Habits are an interesting beast. They sneak up on us over time. With many habits, we don’t consciously set out to make them, they just happen. As the days pass and as we go about our lives, we set patterns. Like anything in life, habits can become either a force for good or a force for bad, it’s up to us to decide. I think we are all familiar with how difficult it is to change a bad habit.

I read an interesting book last year called Habit Stacking by S. J. Scott. It puts forward the premise that you can build on existing good habits by adding little things to existing routines. You evaluate how you do things, then you start adding to those existing patterns. I’ve tried this method and have had some moderate success in making changes.

The last five months, I’ve been putting down some serious habits. Habits about being at home all the time. Habits about having my weekends not eaten up by outside commitments. I didn’t realize how powerful those habits were becoming. This past week, I drove to Albuquerque to clean out my parents house, and I lost two whole weekends to the process. I feel like the flow in my sewing room has been completely severed. It hasn’t. I know that but it was a pretty big change after being home for 5 months.

I kept saying that I want to keep some of my weekends for sewing when life gets back to some semblance of normal, and August has driven that fact home for me. I’m already looking forward to this weekend, and the list of things I want to work on around here. Time management seems to be even more important now, and I need to incorporate some new habits that support the kind of time management I want to have in my life. The last five months, I’ve been making new habits without having any kind of plan to them. The time has come to be more mindful about those habits and have a plan.