152: 3 Tips if You Are Having Trouble Taking Action on Your Home!

Three Lessons for Getting Unstuck, Borrowed from a Project-a-Day Series

I’ve been stuck lately. Some things threw my whole summer off kilter, and getting moving again, or even just shifting direction, has taken real effort. So today I want to share three tips I picked up watching an interior designer named Taylor Bowling on Instagram, at home.tailored, who has been running a “project a day” series for 58 days straight.

A quick disclaimer

Her home is genuinely beautiful, she’s a professional interior designer with a naturally organized eye. If that kind of content usually makes you feel worse rather than better, fair warning. But I think once you hear the breakdown of why this has worked for her, you’ll see it applies regardless of what your own home currently looks like.

Tip one: no rules around the attempt

She’s put zero pressure on herself with this series. No promise of dramatic before-and-afters, no required order to the projects, no concern over whether a project is big or small, and she has no problem repeating a small fix in a second room and sharing it again, since the work still made an impact there too. That total lack of self-imposed rules is exactly why she’s kept it up for 58 days. So much of what trips our brains up is the all-or-nothing thinking, the feeling that if we didn’t follow the “right” order or stay perfectly consistent, it doesn’t count. Removing the rules removes the trap.

Tip two: partial progress on a bigger project still counts

She wanted to refresh some overgrown front landscaping. Instead of waiting to reveal one big transformation, she showed the before and after of just weeding it out on day one, gave herself credit for that alone, then added mulch as its own separate project days later, then came back again to plant new things as yet another project. Only at the very end did she show the dramatic full before-and-after most people expect on Instagram. But she’d already given herself credit at every phase along the way. That’s a genuinely useful reframe if you get overwhelmed looking at a project as one giant unfinished whole instead of the chunks you’ve actually completed.

Tip three: outsourcing it still counts as getting it done

Twice now she’s shown a project where someone else did the actual physical work, a light fixture swap, some trim work and paint in a hallway, but she still counted it, because she was the one who identified what needed to change, made the call, picked the paint color, scheduled the time, and made sure it happened. Who actually executes the task doesn’t erase the fact that you were the reason it got checked off. Calling, coordinating, and deciding are real steps too.

A bonus takeaway: retroactive credit is still credit

At least twice, she’s shown a room that looks like it might have already been finished a while back, quietly counted as one of her daily projects on a rough day when the baby needed more attention or life got in the way. That’s such a relatable ADHD brain move, we do things all the time that were never written down or part of the plan, and then feel like we accomplished nothing because the actual list didn’t move. Looking back and giving yourself credit for what you already did, even if you never logged it at the time, is completely fair game.

A couple more inspiration sources

If you want more of this kind of energy, Taylor Bowling’s Instagram is at home.tailored. On YouTube, Caroline Winkler has two videos worth a look, “You’re Doing Home Organization Wrong” and its follow-up “Home Organization for Chaotic People.” Her humor and language are very different from mine, so consider that your heads-up, but she calls out a lot of the same overly rigid organizing rules I like to push back on.

Your practical, actionable step

Pick one small project today with zero rules attached, don’t worry about order, size, or whether you’ve done something similar before. If it only gets partially done, or someone else ends up doing the physical work while you made the call, count it. And if you realize something you already did counts too, even if you never wrote it down, give yourself that credit right now.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.