I'm kinda going nuts! I've got four more days before I head halfway around the world to see the people I love and get a little bit of a vacation - an actual break from what I have to do every day here - but I feel like the world has to end before I'm allowed to cross that finish line. I've got lots of work (both school and job) and I think my immune system is choosing now to give out. Or as my lovely friend Sarah likes to say, "give itself some exercise". Oh what stress does to our bodies!
I'm going to break things down and do them one step at a time. That's the only way to get through it.
How do you deal with stress and the holidays? Let me know in the comments below.
Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
05 December 2011
28 October 2011
October Post: Get Organized II
So I got some great comments on Monday's blog post about getting organized! Laura @ Catharsis shared her love of cozi.com - a site that helps you keep your life together using your tablet or smart phone. If I had a phone, I'm sure I'd be all over this. You can connect with all of your family members so that everyone uploads their schedules onto a common calendar, you can create to do lists for everyone so that you can stay on the same page. Very cool site.
Jamie @ Chosenchaos pointed me in the direct of Erin Condren organizers. You can find some gorgeous bound organizers at this site filled with bright bold colors, useful tabs and great holiday/event ideas.
Thanks for sharing!
The last organizer that I want to share with you today is all about getting ready for the holidays. The blog eighteen25 brings us this awesome holiday organizer for those of you with long lists of holiday cheer to spread. The site gives you a step-by-step rundown of how to create your own holiday organizer from a composition notebook, some scrapbook or wrapping paper and some of their nifty printables. They even help you create tabs for your coupons, your gift lists, your Christmas cards and that calendar to help count down to the big day. If you're big on the holidays and always feel the stress come on the week before Thanksgiving, then this is the book for you.
Leave a comment to let me know you stopped by! Tell me how you beat the holiday stress and keep yourself organized. :)
Jamie @ Chosenchaos pointed me in the direct of Erin Condren organizers. You can find some gorgeous bound organizers at this site filled with bright bold colors, useful tabs and great holiday/event ideas.
Thanks for sharing!
The last organizer that I want to share with you today is all about getting ready for the holidays. The blog eighteen25 brings us this awesome holiday organizer for those of you with long lists of holiday cheer to spread. The site gives you a step-by-step rundown of how to create your own holiday organizer from a composition notebook, some scrapbook or wrapping paper and some of their nifty printables. They even help you create tabs for your coupons, your gift lists, your Christmas cards and that calendar to help count down to the big day. If you're big on the holidays and always feel the stress come on the week before Thanksgiving, then this is the book for you.
Leave a comment to let me know you stopped by! Tell me how you beat the holiday stress and keep yourself organized. :)
24 October 2011
October Post: And you thought you were busy before
This week's October posts will be dedicated to the current state of affairs in my household: BUSY! I know that I've been having a tough time fitting it all in and as we start creeping up on those big family holidays (Halloween - especially for those with kids, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's), work and shopping and cooking and cleaning and cards and every last thing that you never wanted to worry about at the same time will all start coming together.
Breathe folks! Don't let that above paragraph give you anxiety. This week's going to be about keeping it all under control, setting some goals for ourselves and keeping a master plan. The thing to do isn't to try to organize your life in one swift go - it's to start by making small parts of your life organized and then starting to organize outward.
The first resource I'm going to talk about is an entire website getting and staying organized. The ladies at Get Buttoned Up are some serious planning people! They have lists for reducing your lists - which is meta-listing. That's how serious these women get.
But you don't have to be that serious (or even have obsessive compulsive tendencies) to use some of the fabulous resources that these ladies make available for free on their Free Tools and Downloads page. Here's my favorite list that I've started using:
Breathe folks! Don't let that above paragraph give you anxiety. This week's going to be about keeping it all under control, setting some goals for ourselves and keeping a master plan. The thing to do isn't to try to organize your life in one swift go - it's to start by making small parts of your life organized and then starting to organize outward.
The first resource I'm going to talk about is an entire website getting and staying organized. The ladies at Get Buttoned Up are some serious planning people! They have lists for reducing your lists - which is meta-listing. That's how serious these women get.
But you don't have to be that serious (or even have obsessive compulsive tendencies) to use some of the fabulous resources that these ladies make available for free on their Free Tools and Downloads page. Here's my favorite list that I've started using:
I started using this for midterm goals (a few months) and I've found that it really worked for me. It's great to be able to break a project down into small pieces and set deadlines for yourself. I created this chart and found that I actually got ahead on the first three tasks, so I had time to do the last two at a slower, more reasonable pace. This could be used for holiday planning, your Christmas list, cooking for Thanksgiving, arranging a party, or just getting a project done around the house.
