This week’s topic is a knee jerk reaction to a busy week. There was a lot of running around with children, without children, a flurry of emails, and a long to-do list. Does this sound familiar? When I stood still in a shop for a few minutes my eye caught a range of magazines stating SLOW. Slow cooking, slow living, slowing down. That sounded very appealing. One tagline caught my eye especially; Slow, because good things take time. How beautiful! It is most likely also something that we should really hear and ponder in our day-to-day rush going places, and doing things.

Organise and slow down for the good things

All good things take time; raising children, nurturing relationships, learning and you guess; organising. I am often a supporter of the idea of using timers to allow only 5 or 15 minutes to do a job and then move on. This serves a function, as it hopefully helps us focus and it makes us realise that a lot of the things we think take hours, take in reality a few minutes. Think ironing – well I guess it depends a bit on when the last time was you ironed.

You could, however, use the idea of slowing down and work with the philosophy that good things take time, in organising just as well. If you have a busy week, why not give yourself a little time to slowly clear the kitchen counter, to casually walk to the bin. To peacefully empty one drawer and sort through it. The benefit of purposefully going slow is that automatically our expectations lower and hopefully our stress levels will follow.

Why not practice going slow tomorrow morning?

Get up and enjoy the process of putting items away that have been scattered around in a week full of activities.
Celebrate each little achievement made and take the time to acknowledge what has been done well.
Even though you’ll go slow you won’t be unfocussed, pick an area and clear this slowly, before moving on.

Remember each drawer, each clear surface is a victory and it tastes much sweeter if we get there over a period of time and went slowly so we could enjoy the process and each step along the way. Here is to organising slowly.