efficiency

Mountains and Molehills

They say you shouldn’t make a mountain out of a molehill. (I have a couple of questions about that. First off, who is this mysterious “they”? And what do they have against molehills? Whoever they are, they’re probably not liked very much, if all they do is go on about mountains and molehills all the time.) Where was I? Oh right. Mountains and molehills. I’m all for the proverbial wisdom of the ages and all, but let’s face it: if you’ve got enough moles, and they all team together and work really hard, those moles can probably come up with […]

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Confessions of a Chronic Overcommitter

I overcommit. It’s something I know I do, and yet I do it anyway. The real problem is that I stop myself from committing to too many things to literally get done. If I started doing that, I think people would stop trying to turn to me to get things done in the first place. Instead, I take on enough work to make me insanely busy, but stop short of having enough work to make me incompetent and flaky. Does that make sense? And really, I suppose now that I type that, it isn’t exactly like that. I approach time

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Gingerbread Houses for the Lazy!

Not that my son is the lazy person in this instance. Rather, it’s me who’s the sloth. My k ids have wanted to do gingerbread houses for the last few years, and each year, Denisa and I plan on doing them. But it’s a fairly time-intensive project that requires planning and forethought. Let’s be honest–that description covers a lot of what goes on at the holidays, and there’s only so much planning and forethought I have to go around. (See  my post on why I don’t do Christmas cards for more on that.) Still, nothing like starting a new tradition

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Fighting Clutter: The Horizontal Surfaces Tax

I’ve been waging a long term war with clutter in my house. Long term as in “same long term as my diet”–meaning like in any war, there are significant troop movements on both sides of the battle front. There are times when I make a concerted effort to beat back the forces of clutter, only to have that clutter plot a sneak attack in the middle of the night. Suddenly, the house is bursting at the seams again, and I’m not sure how it happened. Before the big Disney vacation, clutter had been waging one of its strongest offensives in

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Tagging and Organizing My Blog

Back when I switched my blog from Blogger to WordPress, I had to confront a cold, hard truth: I had done an awful job of categorizing my blog posts. I mean really. Horrendous. And for a trained librarian to have done that? Absolutely shameful. How was it horrendous, you ask? Well for one thing, I had something like 100 or 200 categories that only had a single entry in them. Stupidly specific categories like “The Two Towers” or “Dominion.” Why in the world create a category for something that’s only going to have one post in it, anyway? Now, if

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