Lessons in Organization…

I spent a couple of hours last night with my daughter, whose senior year in HS schedule along with a couple of evening classes at the local community college, along with all her college applications due this fall, is not for the faint of heart.  We talked for a long time about how one goes about getting it all done.  Sometimes I feel like a master of the technique, and sometimes an abject failure, I always pull it out in the end, and my daughter’s comments mirrored that sentiment, but sometimes what you pull out in the end isn’t quite your best because you left too little time to really do the job justice.

I’m a big believer in lists.  I have a Google Calendar, accessible from all of my electronics, and printed up month by month on the refrigerator.  It sync’s with my husband’s calendar as well.  But my calendar on the refrigerator doesn’t break down each little task I need to accomplish in a day, like “Clean the Bathrooms” and “Sort the Bills for Payment”.  For those task lists, I use a little daytimer calendar on my desk, and pencil in the day’s assignments.  It is with great joy that I erase each task as it is completed.  This week saw lots of catch up work at the desk, contracts, a book review, an upload for edits of my next installment of my quasi monthly column for Weavezine.  I had a local business man in town send me some pants to hem, a favor I’ve been doing for him for years.  I had to add that to the list.  I had to order more shoulder pads, more Form Flex interfacing, more 15 denier nylon tricot, and more office supplies.  And there were all the final meetings and adjustments to the weaver’s guild schedule for the year, since I’m in charge of programming.  All of those tasks got added to my little daytimer, so I didn’t have to waste anymore brain power trying to remember what I had to remember.  I broke down the bigger tasks into smaller pieces and tried to create a realistic schedule for myself of what I needed to get done and by when…

I tried to share this system with my daughter who is in the throes of cramming the unfinished summer assignments in calculus and English into the last few days before school starts.  At 17, sometimes it is easier to sit at the computer watching Japanese Anime, (in Japanese) for 5 hours than tackle the tasks that really need to be done.  I felt like that last night when I started knitting another pair of socks and I was really suppose to be cleaning the bathrooms.  Toilets, socks, toilets, socks, the pull was just too much…  In the end, because I’ve been doing this a long time, I managed to do both, and went to bed quite happy with myself.

My daughter worked late into the night creating her own Google Calendar.  I don’t know how long it will last, but these are baby steps.  Learning how to prioritize the tasks, and stay on them is tough for anyone, especially a 17 year old who gets distracted by a roll of duct tape…  And I continue to add to, erase, and adjust my own list of tasks as the week moves forward and I do the final preparations for my flight Sunday to Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, I finished reading a wonderful tome while I was in Harrisville last week.  Marion Marzolf, a talented weaver and retired journalism professor wrote a lovely historical fiction novel about a Swedish Immigrant, Lisa Lindholm, born in 1911, who made her way to the United States as a young girl to teach weaving in a small mountain school in Appalachian, NC.  Lisa’s fictional life weaves in and out of the early history of 20th century handweaving in the United States, and I read with great joy and surprise each time Lisa crossed paths with one of the weaving greats, all part of my own historical  background studies in the 1970’s, Else Regensteiner, Edward Worst, Lenore Tawney, Lucy Morgan and Penland, Cranbrook Art Academy, etc.  I really enjoyed reading this book, and found myself heading off to my own library shelf to revisit books I haven’t looked at in years, three of Else Regensteiner’s, Ed Worst’s book “Weaving with Foot Powered Looms“, and a book on Bauhaus Textiles.  The full review is available on Weavezine.com along with information on ordering the book, Shuttle in her Hand, from the Swedish-American Historical Society.

OK, cross “update blog” off the list…