Category: Getting Things Done

During (self-inflicted) chaotic times I often wake up in the morning and will myself into getting my shit together. I declare, Today is the Day I Will Focus! I make lists, I have good intentions, I am motivated…

And then I get out of bed.

I’m like a cat distracted by a fly. I walk into the kitchen to empty the dishwasher, but instead end up doing three other things THAT ARE NOT EMPTYING THE DISHWASHER, just as an example. It’s worse when it comes to keeping the books because we do our bookkeeping with Quicken, which is on the computer, which is dangerously close to the Internet, which is the evil birth place of time-suckers, Twitter and Google Reader.

July flew past me, and I’m not sure I even noticed much of it. I missed opportunities to relax and be with friends, my kids missed out on fun activities, I wasn’t able to help people who needed me – all because I’ve been “busy.” I’ve missed living my life In Balance.

Last week I recalled the last time I wrote about this busyness, which led me to this great post by a friend on Frantic Busy vs. Smart Busy. In rereading her post, I realized this is how I’ve been living:

This kind of busy is the gal that is out of breath because she is running in circles, like a dog chasing its own tail. This busy gal is not ever getting time to rest or to enjoy those she loves or she does do those things and lets everything else fall apart around her. She isn’t really busy at all, she creates chaos by not managing/stewarding well, then has to urgently respond to the chaos- which can mask as busyness. Does she enjoy her life creating chaos? Maybe, frantic is fun? She is a busy gal, but she doesn’t seem to ever get it all done.

The other morning Bryan took a picture of my (not so) effective sign when he went into the bathroom to shower for work:

My focus found itself under a pile of used pull-ups and dirty underwear, forgotten. After Bryan and I laughed at the absurd irony of this crime scene, I felt the discouragement settle in: The failure. The ne’er-do-wells. The despair.

But all hope is not lost. The Lord is showing me my heart through this, and I’m being led through his grace into a new mindset. I see changes being made in my core that will result in new behaviors. I think lack of focus will always be my Achilles heel, but I don’t have to be mastered by it.

I can be the master over it.

Wow. It’s hard to believe how little I’ve been blogging lately, and even harder to believe I’m completely fine with it. I have a few drafts in the making, but mostly I’m just keeping up with Things and feeling very at peace about it.

I finished off my latest organizational project when my sorting bins arrived. I liked these because they are wooden and painted white, which fits in very well with the trim throughout our house. This was important to me because I don’t have a separate office, so I wanted my organizational system to blend in. I discovered them through The Clutter Diet Blog.

They look pretty full and cluttered at the moment, but that will change. I basically just took the piles of stuff I sorted, and dumped them in there to get them off my dining table. Bryan asked me why I got these when the gal on The Diet Clutter blog cautioned against them. I thought this was a great question, and one I thought out thoroughly. It’s why I decided to deconstruct my desk and map out what lands there before purchasing them. I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what they’d be used for, and that I had a plan for clearing them out on a regular basis.

All this stuff was piled up in one spot on my desk, and I could never find anything. I spent half a day looking for my kids’ immunization records last month when registering Thomas for preschool. I feel this is a system that will motivate me to overcome my procrastination, and keep up with Getting Things Done.

We also bought this wall-mounted charging station for our phones, camera, and iPods. We had a desk top charging station, but we really lack a lot of surface space, so this was perfect. It was expensive, though, and believe me that I googled and searched every major container slash organizing store in search of a comparable unit at a lower cost, and I couldn’t find one. Damn that over priced Pottery Barn for being so practical. And pretty.

So that’s what I did last week.

My mom is still here, and my back is feeling better. She leaves tomorrow, and next week I will launch back into my routine of working out and Getting Things Done.

Don’t you just love post titles like that? It sounds so… interesting and…captivating and… yawn.

My babysitter is on hiatus for softball season, and I was thinking about postponing my weekly writing sessions anyway (that’s another post), so I’ve decided to spend that same chunk of time working on finishing some projects around here.

At the top of my list is the state of my desk. Well, it’s not a desk really, as much as it is a set of shelves from Ikea shoved up against the refrigerator in the entryway to my kitchen.

These are the shelves and desk top as I got started. Note the random crap. Everywhere. Those who visit my home know that as you round this corner into the kitchen you will inevitably knock something on the floor as you brush past my desk. If not knocked directly, something will at least blow off the desk in the breeze of your passing. Bryan is frequently heard sighing with furrowed brow as he passes by. Not that he’s one to judge when it comes to messy desks.

This is the inside of the lower cabinet. Thank goodness it’s behind closed doors, because LOOK AT IT! Note the previous attempt at organization, using those cute little white drawers. I have no flippin idea what’s in those drawers.

This is the poor, unsuspecting table where I will sort piles of crap.

These are the shelves and cabinets once I cleared them all out. I should have removed all the stuff attached to the side of the refrigerator for a more dramatic affect – this still looks a little cluttered. Oh well.

Believe it or not, this is all sorted. I created the following piles: to be filed, to do, office supplies, receipts, cookbooks, gardening notes, to go downstairs, to go upstairs, pictures and cards, stickers, handyman items like screwdrivers and furniture pads, and CD’s.

This is the part I often get stuck on, because when I see a pile of pictures – for example – I want to sort through them. Or at least look over them and reminisce. But I read this article on the Clutter Diet blog about macro vs micro organization. My first goal is to visually clear the space (my desk) of clutter (macro), it is not to sort and organize specific things in that space, such as photos (micro).

