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Shawl by Cynthia Rowley, long sleeve shirt by O.P., jeans by Paige, loafers by  Sanuk.

This shawl is actually a sweater vest.  When I was putting it away one day, I was folding it, and discovered that by folding it in half a strategic way, the armholes lined up.  Then I thought, "Hmmmm, I just might be able to put my head through that hole..." And viola! I've now added a shawl to my wardrobe without spending money.

Urgency.  To be honest, I tend to operate on urgency.  Whatever is most important is what I tackle first. And the cycle continues.  Many years ago, I learned an interesting strategy in prioritizing tasks. Obviously there are many ways to go about this and recently in one of my posts, I talked about organizing a to do list based on the amount of time a task would take.  With the urgency strategy, one would categorize his/her tasks into four compartments.  Here is an example of how they would be organized clockwise from the top left of a 4-compartment box:

• Urgent/Important.  
• finish my report cards
• Plan out what's for dinner
• Feed the cats in the morning
• Urgent/Unimportant
• Take out the garbage
• Pack lunches for work tomorrow
• Insert something else that seems urgent/unimportant here...
• Not Urgent/Important
• Call my friend to follow up about plans for coffee
• Laundry
• Get the oil changed in my car
• Not Urgent/Unimportant 
• Reorganize my closet
• Mending my clothes
• Catch up on the last episode of my favorite TV show

As you can see, I'm still prioritizing my task list, but in a different way. This strategy can help one to minimize stress by eliminating the urgent tasks first, then getting to the other tasks as time allows.  The only down side to this strategy is by the time you finally figure out which category a task should be in, you could have completed it already!  In that scenario however, I would recommend narrowing it down to Urgent vs. Not Urgent.  

Happy First of March!

Jennica