Just start

You know what I’ve learned in the last few years? Just start the project. Start it even if you can’t get the whole thing done today or this week or even this month. Sitting around wishing you could transform your kitchen or paint your bedroom or setup a more functional drawer of hair supplies isn’t helping anyone.

Just start. 

Too often, my tendency is to have the whole thing figured out and executed in a short amount of time and that it kept me from doing it at all. In my life as a mom of 3 and a business owner, I never have long stretches of time to devote to any project so I just fit in little bits and pieces where I can.

And you know what? It’s really given me so much joy as I’m working on the project rather than just bemoaning the fact that I don’t have enough time to do said project.

Refreshing my dining room took months. First I found the China cabinet of my dreams so I could display Gram’s wedding china from 1956. It was months before I settled in on the table. And then even longer before I painted the room. And then I had to find chairs. I still have a centerpiece waiting to be spray-painted but that has to be put on hold at the moment because my dining room is currently covered in craft supplies; hello summertime!

Was it the smoothest process ever? Nope. (I even bought one table on Marketplace and decided I didn’t like it so I then sold it on Marketplace before buying a different one on Marketplace. You can imagine the uncertainty when I told David the second table was an hour away.) 

But if I was still waiting for a full week to be available for me to pour all of my time into it, it would still sit there looking exactly like it did before and it wouldn’t display any of Gram’s dishes.

So, I had to just start. 

And with just starting, comes the joy of the process rather than just the joy of the outcome.

On a smaller level, I’ve recently been thinking about how the amount of paper coming in and going out of this house is just not functional. I do my best to minimize that in the sense that if I can just put it in my calendar and toss the paperwork, I do that. Or fill things out and send them back asap so they aren’t sitting on the kitchen counter for a month. But there are still papers that I need to keep and I just don’t have a good system for it.

This is one of those things that I could spend tons of time over-thinking exactly what I want or getting caught up in the best system that Pinterest has to offer. But the truth is, I don’t have the time or energy for a full revamp; I just need a quick and functional setup.

So I spent $10 on tiered filing trays so that we can all have a spot and it gets the clutter off of the counter. In a perfect world, it would go inside a cabinet but I poked around and I just don’t have a cabinet to give up.

What are you going to just start this week? I bet when you do, you’ll find joy in the process of the project.