The final step in this phase of the process was to map out what gets dumped on my desk. I read this article, also on the Clutter Diet Blog, about working with known behavior instead of fighting it, policing it, and getting angry. In other words, if certain things continually get dumped on my desk, I should organize to accommodate that behavior, rather than trying to change it.

So here is where I got nerdy and pulled out my graph notebook, listing out all the categories of crap and making a plan for where it will go.

And this is where the project ends, for the time being. I threw out a bunch of stuff as I sorted, put misplaced items where they belong, and everything else that belongs back on the shelves or in the cabinet I put away. I am waiting on a few wall-mounted letter bins I ordered to sort To Be Filed, To Be Read, Bills, and To Do.

We also decided to buy a small cabinet – at the suggestion of one of my personal organizers friends – to put near the basement stairs where we can stash items that need to go down to the basement. Half the clutter on my desk and the piano comes from items that need to be taken down there, but I just don’t do it one item at a time. The cabinet will contain drawers to hide the clutter, and once the drawers are filled, I will take the items downstairs.

Here are the shelves and cabinet reorganized. The main change is that I cleared everything off my desk except my laptop, the phone, a cup of pens, and a bottle of lotion. Everything else has been put above or below. This will allow a workspace, which I never had before due to crap.

Thanks for watching my kids, Cherie, so I could get this all done!

This is how my house looks tonight as I head off to bed. In fact, this is how my house has looked almost every night this month. Isn’t it refreshingly clean?! Compared to the 101 things I de-cluttered from my piano recently, I’d say this picture is worth some money.

I was inspired by my sister-in-law in CA when we visited over Christmas. Every night we’d have dinner, clean up a little, play games, then after the kids were in bed she’d flit about the house picking up clutter and wiping down counters. It took her fifteen minutes TOPS to do this, because her house was extremely clutter free.

I was like, I don’t know what this is, this working you are doing. Why are you doing this?!

She admitted to being a little obsessive about order, but still. If her house was a man he’d be HOT.

I’ve always told myself clutter didn’t affect my productivity. I’ve always told myself clutter was homey. I’ve always told myself I kept just a little bit of clutter around so others wouldn’t feel intimidated by an immaculate house.

And seriously, don’t we all have better things to do than constantly pick up after ourselves? I mean, who’s going to feed these people if all I’m doing is cleaning?! But best of all, I continually chose spending time with me, myself, and I over providing a safe and sane environment for my family. Why clean when you can write?

I rebelled against maintenance cleaning because I was afraid I would spend 95% of my time Getting Things Done, and have no time left for myself. And I am. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m spending 95% of my time Getting Things Done. But you know what? Do you know how I spend that other 5%? I know you do – you naturally organized types can see this coming: I RELAX GUILT FREE.

Yeah. For people like me this is mind blowing. For you organized types: yawn. You’re like, I could clean my kitchen with my eyes closed and one hand wrapped around a cocktail.

I love Craig’s List – do you? If you don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, TRUST ME when I say all you thrifty types will LOVE IT. It’s basically a giant, internet, garage sale.

It’s better than Ebay because it’s local. You drive to someone’s house, you chat about all the good times their kids had with the train table, you talk about surprising your two year old with the train table, and you thank them for the great cookies and coffee offered when you arrived.

Okay, maybe it’s not always like that, exactly, but there’s definitely more personality to it than traditional online purchasing.

As much as I like it, though, I often feel overwhelmed by it. It’s constantly being updated, so I feel like I have to check in often in order to find what I’m looking for. I forget to do this, see, because I’m addicted to my reader. In fact, I might go for days without checking the site, and then become frustrated that I can’t keep up.

This week it occurred to me to see if Craig’s List has an RSS feed, and do you know what? IT DOES! So now I run a search of what I am looking for – say, “rug” in “babies and kids” – and subscribe to the feed for that search via my Google Reader. SHAZAM! Every time a post is added that fits that search criteria it appears in my reader, which I check several times a day.

And you know what else? It’s actually easier to read the content in my reader because the body of the posts are included – no more clicking on each post title to find out what it says.

That, my friends, is called usability.

Slowly but surely I’m adding new things to my routine so they are more likely to “stick.” This summer I hired a cleaning lady to come once a month to do deep cleaning in my house. The first time she came it took her eight hours to power through the grime, and I was a bit horrified. After that initial visit it only took her four hours each month.

Part of her routine was to change the sheets on our beds. And in full disclosure here, I will admit that my sheets were only changed once a month during that time. But to be totally honest, that was more often than they were getting changed before she started coming, so every four weeks was an improvement.

Her services were a gift to myself and our marriage, and intended for the summer only. I hesitated to let her go this fall, as our house was always so clean and refreshing. But for reasons of paring down our budget for leaner times, and for reasons of sticking to the original plan of summer only, I was on my own again.

As of this writing I have changed our sheets every Monday for three weeks, and I am frighteningly surprised to find that it is really not that big a deal. It’s not difficult, time consuming, nor a pain in the neck. I just take off the old sheets and put on the clean sheets – takes about ten minutes per bed, and then I wash all the dirty sheets and towels in the house.

It just goes to show me how bogged down I tend to get when looking at the bigger picture of Getting Things Done, but when I break it down into small duties it feels ridiculously simple.

Next on my list is the bathroom – I’ve only cleaned it twice since the housekeeper quit coming, and I do not want this experience with my shower again.

What things do you get stuck on? How do you get unstuck?