Hear that?  That ugly, groaning sound?  That’s the sound of my calendar sagging under the weight of my to-do list.  I’m a list maker.  I have lists of lists.  I use lists for a variety of purposes.  The obvious use is to actually function as a list.   The not so obvious use is how it becomes a basis for my problem solving process.

Some things are simple to work out:  the grocery list, the chores that have to be done this week, what to pack on a trip.  Some things are not so simple to work out:  how to invigorate my sewing business or how to declutter the house.  That’s where lists come in handy for me.

On the sewing business front, making a list starts off with listing the big ticket items that need to happen:  legal paperwork that needs to be updated, updating patterns to put them on Craftsy, coming up with new patterns based on my sketch book.  Each of these items is made up of tens if not hundreds of things that need to happen.  Spelling these things out on a list really helps me make sense of what I’m doing.  Am I leaving something out?  Is there work I can be doing in parallel?   One of the things that was brought up a lot at Sew Pro – is there work that I can have other people do?   Being a team of one is daunting.  You feel like absolutely everything is up to you and there just aren’t enough hours in the day unless I move to Saturn.  I’m starting to reach out to people to find out if I have options to get help.  It’s difficult to ask for help but that’s another topic for another post.

In the mean time I’m going to keep working on my lists, keep checking things off and keep eating that elephant one bite at a time.  (note the post title is based on a really old joke – how do you eat an elephant?  one bite at a time).