Plan Your Week Like You Furnish Your Home
Published March 23, 2020 by Sheila Anne MurrayIf you follow along on social or subscribe to the blog that I run with my fiancé, you probably know that we recently moved into our own apartment! After a year on the road, living with friends, living with family, and a month and a half of apartment hunting in Colorado, we are committed to a home!😄
The prospect of filling an apartment is exciting but, to get it done right, you have to be strategic 😏. As we’ve gone through the process of furnishing our new place, I’ve realized that you can use the same strategy to plan your most productive and b e a u t i f u l weeks! Perhaps at this moment you think this is a stretch but I promise that this article will give you some killer tips and, once you start integrating them into your life, you’ll find yourself less overwhelmed, more productive, and with more room to breathe and enjoy.
Aim for 2-3 Big Focuses
Three max! There are going to be a lot of little things but make sure you stick to manageable big-picture focuses. Ask yourself why these 2 - 3 focuses are important because that will highlight their significance and validate that you are moving toward what you truly care about. This will help your brain stay in-tune with what you want to get accomplished and you are much more likely to stay focused and succeed because you can continue to return these 2 - 3 things and ensure you are on track. Everything you do will move you closer to accomplishing those things, and you can easily cut out the things that are in your way.
Furnishing a home: Our main focuses were 1. To not buy anything plastic for our new home and 2. To thrift the majority of our furniture. Why? It’s very important to each of us to keep our human footprint low and we saw furnishing a new apartment as an opportunity to start fresh — buy in bulk, use glass bottles versus plastic ones, get crafty and do research. Thrifting was important to us because of the opportunity to save money and to recycle what others no longer need. This didn’t mean acquiring whatever was free and available, we had standards😆. For example, we bought a $1,000 Ikea couch from someone in Denver for $100 because they were getting a new one, and we l o v e it!
Planning the week: Depending on your path, your main focuses will be specific to you! Some examples include 1. Prepare a stellar presentation 2. Fill your sales pipeline with new leads 3. Network within your company 4. Rewrite your business mission statement 5. Stick to a new fitness routine 6. Make 90% of your meals at home. Again, ensure that you consider your why!Are you looking to acquire leads, increase conversion, nail a presentation in front of your company, start meeting new people and increase your visibility, change your fitness habits, or save money?
The big message here: You can’t do it all at once. So if you want to succeed, get specific about what you want and move toward those few main focuses.
Celebrating this amazing second-hand find!
Be Mindful About How It Aligns With You! (AKA know thyself)
Furnishing a home: Our home has a certain mood to it and this is something that we are both intent on upholding. The color scheme is very subtle — we have wood, whites, and little pops of green & yellow (pre-existing tile). We bought plants from a local shop soon after we moved in and we plan to get more. We have just a few pieces of furniture because I’m loving the space to do yoga & practice handstands. The kitchen is most important to us, so we focused on outfitting that space first. We’ve also done little things like added key hooks beside the door so that we (a-hem, me) are less likely to lose keys inside the house.
Planning the week: Just as you have a unique set of strengths and interests, you also have a unique schedule! The way that someone else plans out their week (from organizational tools to the actual planning of priorities) may work for them and not for you. If you haven’t already, I recommend making your own mood board for how you like your week to flow — what’s the overall feeling you desire? When are you most energized and when do you start to slump? If you lose steam at the end of the day, it’s probably not a good idea to schedule your most important task at 4pm. Take some power over how your week feels and how you can influence it with your unique style.
Leave room to breathe
Furnishing a home: Do you like to have every inch of floor and wall space covered? I certainly don’t! Crowding the space leaves little room to appreciate what’s there and overall feels overwhelming to look at. We try to be minimalist with our style and furnishing — and that means ensuring that the pieces we do have need to serve a purpose and are appreciable. Our apartment is, after all, just that — we don’t have a lot of space to work with so we needed to be strategic with furniture that doesn’t overpower the space.
Planning the week: How does it feel when you have back-to-back meetings or when you must hustle through back-to-back tasks? It’s quite likely that non-stop days like these leave you burned out, overloaded, overwhelmed — or maybe they energize you in such a way that you can’t find the “relax” button anywhere once the day is done. In order to get value out of your daily commitments, leave some room to breathe! Set the alarm to a time that would allow some wiggle room before rushing off to the gym or work. Schedule buffer time between your slew of meetings so you can digest information and do follow ups. Uphold the sacred time between work/entertaining and bed. Not only will this increase your appreciation for the things in your day, it will also focus your attention and make you more productive as a result.
Is It Needed Or Just Nice?
Furnishing a home: Before moving into your home with everything you’ve acquired over the years, and before scrolling through Wayfair or craigslist, go back to basics. What do you really need to make your home work for you? We established a “need list” at the beginning of our apartment search, and we’ve returned to it for tweaks along the way. We’ve forgone certain items in the short term that perhaps not everyone would, because we didn’t see the “right” thing we were looking for or because we thought it just wasn’t necessary at the time. Here are some examples:
Plants: necessary, Trash bins: not necessary (if you have a bag and don’t generate much waste!)
Cast iron set: needed, Toaster: eh, for now we can use the oven if we really need it
Yoga space: needed, Desk for Sheila: not necessary for now
All of the things listed are completely reasonable to furnish an apartment, but not all of them were immediately needed in our opinion.
Planning the week: Again, I’ll ask you to return to your central focuses for the week and encourage you to think about those with each commitment you schedule. If you’re someone that is tempted to say “yes” to all invitations and work responsibilities, consider this your permission to say “no” if it doesn’t get you closer to your goals. A “no” to one commitment is a giant “YES” to you and your success. If a commitment is “nice” one week, it can certainly be “needed” the next. Stay open minded and stay aware to that which is serving you week-to-week.
Leaving our local plant store with these goodies! Plants make a big difference in the home 🥰