Slow it Down

 I have a personality that it is all or nothing.  I am full steam ahead or I am floundering in the rear and flailing around.  I can see the effects of this quite clearly in my life quite a bit.  I have come to the realization that this has happened in the last week or two.  So now I have to back track and correct my course.  At least I figured it out, right?

This seems to be part of my intrinsic nature.  I find a project and I dive right on in.  I'm so excited and ready to slay the project.  I'm going to be Mary-Conqueror-Fran!  It is going to be fabulous!    Seriousl, how many times have I come up with some new project that I am full fledged invested in and after a week or two never mention it again. Sometimes I am even embarrassed to start a new project or idea on here because there is so many.    I don't even want to look....but there are a LOT.    Lets see, there is 2024 miles in 2024.  There was the tracker journal that I was creating each month.  Ohheck, I am stopping there because it depresses me!   But that goes hand in hand with a recent post that I made about finishing projects.  I wrote about how it was time to stop spreading myself thin.  How it was time to clean up all this clutter and finally finish some projects. (You can read about that here.)  I even started this clean up mission!  I made myself a list for last weekend of things that I wanted to do in order to get closer to finishing some of these projects!  I trucked through the project like there was no tomorrow!  I was so proud of myself!  (Seriously, I was proud.  You can sense it in every word of this post.)  Riding high on my weekend success I made a list for the upcoming week and I was doing AMAZING with it!  

And somehow about the middle of the week I started to really think about something.  I started to realize that I was focused on the wrong thing.  I was focused on finishing projects.  I was focused on completing tasks.  I was not focusing on doing them in the highest quality possible.  I was rushing through things like a mad woman in order to be able to cross one thing off my list and in the process was sacrificing the quality of the project.   Case in point.   I had put together a lot of recipes from mom into small recipe book.  I had gone over it and deemed it 'done' and went through the process of putting it on Amazon, with a publish date for later this year.  I ordered a proof.  When I got the proof I was disappointed with some things about it.  Things that were totally in my control!  No worries.  I sat down and figured to fix them quickly, upload and move on.  But it didn't go smoothly.  I was getting frustrated.  The frustrated side of me said "just scrap the project".   But the other side said, 'but no, I want to finish projects, not scrap them'  (I know if I walk away from the project that I will most likely see it in another 6 months or one year and pick it back up as an 'unfinished project.)     And that is when I had my epiphany.   Slow it down.  It's great to have a to do list.  And sure, it's great to cross things off multiple items as completed.  But it's even more fantastic to cross of ONE thing that is done to the absolute best of your ability!  Something that you can be proud of!  

So I am regrouping.  What I did on the recipe book was not in vain.  However,  instead of crossing it off and saying that the project was completed, I need to say that it was just one STEP that was crossed off.  That one step brings me closer to the project being complete.  

So the first thing is to SLOW DOWN.   The second thing is to focus on ONE THING at once.  On the day that I was trying to make those corrections on the recipe book I was also working on a a different project.  I was dividing my attention between the two projects and both of the projects were suffering.  So one thing at a time.  

So for my current to do list for the next few days, I only have ONE writing project on there and only ONE sewing project on there.  There will be more than enough to keep me busy on those.  But I need to let my mind focus on the task at hand.   

Regrouping, refocusing and still 100% committed to completing these projects and streamlining my life!