A friend posted the following on her FaceBook page, and I’m shamelessly stealing. The list comes from ZenHabits, and is longer in its original. Worth a stop by.

9 Rules for a Simpler Day

1. Know What’s Important. Take time to identify the most important things in your life (4-5 things), and then see what activities, tasks, projects, meeting and commitments fit in with that list.
2. Visualize Your Perfect Day. Understand what a simple day means to you. It’s different for each person. Take a minute to visualize what it means to you.
3. Say No to Extra Commitments. List and evaluate your commitments (professional, civic and personal), and say No to at least one. It just takes a call or email.
4. Limit Tasks. Each morning, list your 1-3 most important tasks. Limiting your tasks helps you focus, and acknowledges you’re not going to get everything done in one day.
5. Carve Out Un-distraction Time. When are you going to do your most important work? Make this your most sacred appointment.
6. Slow Down. Life won’t collapse if you aren’t rushing from task to task, email to email. You can pause, take a moment to reflect, smile, enjoy the current task before moving on.
7. Mindfully Single-task.. Practice mindfulness as you do the task — it’s a form of meditation.
8. Batch Smaller Tasks, Then Let go. Don’t let the small tasks get in the way of the big ones. When you’ve done a batch of small tasks (including processing email), let them go, and get out.
9. Create Space Between. The space between things is just as important as the things themselves. Enjoy the space.

I don’t do enough of any of these! 🙂 I forget about mindfulness when I’m washing the dishes. I can remember when I’m watering the plants (welllll, sometimes…), but almost never when I’m doing the laundry. And it’s hard when I’m making the bed.

Sometimes, when I do tasks, I try to do them the old ‘macrobiotic’ way: thinking of the people for whom I do them, and infusing the tasks w/ love. That works, again, when I remember. Which I do FAR too seldom! 🙂

And I almost never remember to limit tasks. I wear myself out filling the morning, then whine because my blasted Achilles tendon is hurting. Duh! I didn’t ice it, like the doc scolded me.

But the one I’m going to focus on for now? #9: create space between. That so appeals to my inner poet — what isn’t done/ said is as important — sometimes even more so — than what is. Negative space, grasshopper. What makes the graphics of life…