Sticky Notes Everywhere

There are sticky notes all over my kitchen and my office. There are different colors, different sizes and different colored inks written on them. I spend a lot of time between my kitchen table and my studio office. When a thought strikes me that I don’t want to lose I throw it on a sticky note and stick it up where I will see it.

Sounds like a great idea right? I mean, how can you forget something with all those notes around? One look up at a note and it will remind you of whatever crossed your mind when you wrote it.

The problem is that I seldom write out the entire thought on a little sticky note. I write a general idea and expect to remember what it means when I look at it later. Also, there is the little matter of taking action on that note at some point. When do I actually look at the notes and decide to follow through with them?

“Riding school bus with Vera” “Reading for pleasure” “Lose labels” “Witch hunt” “Pushing through the sickness” “Cell phone spying” These are the stickies that are currently facing me at the kitchen table where I do my writing. Each of those is a reminder of an idea I had for a blog post. However, if I don’t follow up soon after writing those notes there is a good chance the original ideal is lost.

For example, “reading for pleasure” doesn’t bring up much for me as far as turning it into a blog post. If I wanted to really sit down and consider it, work at it, and make it an assignment, I could do it. But when I originally wrote the note I had a few good ideas I could turn into a post already. I didn’t follow up soon enough. Those basic points were lost in the craziness of my busy day.

For the last couple months my life has been in a bit of upheaval. We’ve made some major lifestyle changes. Our routine has been disrupted. I’ve made notes to remind me of things to do. I’ve begun lists of projects to start and responsibilities to take care of. These notes are mixed in with the rest.

The notes are a great idea for reminding me… but I have to follow through with each one in a timely manner. This is the way with everything we do to try to stay organized. If we start and don’t follow through we are left with a life full of crazy sticky notes that make no sense at all.

In a week I will have time to attack these sticky notes. Hopefully I can glean enough information out of each one to understand my original intention for writing the note. I have a binder with pages of different headings to put the notes into some kind of organization. At least then the “to do” notes won’t be mixed in with the “blog post” notes or the “book idea” notes, or the “priority cleaning” notes.

Until then, there are sticky notes all over with little messages on them. I wonder if my patient husband has stuck any of his own in with mine. And if he did, I hope they are love notes and not “honey do” notes.