The Most Important Project I'll Ever Manage

What minimalism, motherhood, and project management taught me about designing a life that actually works.

A Minimalist Millennial..Imagine That

A few years ago, when Marie Kondo came on the scene, I really loved the idea of her work. Minimalism wasn’t something I ever thought about much, but I realized I’ve always naturally liked the idea of “simple”.

Modern, Clean, Aesthetic..that’s my vibe, but also just how I live my life. You know how the older generation is notorious for keeping things? Maybe it’s because they didn’t have as much access to things as we do now, and I respect that too. I just tend to enjoy life with less physical clutter. My anxious brain doesn’t want the extra mental load of anything, so the less “stuff” the better.

Thankfully, my Mom does not fit this stereotype—she is ruthless about throwing things away, although she loved to “pass things on” to me. Like wait, you are getting rid of this and giving it to me, but why do I need to keep it?

She did this with a family set of dishes. They stayed in my garage for many years because I had no room for them. When I moved, we finally both agreed to just keep a few and we sold the rest. I think we all attach emotion to things that maybe spark a memory, but if it’s not something we will use or really value, why not give it to someone who will.

Like everything else, it’s easy to go all in and then ask, well where do we draw the line? I’ll admit, I love a clutter free house, but I have been told my style is boring. We all know millennial gray is a dying fad, but I am honestly not sure I want to change right now. It’s not that I don’t like color, but something about life being so busy, having my house be simple and easy to look at feels peaceful.

Enter: Motherhood

Alright, so maybe my mindset is slightly different when it comes to my son. We still follow a simple mindset with him and make sure to rotate toys, donate & sell as soon as he grows out of things. I will say I am different when it comes to him—we have the colorful toys and character shirts—he’s only young once…and he doesn’t give a crap about my aesthetic. I’d be lying if I initially was like 😬, but now I love it. My house stays modern, and he brings the color and chaos. I think that works.

My Son’s toys accurately displaying my life: Modern Millenial + Colorful Chaos

The Life Audit

Once you start a “Decluttering” mindset, you start to want to do it to every area of your life…or at least I did. This has been ongoing for me for years, but one thing I realized is how quickly you can get overwhelmed. I remember last year before the New Year, everyone was doing vision boards and making plans to do “something” to improve every area of their life. I did that too, and once you overcommit with no plan, you have every reason in the world to give up.

So, here’s our plan, friends. You don’t need a Monday, a new week, or a new year. We love fresh starts, but that’s what holds us up from starting in the first place.

Over the next few months, I’ll deep dive into each “life” category and talk about the tools I’m using, what I’m learning, and how I’m planning it so we don’t get overwhelmed and give up.

We live in a world right now where you can literally optimize everything. With AI, this can actually become even more crazy because it will analyze anything you want to “improve”. I’ve learned first hand, it can immediately get to be a bit overwhelming. I asked Claude to do a LOT recently. It has created my entire Notion structure (and it continues to update). It has given me macros, meal plans, grocery lists, a capsule wardrobe…but like, ok that’s great, NOW what do I do with all this information. So, instead of just giving up completely…I created my own system on how I’m doing this for each big “focus area” of my life and how we will do this by sprint.

My 2026 Focus Areas

I won’t bore you with all 13 of my “Life focus areas”, so we will focus on a few that I think most of the world can relate to.

• Home—the endless projects, one sprint at a time

• Career— the day job, the side project, and figuring out what’s next

• Health— macros, gym goals, data I track to always improve

• Motherhood— toddler mom life, managing the mental load, and growth as a mom

• Finance— my “mint.com” replacement, budgeting, saving

• Personal Growth— hobbies, things I want to improve

We will deep dive into my methods, the tools I use, the goals, the tasks, and metrics to keep ourselves accountable. It is impossible to focus on each one of these at FULL capacity all the time (trust me I’ve tried), but each bucket is meant to be focused on at certain times of the week or month. We will work toward these and my goals in each of these specifically for 2026.

I think implementing a system to do this in small steps puts us on a continuous improvement path. Having a base system makes it easy to implement new changes or when things don’t go as planned. That has been my goal—life on autopilot as much as possible, and making time for the real memories.

I’m excited to start this series and build this in real time. I’ve done this at work for 15 years, but I finally realized the most meaningful project I’ll ever manage is my own life.

One more thing, these projects never truly end—we just continue iterating as life changes. That’s what makes it fun. :)

Let’s do this.