The Christian Homemaking Podcast: Simply Convivial with Mystie Winckler

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comHave you ever been frustrated trying to use a planner? Have you ever worried that you spend more time writing in your planner and decorating your planner than actually doing what that pretty plan tells you to do? Let me share my quick planner hack that streamlines the process and keeps me focused on the most important things to do each day. Let’s dig in.I know, planners are pretty. They’re fun. But a lot of the ones that we can buy pre-printed, packaged, ready to go are actually over kill. They contain sections and questions and areas that maybe (maybe!) work for the person who designed it and implemented it, and maybe they work for some people, but just because a tactic or a format works for one person does not mean that it’s the thing that will work for anyone and everyone.Instead of searching for and continually trying for that planner that will magically, suddenly make us into planners—not just make a plan but then do the plan—we need to find planning strategies that are simple, streamlined, and personalized. And that’s the planner hack I have for you today. Try to figure out what you need to make a consistent daily plan that actually works. We have to think about what the point of it all really is. Why have a planner in the first place? Why write things down? And you’ve probably thought about that already, maybe in the spirit of ‘Do I have to?’ or ‘What’s the point because I seem to just be wasting my time?’ And the reality is that a lot of planning is wasting time, but that’s because of the kind of plan that we make and not that all planning is always a waste of time.When we make plans that are based on wishful thinking that’s a waste of time. We need to plan for right now, our current reality, our current responsibilities, and then our plan will be effective. I think that a good question we can ask is, what’s the least amount of effort that I have to do to create an effective plan, a plan that I will use and follow through on? And my answer to that question is all you need is a post-it note!Using a post-it note to make our daily plans helps us remember that not only our time, but even our energy and our attention, our abilities, are limited. We can’t do everything that we might be keeping on some other to do list. We have to pick the things that are most important. And then we write down the things that are most important on a small piece of paper that we can keep in front of our face. Then we are more likely to follow through on tasks because they’re not vague, nebulous “I coulda, shoulda, some day do this thing.” We have specified and written down and thought about what it is we actually have to do. So, on your post-it note every day, at the beginning of the day or maybe at the end of the day (the day before) write down your top three things. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s a skill that we have to practice. And we will get better and better the more we practice it at choosing what those top three things really are. But the exercise of having to choose, having to narrow it down and pick three, is all a part of what makes it actually work because the best planning is mostly a thinking exercise. It’s not that in writing something down it’s more likely to happen. In reality, it is having thought about it and putting our priorities and what we need to be paying attention to top-of-mind and visible in front of our faces that makes it actually able to happen. Our minds are for thinking and we need to give ourselves the time and the prompts to actually think about what’s most important just today. And the daily card (or post-it note) is an exercise that helps us do just that. Because we are limited—we’re limited in time, we’re limited in resources, we’re limited in energy—our to do list also needs to be limited. And the tiny size of a post-it note is a visible reminder of that. Writing what needs to happen out by hand every day helps us focus on our priorities. It allows us to adjust the plan as needed as life unfolds. And it puts our responsibilities right in front of our face. The great thing about a post-it note is that it’s sticky. I can put this on the top of the computer monitor. I can put this on the front cover of my planner so that it’s right there. I can put it on the back of my phone and have it right with me in my pocket. A post-it note is super flexible and can help us keep our priorities visible. And that’s really key because a planner (no matter what kind of planner) will not work unless you look at it! So, I challenge you to try out this quick, simple, cheap option for your own daily to do list. Try it for at least a week. Give it a fair shot. Practice and see what happens. Over at Simply Convivial I’ve put together a Daily Card Quick Start Guide that will help you get going with this small, simple habit. It will teach you how to make and use this card (or post-it note) every day and give you a checklist so that you can hold yourself accountable to actually trying this out for yourself. And, where you can always write down your observations about what you learn about this method (and also yourself) so that you can figure out a plan that works for you. Visit SimplyConvivial.com to find that today.At Simply Convivial we do not believe in one-size-fits-all solutions, plans, or checklists. I’m all about teaching you the principles and the skills that you need to figure out what’s going to work for you in your particular situation with your particular needs. If that’s what you need then make sure to subscribe and check out some of my other videos. But always remember, that your attitude is the most important part of your organization project. So, repent, rejoice, repeat. