Too many clothes, too little to wear

Re-inventing myself as I approach my 70's also means re-inventing my wardrobe.

Like so many, I have way too many clothes and too little to wear. Blogs about how to whittle down and edit a wardrobe so that it suits you are all over the web, but so many of them are aimed at younger women.

What I need to do now . . . and have been doing over the last several months . . . is just get rid of enough stuff so that I can see what I have.

I know it is a lot. Despite sending at least a dozen giant bags of discarded clothing to the local charities which sell or  recycle used clothes and perhaps another four or so bags straight to the trash, I still have clothing jammed into my armoire, shoved into boxes and old suitcases under the bed, in cartons in the attic and in TWO dressers in the bedroom.

It is just about time to exchange the Summer clothing in the armoire and dressers for the Winter clothing under the bed and in the attic. I am going to make one simple commitment to myself: to have at least one more giant bag off to the recyclers by the time I finish the exchange.

I know where I am going to start, too. For about three weeks in the Spring and another three in the Fall, the most comfortable way of dressing for the temperatures is a light t-shirt, or if it is a little cooler a turtleneck, under a button-down shirt. With decent jeans or good slacks and a simple accessory, this looks adequately put-together for my stay-at-home life and gets me in and out of the grocery store without embarrassment.

The problem? Jammed into my armoire are enough button-down shirts that I could wear a different one every day for a month and still have some left over. In fact, there are probably almost enough that I could wear a different one on each of those Spring and Fall days for the rest of my foreseeable life.

Time to haul them all out and pick a reasonable handful of the favourites.

Deadlines! Deadlines!

My desk notebook is up and running and so far proving helpful. I'm sure how it goes together will change over time, but yesterday I started five pages, one for each of the organizations for which I volunteer, one for personal, and one for blog and journal.

Then, for each page, I wrote down all the deadlines and meetings with their dates. I thought of the page as roughly representing the rest of the month and spaced the items out accordingly. In other words, a project due towards the middle of the time period was written about halfway down the page and one due at the end of the month was written towards the bottom. The spaces in between were used to list the things I needed to do in preparation for a particular project or meeting.

Next, of course, I worked backward. The draft for the presentation I will be making on the 28th has to be submitted for final approval two weeks before, so that is the 14th. And it needs to be circulated by the 11th (that's tomorrow!) for pre-approval at a meeting on the 13th.

Yes, see how tight this all is! I am probably not going to making these deadlines and am going to have to negotiate more time. But at least I know that I am going to have to do that now, which I wouldn't have if I was sticking to my old, no longer working, seat-of-my-pants ways.

It seems strange that I need to be learning this now, but the old ways used to work. And  right now, the new ways are difficult. Working backwards was hard, even though I guess, in some ways, I had always been doing it. Otherwise, I could never have functioned as well as I did.

But getting it down on paper was new. And I realized how useful it was once I had finished all the pages, and highlighted the various deadlines and meetings. It is easy now to look at all of them together and see the scheduling I will need if I am to get everything done in time.

It was also easy to see that I needed to stop my planning and quickly finish off a report due this morning. That was close!

Planning to Plan

I spent a lot of time yesterday looking at blogs about planning. Most of them involved making pretty plans in pretty planners. All were lovely to look at; none of them really worked for me.

But then I found this article on the Unclutterer (a fun and useful site about dealing with both physical and mental clutter). The idea that appealed to me was having two simple notebooks, one holding the to-do lists for my upstairs "office" where I do most of my writing, and one for my downstairs "nest" which seems to be homebase for much of my domestic planning.

Those notebooks can themselves be subdivided. The obvious way to do this in my office is a page or section for each of the organizations for which I do volunteer work plus one for personal stuff. I can do that now, although I suspect the exact divisions will evolve as I go along.

I am less clear about how to subdivide the domestic notebook. By how often tasks need to get done? By room? By general type (Errands, Cleaning, Decluttering, etc.)?

The Unclutterer article also led me to this which provides a very simple method of marking the status of items on the to-do lists. I think that should work pretty well, once I get the hang of it.

Still needed is someway of deciding priorities and setting deadlines. I have some ideas on that, but I need to think about it a bit more.

I'd love to hear your ideas! Please leave a comment!

Time to stop flying by the seat of my pants?

Thinking about what I wrote yesterday, I began to realize that a whole lot of the reason why I feel I am drifting through my life is that my old ways of managing my time just don't work very well.

Part of it is just being older. While I used to be able to keep multiple task lists more or less in my head and get most of them done, that just doesn't happen anymore. And I did that while living with two people who had to have very erratic schedules, so having much of a routine was never really possible or desirable.

But that's different now. One is retired and the other is only here three or four days of the week. So: still some chaos, but much more controlled.

The ever-evolving goals evolve again.

I need to learn how to work with routines, to figure out how to sort out priorities, and how to create and stick with schedules.

Definitely time to stop flying by the seat of my pants!

Getting Started

Two days ago, I started out with a list of very general objectives that I saw as being part of getting to seventy.

If I am to make any headway on these, I need to sort out where I am now and also figure out more precisely where I want to be in January.

Yesterday, I got more than a bit sidetracked by the mechanics of setting up a blog.That is going to be the case for a while longer.

But even so, and even without getting too specific about my objectives, I feel I have made a few baby steps towards one of them (which was to write more) and a much bigger step towards a more confident me.

Hey, I figured out a whole lot of stuff yesterday without resorting to the household geeks!

Back to those objectives.

One was to write more.

Over the years, I have intermittently kept a journal and I have also done a lot of writing for a couple of volunteer organizations. So writing isn't something I don't do, but I want to make more of it.

I want, most days, to write at least a short journal entry, and, of course, I have made the commitment to write here.

What worries me, though, is that I have gotten slack about the volunteer writing, too often missing deadlines or having to turn in sloppy work to meet them.It's true: some of the writing is not very creative -- things like minutes of meetings -- but some is quite rewarding.

So, what is the problem? What is the solution?

I'll be thinking about this over the next day and writing about it in the morning. But what do you think? I'd love you to comment.