I am jumping into a crazy brainstorm, and I would like to invite you along for the ride. I am literally going to be building this plane while it's in the air. But sometimes you just, you get an idea and you roll with it. So I just want to say welcome or welcome back to the Joy Loving Home Podcast. My usual content is all about planning, productivity, organization for ADHD moms, although you do not need to be diagnosed or even be a mom if you'd like to follow along.
If anything in that realm resonates with you and you want to hear sort of a different take on how things could work and a whole lot of experiments, then you're in the right place. But I am jumping in on, let me take a step back. I am the queen of pending lists. And if you are not familiar with my non-linear pending lists, jump back and listen to episode 139. I have done for the past two Christmases a way to do sort of.
A scattered nonlinear pending list of Christmas that I was calling the 12 days of Christmas, where we were focusing on different tasks to get ourselves prepared for Christmas. That still exists. That is something that you are interested in. I am doing it in my membership with my folks right now, but I am going to be jumping into my free group and I will share it there just sort of as a like Merry Christmas present. If you are not a Christmas celebrator, it's probably not the right way to say
that. If you don't celebrate Christmas... It could still be useful because you could just use it to like whip your house into shape for any holiday or just because you want it whipped into shape. It's just a totally different way to go about life. So if you want to take a stab at it, you can still check it out. But because it's my third year doing it and our ADHD brains sort of decide that familiar gets really old and boring.
And so we need something novel, I suddenly had an idea to revisit my 12 days of Christmas, but to do it a little differently this year. And so as the song goes, where they will say, let's say it's the 10th day of Christmas, and they'll say what the 10th day of Christmas is, and then they'll count back the 9th, the 8th, the 7th, the 6th, the 5th, the 5th. You get the point.
What I'd love to do is I'll introduce a new task each day for the next 12 days, and then we'll repeat the ones that went before as we go about our house trying to get things kept up for Christmas or conquered for Christmas. I just think it might be fun. I only have like the first three days planned out in my head. I'm only going to introduce one each day. So I've got time, again,
building the plan while it's in the air. My plan is, is to create a PDF where you could sort of follow it along and check off the boxes. And you will be able to get that in my free group. And you will be able to see sort of the video version of what I'm doing if you want to follow along and pretend that we're doing it together whenever you watch the video. All of that will take place in my free podcast community.
To get there, I'll put a link in the show notes, but you just go to bit.ly slash joylovinghomecommunity. That will lead you to my group. I will let you in and you can just sort of follow along with all the fun. And you could download the PDF from in there as well. All right, let's talk about day one. Let's just jump right into day one.
So the first day of Christmas, our partridge in a pear tree, if you will, is this sort of tip that I hinted in in the title of this podcast, which is a way to keep your cool in the middle of what can be a really hectic season. And I didn't say this in the title, it is also a way to evaluate all of the things you're plowing into your schedule or you're adding onto your task lists. It is a way to say, is this worth having on my list this year?
Is this worth the effort to put it in the calendar this year? So what is that one quick trip? It is to add the words so that to the end of any task that you're trying to do or event that you want to go to. So we're going to follow every single thing that we're about to do or about to place on our calendar with the words, so that. So let me give you a real life example that recently happened to me.
During this Thanksgiving week, very near Thanksgiving, friends of ours were hosting what they call pie night. And it was just a way to get some friends together that all you had to do was show up with a pie or not. She even says or not and visit, eat some pie and visit. It's not overly elaborate, which is kind of brilliant from her standpoint.
So as I got the invite and I had to do the RSVP and I was looking at the calendar and it was going to be happening on the same evening as our oldest son, who no longer lives with us, he's flown the nest and is existing happily into the world. He was driving in that evening. And so when I had to add my so that. What was going on in my brain was, okay, I'm going to say yes, so that my friend knows that I'll make time for something that is important to her.
Or I could have said, I will say no, so that my son knows he takes top priority. Or what happened was I said yes, so that my friend knows I will make some time for her. But I said, I will keep it short so that my son can see I can juggle multiple things and that his time is valued as well as hers. I decided not to make a pie so that I could honor the fact that, one, I'm not great at making pies, and two, that she was letting people off the hook in a stressful season.
And what I ended up doing is I had had to have some cookies made for something my daughter was going to. And I was like, a pie serves like, I don't know, 10 people. I'll take a dozen cookies. That way I'm not being a complete freeloader. They're already made. Yes, it goes against the pie theme, but is anybody really going to complain about eating a cookie for a slice of pie?
And her son happens to be a very good friend of mine, number three son, and he's had these cookies before and I know they're a favorite of his. So it just sort of worked out. So I'm hoping you can see in that illustration, the so that when you put it to the end of something. It helps you to be questioning, am I killing myself doing all of this cleaning so that I can prove I could post my house on Pinterest?
Suddenly that reasoning seems rather shallow. I am killing myself with all this cleaning so that during the holidays we can all relax, not being surrounded by stressful clutter. Two very different reasons, but it keeps your mindset in check on why you're doing all of the things that happen to pop up this time of year. So as another example, I am contemplating painting my dining room in the midst of all of these things that don't need to be done or that do need to be done right now.
And so I would say to myself, okay, I want to paint my dining room so that I will look like I have it all together. So that people will be impressed when they come and sit down at the newly painted dining room. So that I can avoid the harder stuff that's actually on my list that needs to get done. Or so that I can finally check it off because it's been on my list for four years and I'm never going to have this kind of pressure and urgency to get it done again.
And if I get it painted, then I'm really going to want to straighten up the dining room, which is going to lead me to want to clean the foyer next to it, which is going to inspire me to go ahead and get the powder room cleaned. If you see it as a linchpin of a big series of dominoes that it's helpful to get rolling, then maybe that is a yes.
But if your only answer is so that people will be impressed with the dining room, they're not even going to see that like nobody thinks about the same stuff that you think about when they're in your home. You would be better off spending the three hours it would take to paint the dining room of three hours of cleaning up around it and you're still going to feel really good about it. I hope that adding so that to the end of things really will help make a difference for you.
That is going to be our partridge in a pear tree. So each day that we pile on more and more little tasks across these next 12 days, we are going to keep revisiting so that. And I really think it's going to help keep us centered on what's important this holiday. I hope you enjoyed this chaotic special edition of the Joy Living Home podcast. And we will continue with each of our 12 days of Christmas. And by the way, guys, I realize this is going to be posted on December 3rd.
My options were, oh, well, don't do it again for another year because you thought of this too late. or jump in where you are, start with what you've got and move forward. And if that's a lesson you can learn from me still giving this a go, that you can do things, even if they're imperfect things, they're worth doing. So that you can be pleased that you're actually taking action in your life. Until next time, continue to choose joy.