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comTransformation Tuesday is our answer to the complicated, overbearing cleaning and organizing checklists out there.You don’t need to clean by someone else’s schedule.Instead, see what needs to be done in your own home, and spend 10 minutes improving the order and organization there.Transformation Tuesday is one of my little homemaking mottos that helps me tackle housecleaning in small bites and tame my attitude at the same time. Cleaning and decluttering should just be a small piece of your weekly cleaning routine. When we wonder how to organize our life, we usually think about containers, labels, and homes that magically stay clean without further effort. But someone who is organized is someone willing to continue taking the effort of homekeeping, to maintain the work consistently.Transformation Tuesday is a catchy reminder to spend 10 minutes once a week cleaning or reorganizing a small area that will positively affect at least your peace of mind and maybe even your personal productivity.No one can tell you what that area ought to be. Each week you pick the thing that’s bothering you, that’s holding you up, that’s the biggest (small) problem area. Each week you take just ten minutes and make an improvement in order and tidiness in that small spot.This accomplishes more than just the small amount of order. It also, gradually, changes our perspective and attitude about organization itself.When organizing an area is no longer a huge, overwhelming, whole-closet or whole-house project, but just a ten minute focus, we overcome our mental and emotional hurdles to becoming more organized.We aren’t going for night and day or for whole-new-self change. We’re just going for 10 minutes of better. We succeed at that. We appreciate the difference it made. We are less devastated when the work is inevitably undone by normal, everyday entropy. After all, it was only ten minutes. We can do that again.And when you do, take a before and after picture! Share on Instagram with the #simplyconvivial hashtag and tag me. We’re forming an open, honest, real-life community of homemakers who spur one another on to cheerful attitudes and good work at home. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comI wanted to talk about decluttering as a habit because there’s this rumor floating out there on decluttering (from experts and gurus) who say that “decluttering can be done once and for all.” That it’s a project you finish and check off and be done with (which is really what we all want to hear, isn’t it?). We really want it to be something that we can achieve: “Achievement unlocked! We are now decluttered and forever and all time, moving forward. Now we have the right habits, the right house, the right organization. We won’t have to do that again!” That’s just not the way it really is in real life. Not our kind of real life anyway. Not family life. Not home life where you have a lot of people in one house actually living a full life—which means a lot of stuff—and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. I think there’s a lot of hope and happiness pinned even on minimalism (on eliminating as much as stuff as possible) as if I manage to do [that], get [that achievement unlocked] then I will be happy. Then I will be a good housekeeper. Then I will love my house. Then my family won’t drive me crazy. Then the lights shine brightly and angels sing, “la” and we have achieved our housekeeping, homemaking goal! Decluttered once and for all, now we can move forward and do this thing right.And that appeals to our desire to achieve our ambition. It appeals to just wanting to be done. To figure things out and do things right. But the reality is that stuff comes into our house still and it’s just something we have to keep up with. It’s just one more thing—like dishes and the laundry and meals—that has to be continually addressed. We should declutter in order to use our space wisely, but our life changes, our needs change, sometimes our house situation changes, the ages of our children and their stages change, and we need to adjust. We will continually go through that process of figuring out, “Well, I saved this because I thought I would need it. These are just questions in wisdom and stewardship that we need to be continually asking and assessing and working through because life and our situations change and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not because we’re doing it wrong, it’s not because if we had this thing figured out we wouldn’t have to anymore. When the stuff is used as the measure stick it’s just wrong. It’s not going to work. It’s not true. It’s not accurate. And it focuses us on the wrong things. So, the stuff is just stuff that we do have to manage and steward. There isn’t a universal one-size fits all plan for how much stuff you ought to have, what you ought to keep, what you ought to get rid of. So, decluttering will be put in its proper place if we think of it as a habit and not as the holy grail, the step that we need to complete in order to take the next steps of perfect homemaking. And so, if instead of thinking of it as a project that we’re going to finish, we think of it as a habit we’re going to build, it breaks it down, we take smaller steps, we work it into our routines and our awareness in the smaller chunks of time and energy, and in the end we actually make more progress because we’re continually applying ourselves to it, we aren’t frustrated because it’s not complete yet because we’re not expecting it to be complete, and we aren’t waiting to make other steps and other changes until it’s over and complete. