Gadgetopia

The Wife was having e-mail troubles a while back, so I dove into Entourage one night to see what the problem was. After a simple fix, incoming mail started flowing again. Flowing to the tune of 80 new messages! I thought for sure that it was all spam, and her junk filter would also need some tweaking, but looking at the inbox, most of the messages were coming from the same source — FlyLady.net — and she wasn’t at all surprised at how many there were.

FlyLady is a bit of a difficult concept to wrap your mind around; the Wife says it’s more than a resource website, it’s an entire program that’s teaching her new and better ways of approching the chores she needs to do, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy doing. Kind of a Getting Things Done program for homemakers. One of the keys to the program is that you can do anything, no matter how unpleasant, for 15 minutes. So if you give yourself 15 minutes a day to do those nasty things, it’s not so bad. Daily routines are also a big deal on FlyLady; shining the kitchen sink before bedtime is one of the biggies.

A friend of hers turned her on to the site a while back, and she had mentioned it to me from time to time, but I never really checked it out until I saw the glut of stuff in her inbox. I’m now a subscriber too — they really have some great advice to offer that extends to all areas of life, but you do have to weed through a bit of fluff to get to it.

The website is only the tip of the iceberg; 15-20 email messages are sent out daily to the FlyLady mailing list (or “Mentoring Program”). Subscribers are told to just delete unread messages if they get behind, and then pick up with the current messages; “You are not behind - you are just getting started!”

Thanks to LifeHacker for reminding me that I was going to write this post.