1. Everything for the shirts is with the sample maker. I picked the graded pattern up on Thursday afternoon (I have to tell you more about my grader sometime–I love his stories) and walked an exhilarating three blocks north to my sample maker, each step a step closer to a woven shirt that we can wear. Once the samples are ready in a couple of weeks, I’ll fit-test them on volunteers to know what direction to take next.
2. The picture above is the result of some of the regrouping I wrote about last week. Too bad I didn’t take a “before” picture, but it had become so bad I didn’t want to work on anything at this computer. Thanks to two steps from David Allen’s book Making It All Work, I made a ton of progress this past weekend.
The first step is simply to collect everything that’s on your mind and put it in an in-box. The next step is to decide what your relationship is to each item. Is it actionable, and if so, what is your goal and what are your next steps toward that goal? If it’s not actionable, is it (a) trash, (b) something that might be actionable at a later date, or (c) reference material?
He gave a great example of a little boy who wouldn’t clean his room until the father had him put everything that wasn’t where it belonged in a big box. Then it became almost like a game for the boy to take one item out at a time and determine where it belonged. It was the same for me this weekend. When I thought I had to know where everything belonged before I even began, I was paralyzed by the piles on my desk. Once I approached things one by one, I could move forward.