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comSo, we talk a lot about needing to declutter, but part of what holds us back from just diving in and making some progress in decluttering is that even though we say that we are doing this project we don’t really understand how to do it. We don’t understand what the project really is, what it entails, what we set out to accomplish. It remains this, kind of, vague, nebulous project that we can’t define. And that means we can’t see progress made. And when we don’t know what we’re going to do next, we end up not doing anything at all. So, in order to declutter our homes, we need to understand the process of decluttering and it’s really very simple. It’s a little bit scary, but what you need to remember is to start with an amount of space that you can actually tackle in the amount of time that you have. What I like to do is choose a spot that I can actually declutter in 10 minutes or less, because even when I think I have half an hour I often don’t. But 10 minutes I can probably manage that, or at least, if some interruption comes a 10 minute declutter session is easier to come back to and finish up, whereas longer projects not so much. The first step of decluttering is actually removing everything from the space—that’s scary, that’s a big deal, I know, but it’s really the most effective, efficient way to declutter. But that’s why it’s so important to start with a very small space. So, a single drawer (or even a section of a drawer), a single shelf in a closet (and not the whole closet), one container at a time decluttering; not entire rooms or even entire closets—a small space. Empty it out entirely onto a table, or some other space—just move it out. Then the next thing I like to do is to just throw away the garbage that came out in that process. Ideally, it doesn’t even make it onto the table (or whatever other space I’m emptying things out on), but as I’m pulling it out it just goes into the trash. And still, if there is some junk on the counter (or wherever this pile has ended up), I go through and throw away the trash because that’s the fastest, easiest, most obvious step to take first. And the more visible progress you can make quickly the more momentum that you get. You’re seeing that success and you’re seeing progress right away and that helps you keep the momentum and the energy moving forward to get the job done. So, we don’t start with the hardest part (although emptying the entire space might have been hard, mentally or emotionally) but then we do something easy—we just throw away the garbage. And, it’s amazing sometimes how much difference that makes right there. Next, we’re looking at all this stuff that’s out to see. Now, none of it’s where it belongs because none of it belongs on the bed or the counter or the table or wherever we’ve put it, and we see things that belong somewhere else. So they have homes, we know what they are, we know where they belong and it’s not here and it’s not in that drawer that we just emptied. So, we go put those things away. This is where distraction is tempting. This is where we might get an idea, see something else that needs to be done, get interrupted by a child, or something, so we have to be very careful and try to do this very quickly.  Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comSo, what even is decluttering and why is it something that we keep trying to do and keep feeling like we never make any progress doing? Yeah, that’s right—you are not the only one. Decluttering is getting rid of clutter. So, before we can understand declutter, we have to think about what clutter really is. Sometimes we just use it as a generic insult to stuff we don’t necessarily want or want to deal with. But clutter is referring to those things that are not where they belong, or they are some place where they don’t belong. And so, when we’re looking in a closet, in a cupboard, in a drawer, in a whole room, and we say, “It’s cluttered,” what we mean is that it’s full of stuff that does not belong there. So, the process of decluttering, then, means going through the space and removing what does not belong. Organizing the space then is putting the things away well, strategically, smartly, in the place they do belong. But decluttering comes before organizing. And you really can’t organize a space that has not been decluttered because if the space has stuff that doesn’t belong there, it can’t be organized there. It needs to be removed so that the things that do belong can then be ordered and tidied well; so, decluttering means getting rid of the things that do not belong. We keep coming back to this project of decluttering because it’s a part of the process of actually stewarding or managing our resources well. Things tend toward disorder, things fall apart, new things come in, and the way that we use a space or the way that we need to use a space changes. So, the fact that you need to declutter doesn’t even mean necessarily that something is wrong, or you’ve failed in some way, it just means that the task before you is clear—declutter the space. Of course, when we look around our home there are so many spaces that need to be decluttered (I mean, we are not even going to talk about kid bedrooms)! But we just need to be satisfied taking small steps forward, making a little bit of progress in a small amount of space; steadily, strategically, and consistently. And that’s what we’re going to do in this series where we are focusing on decluttering. We aren’t just going to talk about decluttering and we aren’t only going to pep talk decluttering (although we are going to do that as well), we are going to find ways to build decluttering as a habit in our life because our spaces are always going to need decluttering. Things are always going to wind up where they don’t belong because that’s just the way family life works. Not to mention the way that we need to use the space changes—something did belong in a particular spot at one point but no longer does because that’s now not the point of the space.  Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comToday’s episode is an audio blog for one of my favorite posts: Life is like laundry. If you pop on over to the article on the blog, you’ll also find a follow-up 45-minute workshop on this topic. If you have some extra laundry to tackle and you need a pick me up to accompany the marathon folding session, it’ll be just the ticket to keep you company and keep your spirits lifted. So, let’s dig in. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comI think our attitude is the missing link in our attempts at getting organized. So I’m excited to announce my new free download: an attitude adjustment audit. What is an attitude? Every passing feeling is not an attitude. The dictionary says that an attitude is “a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person's behavior.” However, passing feelings can become our attitudes if we nurture them and keep them around. That’s why it’s important to reject false feelings and cultivate those based on truth and love.  Our actions are produced from our thoughts and feelings: our heart. Self-control - a fruit of the Spirit - includes controlling our thoughts & feelings as well as our actions. Yes, you can actually change your attitude by deliberately and intentionally changing your thoughts – that’s something we have a responsibility to do. When what we feel or think does not align with God’s revealed will for our lives (which is gratitude), the only obedient option we have is to repent, to change them with the help of the Holy Spirit.Our inner lives and our outer lives are not two disparate and unrelated things. One affects the other. Outer chaos creates stress and confusion. Inner chaos works itself out in how we live our lives. Fixing either kind of disorder is the project of a lifetime, not the project of a day, of a weekend, or of a month. Organizing our attitudes is something we must continually be doing.An organized attitude isn't faking a smile.It’s constantly reminding ourselves of truth and not panicking when we notice we sin, and also not ignoring it, but rather repenting of it, receiving forgiveness, and gratefully pressing on to do what we called to do.To organize your attitude is to bring your thoughts into alignment with God’s Word, every day, every situation, every time. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comThis episode is an excerpt from a recent mentoring session that I host weekly inside Simply Convivial Continuing Education. Our topic was mindset habits and how even our thoughts and responses can be habitual - both good and bad. So what we know about habits breaking and habit building applies even to our mindset, even to our attitude.We need to break out of bad attitude ruts and form some new and intentional ruts in our brains.  Weeks have passed since the holidays which were a fun break but also exhausting and a lot of work. Then we jump into January with all the energy and good intentions we can muster. It’s no wonder February finds us dull and feeling doomed. February is the time we need to be deliberate with our thoughts, because it’s easy to have them spiral down into lethargy if not worse. So this month we’re focusing on mindset. Think of it like your mega dose of vitamin C and B12. Remind yourself of truth, reject thoughts that are false, and practice turning to gratitude as your habitual response. The podcast this month will be all about how to do just that. So let’s dig in.Support the show (https://www.simplyconvivial.com/membership) Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comJanuary’s podcasts are all about self-care: what it is and what it isn’t. In the medical world, self-care refers to those tasks a caregiver must do for someone, whether it’s a caregiver to an injured or ill adult or a mother to an infant. But when the internet tells you that you need self-care, they basically mean you need to spend some time being self-centered and self-indulgent. What will help us face our real life home duties is a measure of self-control and faithfulness, and organization helps us grow in both. If you think you need some self-care today, maybe what you really need is some organization. Support the show (https://www.simplyconvivial.com/membership) Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com

Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.comGuess what? Self-centeredness and self-indulgence is never going to make you feel better in the long term, nor will it prepare you for reentering your real life with joy.You don’t need to treat yourself or indulge in luxuries to be happy with your life. Let’s get a grip and a game face on and find not only contentment but also joy in our real life home duties. What will help us face our real life home duties is a measure of self-control and faithfulness, and organization helps us grow in both. If you think you need some self-care today, maybe what you really need is some organization. Today's episode is an audio blog, written and read by Abby Wahl. Take Sweep & Smile with us now! convivialcircle.com