I don’t know if anyone else feels like I do, but I feel like I have 36 hours of things to do in a 24-hour day. Exercise, kids to school, homework, baths, dinner, run a business, e-mails, magazines subscriptions piling up, mail, bills, clean the house, figure out 401K investments, journal and spend quality time with all members of the family, including myself. 
How can you possibly get it all done? I’ve reached the conclusion that I can’t. I’ve been re-reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
and have realized that it’s more about what I choose not to do than what I choose to do. Since there are so many things coming from so many directions, and I can’t possibly do them all, I have to get a lot more choosy with my time. It’s also about getting all the million little things you have to do "out of your head". Think of each thing you have to do like a ping-pong ball. At any given time, there are hundreds of little ping-pong balls, bouncing around in your head, reminding you of all the things you’re supposed to be doing. How are you supposed to get any peace in your head with all that racket going on? How are you supposed to have a creative thought when it keeps getting interrupted by "Oh yeah! I have to "fill-in-the-blank."?
I’ve spent the last few weeks getting everything "out of my head". I have to tell you, it’s been one of the most freeing things I’ve ever done. People have recommended a couple of really cool new tech tools that have made a really big difference and I wanted to share.
The first one is
www.roboform.com. RoboForm is a password manager that remembers all your passwords. All you have to remember is the master password and it remembers all the other ones for you. I have 142 passwords just on my home computer. I can’t imagine trying to keep them all straight without RoboForm. I’ve also started using an online to-do list from
www.toodledo.com. Toodledo has been really helpful in getting everything together in one place. It even has "contexts" so you can keep your work to-do’s and your home to-do’s separate. But my favorite thing that I just started using is
www.jott.com. Basically, when something pops into your head, you "jott’ yourself. You call a number, leave a message, and they e-mail or text message it to you. Instead of having a gazillion little scraps of paper everywhere, it’s all in one place. I’ve "jotted" myself over 20 times so far this week! The best part about all these tools is that the basic ones are free. So, I hope any or all of them can be as helpful to you as they’ve been to me. Because we all know why we really need more time…for scrapbooking!
We have over 200 new items this week, including a limited quantity release of "Dandelion Wishes" from Best Creation. Lots of you have been asking us to start carrying baby products, so we’ve added a baby boy and baby girl collection from SandyLion this week and an adoption line from Karen Foster. I think the Sandylion is the cutest of all the collections out there right now. The albums even come with a kit so that you can put there little hand or foot prints in the there. We also have created a customizable "onesie" with a capital letter monogram and baby’s name. We have birthday and wedding, Soldier Boy from Creative Imaginations, firefighter, hunting and fishing, dog and cat, grandma and grandpa. From the SYT Design Team, we have die cuts for Hawaii, camping, Greece, France, back-to-school and more. Wait until you see the customized Disney frame Jill made! We also have 40 new papers in the SYT collection, including school, construction/remodeling, Purple Heart, the rainforest, Egypt and more. Click here to see them all:
http://www.scrapyourtrip.com/whatsnew.html.
As always, thanks for your business!
Julie Swatek, President
Scrap Your Trip®
‘cuz life is a trip worth scrappin’®
September 17th, 2008
