Prioritize. Focus. Decide what’s Important.

Cathy Zielske recently posted How do you find the time? on her blog. Her post is in response to reader’s questions. Zielske has been on a quest this year to “move more and eat less” and has been successful in losing weight. Part of her “moving more” is running. Her blog readers wonder, how does she find the time?

The issue of time came up in my dissertation in a few different ways. Among my respondents, they all made time for scrapbooking. They may have devoted a weekend every few months to scrapbooking. If they were mothers, may have their husband take care of their children’s bedtime routine a couple of times a month so they could scrapbook. They may have purchased time by attending an in-store crop. They didn’t just wait for time to appear so that they could scrapbook just like Zielske isn’t just waiting for time to appear so that she can run. They make time. They have said that this is something that is important to me. I am going to fit it into my life.

The other thing to note is that people believe they need big blocks of time to accomplish many tasks. No, you only need a few minutes. There is a book called Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis about how you can finish this huge task a little bit at a time (in my experience, however, you will need a bit more than 15 minutes a day if you want to graduate in a timely manner). I also recall an Oprah episode with Peter Walsh, the organizing expert. He talked about how you only have to organize one cabinet a day and you will eventually get through the big task of organizing your home. The point is that you don’t need a lot of time to do anything. You just need a few minutes a day and you can accomplish quite a bit.

To use your few minutes a day, you have to know what you are going to do with your time. Make a list. If you only have five minutes to scrapbook, what can you do? Here are some ideas:
*Edit photos
*Order prints
*Take photos
*Journal on your computer so you can print it out when you are ready for that page
*Put your supplies away
*Organize one drawer or box of scrapbook supplies
*Organize one sleeve of printed photos
*Sketch a layout idea
*Mark a layout idea you have to scraplift
*Match photos with paper and embellishments
*Lay out how you might complete the page with your photos, paper, and embelishments

You might not complete an entire scrapbook page in five minutes, but there is quite a bit you can accomplish with only five minutes. Pick a task and just do it. In a few weeks you will have a lot of scrapbooking done to show for this. Any other ideas of you can do scrapbooking-wise with only a few minutes a day? Leave a comment below.