Many years ago, The Nester wrote a 31-day series on lovely limitations.
To be honest, I had never thought of limitations as lovely before that but I’ve since come to see the beauty of having boundaries – physical, time-bound, and digital limitations.
They force you to be more creative with what you have, and for an upholder like me, I love having some self-imposed rules.
Physical
If you have a basket to store magazines, the basket is your boundary. Ideally (and something I LOVE) is using the physical boundary to help me make decisions to declutter. When the basket is too small for the magazines, I declutter til they fit again.
I’m definitely better about this in some areas than others – I have small bathroom and kitchen cabinets so I see it as a goal to see how little I can get away with keeping, especially for consumables like toiletries and food.
I’m always working on mugs and glasses 😉
Some ideas for physical boundaries in the home? Baskets, trays, bowls, plastic containers. If you’re not yet following me on Instagram, check out the page anyway because I share many on-the-go solutions in my very own home. And I save many of them in my highlights (the circles under my bio).
Time-bound
I do something with meetings which is a lovely limitation. If I have a meeting in an hour’s time, I might make a meeting with a new client in the hour before that to keep us both on track and so that I have a legit reason to leave a meeting promptly. I’m an extrovert so it’s very easy for me to get chatty.
You can do this with personal events too. Make a tea date with a friend that has a hard end time. I find that I’m much more likely to want to keep up with recurring dates if my dates are 1.5 – 2 hours in length.
Digital
This happened purely by chance. I had an iPhone with only 16 GB of storage space. Because it was so limited, I had to delete photos all the time. It was annoying at first but I loved cultivating the habit of the Daily Delete (I first learned of this tip from Becky Higgins). I’ve since upgraded to 64GB of storage but I still do the daily delete and remove my photos every month. It’s a great habit to prevent overwhelm.
I mentioned my upholder tendency above. I made myself a rule that I have to read 4 books from my Kindle every month but I usually read more than 4 Kindle books. I find that that helps to keep my buying of books under control. I automatically stop buying unless I’m reading enough. For the record, up to the end of August, 64% of the books I’ve read have been on Kindle (41 books).
I definitely need limitations when I get on the computer for fun. I think I’m just going to play a game of Candy Crush while having a snack or read a quick article and before I know it I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, one blog post leading to another and another (or one game leading to another and another…) I try to remember to set a timer on my phone when I sit down and give myself a limited time. I like to use the song “The Bunny Hop” as my timer tone. A gentle reminder to NOT go down the rabbit hole. 🙂
Shannon, I LOVE that that song is your timer tone 🙂 Such a great (fun) way to remind yourself!