How long do you tend to sew for in one sitting? Long periods of time or small chunks? Yesterday's awesome Sewing Social Twitter chat focused on how to fit sewing into a busy lifestyle. A few people mentioned that their strategy was to sew for about 15 minutes. Every day. My approach in the past was to save sewing for days when I knew I had hours of free time ahead to get stuck into it. Yet those days so rarely come that I often feel frustrated that I'm not sewing more often. So I think I'm going to give the 15 minutes per day strategy a whirl.
The genius of this approach is fourfold:
1) There are 1,440 minutes in a day, so setting aside just 15 of those minutes to do something you love shouldn't be too challenging. You have no excuse not to, basically!
2) While the enormity of a sewing project can sometimes seem overwhelming, breaking it down into bitesize chunks makes it much more digestible.
3) If you stop sewing after 15 minutes, it leaves you wanting to come back for more. Those of you use the Pomodoro technique for working or studying will know how limiting activity to short bursts can keep you motivated.
4) Sewing for a small period of time every day means that sewing becomes part of your regular lifestyle. Hooray!
So I'm going to give this a go for a week, sewing for 15 minutes every day. Obviously I don't want to have to spend five of those minutes setting up my sewing table, so I'll keep everything organised so I can whip it out quickly. I also keep a note of the next actions of any sewing project, which really helps me to get started quickly. And when it comes to fitting, I'll give it longer than 15 minutes - I like to get all the boring fitting perfected early on, so I can get on and sew. Delayed gratification :)
Here's to sewing in short bursts! Who's with me?
PS. Thank you to the 40+ lovely stitchers who joined in the Sewing Social. It was so awesome to chat in real time to likeminded people! You really gave me a boost. And thank you to Inna for hosting the Asia Pacific version. There's a Tweetdoc here of the discussion, although our tweets exceeded Tweetdoc's limit of 500 so it's only documented half of the conversation...
[Soundtrack: 'Dynamo' by Si Cranstoun]
