do is recap the previous year and post the current year’s focus to the blog. In my mind, this is something I do every year, but in looking over my past blog posts, it seems to be less of an actual tradition than I thought. Whoops! (Note to self: Add “Post Yearly Theme Post” task to Things)

So since I didn’t post my theme for last year, I guess I’ll start my 2019 recap by sharing that it was “Intention.”

I had started feeling as though I was just blowing where ever the wind (or people in my life, rather) wanted to take me. As a type-A person, the added spontaneity was initially a breath of fresh air, but over time, my days became increasingly dictated by what other people wanted to do. As a result, I lost any sense of where I was heading. I figured that by being intentional, I’d regain some sort of control and hopefully find some sort of direction in the process.

In hindsight, I think a better name for the year’s focus would have been “boundaries”. It took the better part of the year for me to realize that I was blowing wherever the wind took me because I’d failed to set boundaries. While it seemed easier to go along with what other people want to do, I was losing my own life in exchange for everyone else’s in the process.

If I could pick the most significant takeaway from 2019, it’d be relearning how to “take up space” (as my therapist calls it) in my life again.

I started really thinking about things like:

  • What do I want in life?
  • What do I need?
  • What things am I only doing because other people wanted me to do them?

I still don’t have entirely clear answers on them, but I am learning to be honest with myself and others about what I will and won’t spend time on. This has meant saying no to more things, accepting that not everyone will be okay with my decisions, and most importantly reminding myself that saying no isn’t selfish or rude.

An unintended consequence becoming more comfortable with what I want in life is that I may have indulged myself a little too much towards the latter half of the year. I’d set a well-meaning intention to relax after a long week, but I’d do so by spending the day on the couch mindlessly shopping, snacking, and watching YouTube followed by going out for drinks and binging on mozzarella sticks and nachos while doing so only to feel awful the next day. Comparing my couch-potato tendencies to that of my significant other, who often spends his days playing hockey and ordering salads whenever we go out, only left me feeling more and more sorry for myself.

It was so obvious I needed to start exercising again and start eating better foods, but I’d reached a point where I felt too tired to do either. Instead, I spent more and more time on the couch feeling sorry for myself. By the end of the year, I’d stopped working out entirely and spent the bulk of my 2-week break on the couch.

So with that in mind, my focus for 2020 is health – both physical and mental.

I realize health is a pretty generic theme. Everyone wants to lose weight, go to the gym, eat better, and meditate more in the new year. It’s probably the most cliche theme I could pick, but considering where I ended 2019, I didn’t see any other option.

This year I’m not setting resolutions or goals to work out x number of days or lose a set amount of weight.

I’m simply asking myself, “What would a healthy person do?” whenever I find myself feeling resentful about my behaviors.

Would a healthy person watch YouTube on the couch all day?

Probably not.

But I’m also way too addicted to Gourmet Eats at this point to give up watching it completely. I could swap sitting on the couch for watching it while on my spin bike instead though.

Would a healthy person eat pizza rolls for dinner 5 days a week?

Probably not.

But I’m also generally exhausted after work. Expecting a gourmet meal every night isn’t realistic, but I can stock my kitchen with healthier options.

I usually wrap up my yearly focus posts by listing my specific goals for the year, but as I’ve already said, I’m not doing that this year. In fact, as I’ve gotten better at using my yearly focus to guide my decisions, I’ve been reducing the number of goals I set over the years.

There are a few I still do set like a yearly reading goal, and I obviously can’t ignore my work-related goals set by my supervisor. Aside from that, however, I’ve only set one goal for 2020.

For those of you who follow me on Instagram, you may have spotted a hint already in a post from the summer, but I haven’t actually shared anything on this blog yet mainly because I try to keep my private life private.

In any event, my better half proposed last summer, so that’s my one and only goal for this new year – to get married.

Do you set goals or a yearly theme for the year? If so, I’d love to hear what yours are!

Update & Brief Posting Delay

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I’m popping into the blog today to briefly explain my posting absence.

As some of you may know, my primary job is managing a help desk at a university. Our Fall semester started about three weeks ago which means I’ve been knee-deep in our busiest time of year.

Somewhere in those three weeks, there were also a number of events including celebrating my 29th birthday. (Happy belated birthday to me!)

Then, just as I seemed to be reaching the end of my busy season, I was thrown an unexpected curveball when a neighbor above me called a plumber to unclog a shared pipe in the building. It wasn’t until later that night that I discovered the plumber unknowingly unclogged the pipe by pushing it straight into my condo, and by that time, there’d already been extensive water damage caused in both my condo and the unit below me.

Thankfully, the issue was due to a shared pipe, so I was not responsible for the damages. It did mean, however, that for the better part of the past week, I was forced to deal with with a few sleepless nights, having to take off work, daily visits from a remediation company, almost deafening dehumidifiers and fans running constantly, and worst of all – watching along in horror as the flooring I was so thrilled about having put in when I bought the place were ripped up.

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While it doesn’t look all that bad in the photo, and admittedly it could have been a LOT worse, the concerning issue is that the flooring, which is now discontinued, runs throughout my condo with no breaks. Unless the pieces they gingerly removed are salvageable, we will be in for a lengthy fight and headache to have our homeowner’s association replace the floors entirely.

Normally, I try to post here every other week, but, admittedly, this is one of those cases where life even my best laid plans have been completely thrown out the window. Expect a new post in 2 weeks or so, as I get things back in order.

Top Photo by Oliur on Unsplash

Taking on the Chores CleanMama Style

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This week’s post is a bit of a divergence from this blog’s normal content, but these two changes in our house have had such an impact on my sanity, I couldn’t help but share. I’ll be back with a fun tech tip that leverages both Evernote and Things in 2 weeks.

