highlandheffalump

Word of the Year 2023 – Less – checking progress

At the beginning of the year I chose the word Less as an intention for 2023.

I started the year really well with my Less mentality. Decluttering, resisting yarn purchases, my time on Facebook and Instagram was down to 3 mins a day. It really seemed like I was going to smash the year of ‘less is more’.

Then in May I’m not sure what happened, I was kindly gifted some weaving yarns and fibre, and then I bought some too…then June came and I bought some more. Oops! I love it all though and will eventually use it all.

My wasting time on Instagram has returned, I have two profiles and one shows me knitting stuff and the other keeps sending me Formula 1 drivers so I’m getting hooked in on both profiles. I think Instagram stopped the time limits I’d set but I’ve reset them.

I’m still working on finding plastic free toiletries and have been impressed with Fussy which is a plastic free natural deodorant and the first I’ve used that works. We buy bars of body soap, face soap, shampoo and conditioner, although I am using up some old bottles occasionally. I haven’t found a moisturising bar for my face or sun cream but my hand moisturiser is also a bar (the little charity dog paw ones from Lush….it’s fantastic).

We save all the recyclable plastic food wrapping and deposit them in the cage in the supermarket…do I have faith it’s recycled and not just shipped off to a developing country….not really but I live in hope they do something with it, but the aim is to buy less in the first place.

I’ve used the refill shop in Inverness once so far. I’m rarely in the city and we are pretty well stocked up on dry goods and detergents.

I’ve started to adopt the Fly Lady System (if you search YouTube you’ll find lots of people explaining it in detail, I personally like Diane in Denmark’s videos) of cleaning and that seems to work well for spending less time cleaning. I also said I wanted to procrastinate less and part of that system is having anti-procrastination Wednesdays so I hope to keep that going, as I have a long list of things I’ve talked about doing for a looooong time!

So a mixed bag overall, room for improvement but some achievements and having stopped to review how I’m doing I feel confident that will help me get back on track.

10 comments

  2. Many of the products we purchase in plastic bottles state they use recycled plastic to make their containers. We have home recycling pick ups weekly where I live. Which is very nice. I just started seeing ads for bar shampoo. You have given me food for thought and I will start searching for products not put in plastic to see what is put there.

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  3. A mid-year review is so helpful, I find. Jan/Feb, it’s easy (ish) to stay on track but then the warmer weather and other things start to creep in and I find May is when it goes off the rails oftentimes, so a reassessment in June to get the second half of the year on track is a great idea. Sounds like you’re doing well on many things tho! (PS – I laughed at your image at the top of the post because I had a college professor whose name, I kid you not, was Les Muchmore.)

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  4. I had to laugh when I saw your sentiments at the top of the blog, less is more and I thought yea I’m doing it right, I’m doing less!! But I don’t think that was what you meant, lol. Less dishes, less vacuuming, less spinning, less knitting, sigh. Just coming out of my down time that happens every year at this time (it’s regarding a loss), and it takes about a month and 1/2 to re-energize myself. I’ve heard of the Fly Lady seems like a really good system.

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