I never hide the fact that I love to work and I am extremely passionate about what I am doing right now. But you know, work is work, and sometimes it’s tough to get through my long workday. So over time I’ve found a few ways to make my workdays a bit more pleasant and thought I’d share them here:

1. Start each day by doing something that energizes you. In an ideal world, I’d work out in the morning, before work. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pretty good about getting rid of clutter around the house. My husband would say I am too good at times, and yes, I’ve been known to throw out a piece of paper we need later on. But most of the time my de-cluttering obsession serves us all well.

Recently I realized that there were a few small areas in the house that weren’t well organized and annoyed me every time I had to interact with them.

• The small cabinet we have in the kitchen where we store randomness of every kind and the top of which had become “put stuff here and then ignore it for days” area.

• The box in my daughter’s room which contains her hair pins, ribbons, and various other hair accessories. It’s a mess.

• The pantry. Yes, I still feel giddy that we actually have a pantry, since it’s the size of what for years was our New York City kitchen. And the nice people who lived in our house before us put up some convenient shelving in it, which is helpful. But perhaps because I’ve never had a pantry before this one turned into a random mess quite quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a to-do list junkie. There, I’ve said it.

I write my to-do list every night for the following day and more often than not I actually re-write it at some point during the day. I am also a neat-freak, which means that if the list is getting messy — because things keep getting added to it, crossed off, written diagonally to fit them in — I am going to re-write it. (Yes, I am a little like Monk. OK, more than a little.) My to-do list is one of my key productivity tools and I am constantly trying to tweak it to make it work better. I wrote about one idea here and love this post from Zen Habits about actually using your to-do list to get things done.

So I got an idea this weekend to actually share my to-do list with all of you and to ask you to do the same. I am not exactly sure how this will be helpful, but I think it can be. (It will at least make for some fun perusing, since admit it, it’s a sneak peak into a life of a fellow busy working mom.) And then just as I was thinking about posting my list, I came across this post from Carmen, over at Mom to the screaming masses. Her list made mine look easy in comparison, which was awesome, since I was feeling overwhelmed. And that further indicated to me that this is a good idea for all of us to do. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m the first person to complain about not having enough time. My to-do list is ALWAYS getting longer vs. shorter, I don’t read enough, paint enough, see friends and family enough, and oh, sleep enough. If I could just add an hour to my day it would make a difference.

Well, this is what I usually think. But I recently had a strange experience: A working day without interruptions. My husband took my daughter to school and picked her up. The babysitter (who comes after school for a few hours) met them outside and stayed outside to play with my daughter, removing even that brief usual interruption in my day when we get home from school and do the “transfer”, as I call it. I was feeling sick so I skipped my daily workout and it was snowing, so I didn’t go for my daily half-hour walk. In other words, I had a full 9 hours to work, uninterrupted.

I’ll spare you the details and get to the punch line: I got less done than on a normal day. Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I read an article in the New York Times about a book called The 4-Hour Workweek. According to the article it’s sweeping the Silicon Valley, dominated by start-up and technology companies where many employees’ workweeks are closer to 60 hours. Clearly everyone who is reading it knows that the premise of a 4-hour workweek is impossible, but the book’s popularity might have something to do with what we all know–most of us work too much and we do a lot of things during our workdays that reduce our productivity and make us work longer.

One of those things–as described in the book and in numerious other blog posts, studies, and articles on productivity–is email. Or, more accurately, our addiction to email.

This resonated with me and not in a good way. I check my email throughout the day and unless I am on a call or out at a meeting, rarely does an email sit there without being read for more than a few minutes. OK, that was a lie–I often check email during conference calls. It’s part of my multi-tasking routine and one that I am certain slows me down during the day.

Here are somepretty wacky stats on email that I found on the book author’s site: Read the rest of this entry »