How to Be Insanely Productive

3-day weekends are the best, aren't they?  Sometimes I like to use that extra day to relax, and sometimes I like to use it to get stuff done.  This past 3-day weekend fell into the latter category.

I have been abundantly blessed in the last few months with opportunities for sewing things for people and contributing to their lives and memories.  I love this.  It's what I want to do.  However, since I also have a regular 8-hour-a-day job, it's not that hard to fall behind on my sewing obligations (even if I really wish I could just be sewing all the time).  This weekend, I set my sights, and I set those sights high, on sewing up a storm.

My friend Brittany and I have similar dreams-becoming-realities-outside-the-regular-working-hours things going on right now, and on Friday when we talked about how much we both wanted to accomplish this weekend, I half-jokingly said that we should e-mail each other our progress as accountability partners.

On Saturday morning, I woke up to just such an e-mail from Brittany, which started an entire weekend of productivity accountability THAT WAS AWESOME.

Here are some excerpts from our e-mails:

"Day's long term goal: minimize the amount of ice cream I eat. (eep.)"

"Closing report:  I accomplished the minimum I said I would do.  Didn't make it to bed by midnight, but that's because I was watching Jennifer Lawrence on SNL, which I feel is a somewhat valid excuse."

 

"I needed reinforcements, so I'm bringing in Devil Wears Prada and ice cream. I'm aiming to be done with this by 3."

 

"Immediate plans:  shower, lunch, put away laundry, vacuum, do the ironing, change the bedsheets before 2 PM.  If I do all that, the only thing I have left to accomplish today not sewing related is making dinner.  I will be watching last week's Downton and the remainder of all my week's tv shows while doing all of the above."

 

"My plant from my boss is not dead (yet)!!! Small victories."

 

"So it turns out that even though The Impossible was extremely painful to watch, it helped quite a bit today when I went on my walk and the wind was blowing at, oh, 30-40 miles per hour.  About 5 minutes in I was like, "I should just go home," but then I remembered how Naomi Watts' entire body was basically destroyed and she still swam through debris-filled tsunami water, so surely I can walk up this hill.  And so I did."

Somehow, laying out everything that I needed or wanted to get done that day - from housework to cooking to exercising to working on my sewing - and then knowing that I was going to check in with Brittany again in just a matter of hours made me work so much harder without even feeling like I was working.  We virtually high-fived one another when we got things accomplished, and used each other's victories as our own motivation to get more stuff done.

Call me a productivity nerd, but having an accountability partner in all of it made things fun.  Next time you have a gigantic, intimidating to-do list, I highly recommend getting yourself someone to report back to!