Sunday, August 28, 2011

"Baby Steps" / "Snowball" or "Eat Your Frog"?

It is the end of August and in our school district, school has started! This year, in two days to be exact, I will also start getting a little kid-free time since we have signed my little girl up for a mom's day out program in a nearby church for two mornings a week. Lucky me, I know! So, I thought, I should get my act together and work on some organizing projects.

But here is usually when I stop: where do I start?!

Everywhere I look, there is something to work on. How can I keep focus? How do I make sure I do not move on to a new area before finishing one? I have trouble in figuring out how I should approach it. Then, I remembered some time ago, I read an article about monthly decluttering projects. I then think of how I liked the idea of Flylady's Baby Steps, changing bad habits one at a time. Dave Ramsey's "snowball" idea on eliminating debt also makes a lot of sense for decluttering - if you replace "debt" with "clutter" and "personal finance" with "getting organized" in his second paragraph under his Baby Step 2.

So, come back to my original question, where do I start? One common first step with these ideas: make a list and tackle them one by one. Unless I want to follow Flylady's Baby Steps straight, I need to make my own list. Just as I am about to make my own list, SimpleMom's One Bite at a Time - 52 Projects for Making Life Simpler came out! (See, this is why she is SimpleMom and I am MessyWife: I think of making a list and she made a list and made an eBook. Oh well, we are not here to compare.) At my first glance at the title, I thought the idea behind agreed with my plan... So, I clicked on her sample page where she put up her list, hoping that I don't have to make my own - I found the first one on her list was "Eat your frog". I did a little search and found out what that means...

And now, the question becomes: should I eat my frog first or do my baby steps first?

You see, the idea behind Flylady's Baby Steps and Dave Ramsey's Snowball are both on motivation through accomplishing smaller tasks: when you get a no-matter-how-small task done, you have the motivation to do more. On the other hand, Eat Your Frog means to get rid of a task that you have been trying to avoid so you can go on your day without that particular task dragging you down.

So, should I begin with simple tasks or should I do my least favorite task first?