Two weeks ago today, I attended Professional Development Day at the Annual Chain Link Conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. I haven’t had time to discuss everything I learned while I was there, but one of the break out sessions I attended in the afternoon figures into my work today.

While there were nine presenters, attendees had to narrow their choices to just three as that was all that could be crammed into one afternoon. One I chose to attend was Melissa Leapman’s presentation: Diversify to Make Yourself: and Your Business Profitable.

During her talk it became clear that Ms. Leapman has a proclivity for lists to help organize her work.

I have not always found lists useful. Sometimes I write down minute details just so I can cross something off, but now that I am down to the wire with this project and have an extreme need to put every available moment to use,I decided to give the list thing a whirl.

So last night, before I went to sleep, I found a lucky notebook and carefully prepared a laundry  list of things I wanted to do today with a corresponding timetable.

The day got off to a shaky start. The first thing was that I somehow missed my 5:45 am alarm, and I was not up and out of bed until 6:04 when my youngest son got me up.

We spent the next 26 minutes making sure he had every thing he needed for his school day, and then we set out to the bus stop. By the time 7:00 am rolled around, my schedule had slipped.

Undaunted, I did not allow myself to be flustered, and instead did what I could to get the day back on track. After I got a few household chores out of the way, I began work on the 1×2 and 1×4 Bauhaus rectangles I need to finish this project.

Then, right around 9:00 am, the light in the house was good enough to take this photo of the project that is bedeviling me:

While I find I prefer the afternoon light, I still had a lot to do, so I continued work on the rectangles and took breaks to do laundry (a task which had not made it to the official laundry  list in the lucky notebook but still needed to be done).

By mid-afternoon, I had done three loads of laundry and finished these 1 x 2 Bauhaus rectangles:

and these 1 x 4 Bauhaus rectangles:

Once I had at least one 1×4 rectangle of every color I was working with, I then turned my attention to using the pieces to assemble the Bauhaus quilt block iv motifs needed for the project.

Moving everything I needed to my outdoor office:

I set to work.

The piecing is, at this point, going a bit more slowly than I had hoped. The task that takes the most time is me deciding which color belongs where.

I am hoping that by tomorrow, I devise a less time consuming method for color placement, but at the moment, I need to write tomorrow’s list.