 

I’d love to be able to tell you my house looks like one of those immaculate photos you find on Pinterest every day. Unfortunately, no house that people actually live in is capable of looking like that. More often than not, the kitchen counters are covered in that day’s meals. The dining room and balcony play host to a variety of hockey and music equipment, sofa cushions are thrown on the floor, and equal piles of laundry are sitting in the dryer, the hampers, and on the bed.

 

I’ve tried a number of methods to keeping the house clean over the years, but they all ended up being too complicated to keep up – even for me with my excessively organized to-do apps. (Spoiler alert: keep reading for a screenshot of how I’m using Things to manage household chores.) For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying out something different, and it’s working.

 

Adapted from Becky Rapinchuk’s Clean Mama routine, the house certainly isn’t spotless, but by tackling a little bit each day, it has been getting consistently cleaner. Even better, I’m spending considerably less time cleaning which is actually kind of mind-blowing.

 

Getting Started

First things first, I set up the house for to be incredibly easy to clean. I tossed all the old cleaners. I also gave up on trying to be one of those people who makes their own cleaning products. It seems like a great idea, but eventually you have to make more, and the added step of measuring ingredients becomes another reason to avoid cleaning.

 

Under each sink in the house I have a spray bottle of Mrs. Meyers Multi-Surface Spray. Each of the bathrooms also have Mrs. Meyers Tub and Tile spray and toilet bowl cleaner. With only three cleaning products to choose from, it’s no longer a question of which one to use, and because everything’s right under the sink where it should be, there’s no longer any question of where the cleaning products are. I keep bins of microfiber cloths in both the kitchen and linen closet, both of which happen to be conveniently at either end of the condo.

 

Daily Tasks

Every day, Becky’s routine recommends the five following tasks:

  • Make the Beds – Admittedly we don’t do this. I’ve never been a bed maker unless I’m feeling extra tidy. It’s also a struggle when you share a bed with someone who wakes up before or after you pretty much every day. That being said, countless people recommend doing this to set the tone for your day, so go for it if it suits you.
  • Check Floors – Our Neato vacuum takes care of the majority of this for us every day. (Thanks Neato. 🙂) I do have a small broom and dust pan in the master bathroom to sweep up around the cat box, but since we use pellets instead of clay litter this is a 2 second job most days.
  • Wipe counters – I’m a bit surprised to say I’ve gotten into quite the habit of wiping down the counters throughout the house any time I use them. Having the Mrs. Meyers spray within reach helps.
  • Clutter – I try to put things away while I’m walking around the house throughout the day, but I also have a few bins and baskets scattered around the house now for corralling the other half’s things (and some of mine too) when things get out of hand.
  • Laundry – This is another thing I don’t do daily, but instead weekly. More on that later.
I’ve also added a couple of our own tasks to the list:

 

 

  • Scoop the cat box – This is a daily necessity in a multi-cat household.
  • Empty the kitchen sink (and, if it’s full or nearly full, run the dishwasher).

 

 

Tackling these daily tasks takes maybe 15 minutes, and since I tend to do them as I’m going throughout my day, I don’t feel like I have a mountain of chores waiting for me each night when I get off work.

 

Weekly Tasks

In addition to the daily tasks, Becky recommends adding in a 10-15 minute weekly task each day of the week.

 

Mondays are bathroom cleaning days. I used to dread cleaning them, but her method is pretty darn easy. (Spray everything down. Let sit for a few minutes. Wipe from top to bottom. I’m simplifying here, but not much.)

 

Tuesdays are for dusting. It only takes a few minutes to run through the entire house with a microfiber duster. I might even consider it fun if I dare say so. Once I’m done, it goes in the hamper to be washed with the towels later in the week.

 

Wednesdays are for vacuuming. We don’t have any carpet, and Neato does a pretty good job at vacuuming the floors for us every day, so I use Wednesdays to vacuum things other than the floor (furniture, cat beds, air vents, ceiling fans, etc).

 

Thursdays are for washing the floors. I have a spray mop that I can quickly clean the floors with for this. This is one case where I do still make my own cleaning solution, but it’s easy enough to do, and it lasts a while. (Side note if you’ve followed along, you’ll notice I’ve already dusted and vacuumed up said dust on the previous two days, so the floors are already ready for mopping. Genius!)

 

Friday is considered a catch all day for things like your weekly review or meal planning. This means there’s no major cleaning on Friday.

 

Saturdays are for washing all sheets and towels. While this routine probably works great for a family, when your other half is a musician, Saturdays for us are pretty busy.

 

Sunday is technically a free day, but it has always been my laundry day for as long as I can remember so it made sense to just keep it that day. I now also change and wash the sheets on this day rather than doing it randomly throughout the week. I’ve found that by doing all the laundry at once on one day, I’m more likely to get into “laundry mode,” and therefore I’m much more likely to fold/hang everything as it comes out of the dryer rather than letting it pile up.

 

If you’re wondering where all the other monthly/seasonal household maintenance tasks are, I just slot these in throughout the week as time permits. It turns out that you actually have time to do things like wash the baseboards and clean the appliances when you’re only spending 15-20 minutes on regular cleaning.

 

As promised, here’s what it all looks like in Things.
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I had my doubts when I started this routine. I thought to myself, I couldn’t possibly keep the house clean by just doing those few things. I seriously cut my Chores list in Things in half. Somehow it works though, and my house is tidier than ever. Moreover, I actually find myself wanting to clean, so I’ll call it a success in my book.