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These 7 tips with turn your Pin Board projects into a reality

Why do we need 7 tips to turn our projects into a reality? Ah, Instagram with your beautiful white kitchens, and perfect mid-century modern living rooms.  Pinterest, how we love your quick tips for keeping our houses cleaner and making it easier to organize our bathrooms.  If only we implemented any of the hundreds of ideas on our pin boards—but we don’t. 

Is it because we prefer to dream, but have lost the will to chase the dream?  Or is it because we don’t know how to begin, let alone how to finish?

Take these steps to get your project off your pin board and into real life.

• Get motivated. Knowing that it’s time to make your laundry room functional isn’t enough to get you to tackle that project.  Motivation is more about feeling than about knowing.  You must tap into a good mood to get anything started.  Quit looking at the problems with your laundry room and imagine how great it’s going to look when you’re done.  Focus on the things you’re going to love about the project and you’ve taken the first step to tackling it.

• Track your Progress. This one comes straight from the smarties at Harvard Business Review, “the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.”  Tracking your progress increases your creativity?  Sign me up!   I like to take a series of photos as I work on a project so I can see how far I’ve come. Spreadsheet trackers are also high on my list of motivators.

• Know the Reward. It’s almost impossible to stay motivated if you can’t see the end game.  Write down all the reasons why this project is going to totally change your home or life, and why it’s going to be kickin’ awesome.  I also like to imagine how my mom and my friends are going to react when they see it for the first time.  Those little head-movies keep me in the game for the long-haul.  You also get an unexpected reward—but you’ll have to wait until the end of the post for that one.

• Break it up! Any big project looks like the Loch Ness Monster from afar—all out-of-focus, massive and intimidating.  Break any big project into little chunks that you can complete in 2-4 hours, and write them down.  Then take the first block of time and divide it up using the 1-3-5 list method—or the app http://www.135list.com/ (yeah, baby).  Now you have an executable list of what you are going to do during your first block of time.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

• Make it Routine. Home improvement is a creative effort, and we erroneously think that creative projects need to be ethereal or tenuous, to tap into our muse.  But it’s been my experience that your muse appears in the middle of working.  You can even make an appointment with your muse by working on your project at the same time each day or week.

• Help Wanted. There’s nothing more frustrating than spinning your wheels because you don’t know how to move your project forward.  When in doubt, get help.  I love this era in the history of the world, where there’s accessible information everywhere and people are so willing to give it away for free.  Email your fav blogger (hopefully me) with questions.  Drive down to Home Depot and tap into the retired craftsmen that always seem to be working there.  Get creative.  I once called a plumbing company and the receptionist walked me through my problem for free.

Now that you have all the tools to tackle your home improvement project, get to work because it isn’t really work.  What?!  That’s right—your project is “serious leisure,” the kind of leisure that actually makes you more productive at work.  Studies have shown that people who are ambitious and think about their work often, have projects or hobbies that absorb a lot of time and provide their brains a different way of thinking that keeps them sharper during their day jobs.  As if I needed another reason to pull out the jigsaw!

I’d love to hear your thoughts!  Did this help motivate you to get started on your project?