Another great resource that I don't think people use enough is a calendar. When I think of calendar use, I tend to think of the one calendar at my parents house on which the birthdays get written every year. Once a month (usually) my parents sit down and write general plans that they know about on the calendar and then it hangs on the wall... never to be touched again. Or at least not usually.
Personally, I've taken to using a weekly planner, which helps me keep my job and master's work in order - gotta keep those deadlines straight! There are, however, dozens of ways to make calendars more accessible and useful:
-Set up a dry erase board weekly calendar on your fridge. Use it to remember which nights you or the kids have events and activities, plan meals for the week, remind yourself that there's a birthday you really shouldn't miss on Thursday and that Wednesday is the day you're husband/roommate/live in occupational therapist has a late deadline, so you're only cooking for one.
- Find a nice planner that you feel comfortable writing down goals and making plans in.
- Create your own holiday planner, complete with calendar and lists of to dos on a manageable schedule (MORE ON THIS FRIDAY).
Get free calendars from sites like Calendar Labs where you can find free printable calendars of all kinds, or even your own gmail or microsoft outlook. People forget all the attachments these great accounts - and they appear right in your inbox.
So tell me, folks. How do you organize? Or, maybe more interestingly, how do you go nuts in the fall preparing for the holidays?
Please leave me a comment and to let me know you stopped by! Also consider stopping by lovelinks, where I've submitted this post.
12 October 2011
Some Self Reflection
Things have been so crazy and busy with school and work and everything that falls outside of those two categories that I've barely felt I had a moment to myself recently. I'm trying to make my workouts a mental muscle-memory reaction, be an efficient employee, prepare for my project and testing, keep my expanding philosophical thoughts expanding at their exponential rate by participating in some interesting conversations, and keep up my end in the blogosphere.
Many of these things are supposed to be outlets for the stress, but lately they've all been jumbled up with it. My husband asked me yesterday a bit about how I'm approaching life* and why I gather stress, so that I can remember how to let that stress go. What do I really need to work on and use as a focus for my activities?
This led me to some self-reflection about how I'm looking at the world. The great thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. The bad thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. It's great to be able to carry the good moments and connect them to the more mundane bits of my life, but it's difficult when stress becomes the overriding factor of the interconnected world I live in. While compartmentalization could be a simple solution to this problem, I don't like to chop my life up into bits. I needed to remind myself that when it comes to helping others, I like to keep positive about the options and possible paths ahead of them in hopes that they'll see the positive paths too. That is an outlook that I should carry over into every aspect of my life. There are several areas in my life in which I've been searching for a dao (a path, a way) to walk. Sometimes it looks like there's no path ahead of me that isn't painful and stressful and dark and dreary. I realized yesterday that this isn't the case. What makes the paths look that way is that I'm resistant to them.
It's time to spread my positive attitude to the stressful parts of my life. The fact is I have to walk a path. Why not like the path I'm walking? After all, this is what I'm making of myself.
What path are you walking? When do you set aside time to reflect? Please feel free to leave a comment!
*I must say, this is one of the many fabulous perks of being married to a philosopher. It's in his job description to think about and question and prod things. It makes for an interesting time around the house.
Many of these things are supposed to be outlets for the stress, but lately they've all been jumbled up with it. My husband asked me yesterday a bit about how I'm approaching life* and why I gather stress, so that I can remember how to let that stress go. What do I really need to work on and use as a focus for my activities?
This led me to some self-reflection about how I'm looking at the world. The great thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. The bad thing about liking to look at things holistically is that everything is connected. It's great to be able to carry the good moments and connect them to the more mundane bits of my life, but it's difficult when stress becomes the overriding factor of the interconnected world I live in. While compartmentalization could be a simple solution to this problem, I don't like to chop my life up into bits. I needed to remind myself that when it comes to helping others, I like to keep positive about the options and possible paths ahead of them in hopes that they'll see the positive paths too. That is an outlook that I should carry over into every aspect of my life. There are several areas in my life in which I've been searching for a dao (a path, a way) to walk. Sometimes it looks like there's no path ahead of me that isn't painful and stressful and dark and dreary. I realized yesterday that this isn't the case. What makes the paths look that way is that I'm resistant to them.
It's time to spread my positive attitude to the stressful parts of my life. The fact is I have to walk a path. Why not like the path I'm walking? After all, this is what I'm making of myself.
What path are you walking? When do you set aside time to reflect? Please feel free to leave a comment!
*I must say, this is one of the many fabulous perks of being married to a philosopher. It's in his job description to think about and question and prod things. It makes for an interesting time around the house.
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