ElizabethPW

Going With the Flow

Posted on 10. Oct, 2007 by Elizabeth Potts Weinstein in Blog

Tuesday morning I woke up with a passion … for cleaning out my house.  Not "cleaning" per se, but sorting through and organizing all the junk and clutter that has built up in the 4 years we have lived in our home.  My first thought was no, I need to work on the gigantic list of work projects and not use cleaning to procrastinate those items on my to do list.  But I decided to go with my cleaning "flow" — and here’s why. 

My husband and I have been thinking about moving to another part of the bay area & have been looking for the perfect place for a few months, to no avail.  Everything was too far away, too expensive, too murky, too crowded, or just not right.  So on Sunday night I made a list of each of our top 5 "wants" in a location to live, and triangulated them on a map (15 minutes from this, 30 minutes from that, etc.).  We found our location (for those of you who are from the Bay Area, the Skylonda area of Woodside).  Monday we took a few hours off work for a visit and fell in love.

Now our move is real.  I finally have a motivation to de-clutter my house, because I have a real vision of what our new home will be like.  And de-clutter is the first step in selling this house and packing to move. 

My first thought was that I should not use de-cluttering as a procrastination tool to delay working on work.  But I quickly put that thought aside.  Right now I have a passion for cleaning (which does not arrive every day, let me tell you) and I should harness this energy and make some major progress.  My "job" is not running my business — that’s just one part of the roles I perform in taking care of myself and my family — and I should feel no guilt in setting different priorities during my "work time." 

So yesterday I cleaned out my laundry room, top to bottom.  Wow.  It had not been cleaned out since we moved in, and had a ton of junk piled in corners and stuff in cabinets.  Filled up the entire trash can outside with junk, found a cooler from camping in May that was not completely empty (nasty!), reorganized the tool box, threw away stained clothes, and cleaned up dust hiding in corners.  If I had to move tomorrow, everything in that room would fit in two banker’s boxes. 

Just from that small amount of progress, I feel lighter and more confident. I’m less distracted, so today I can concentrate on work. 

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Tags: life hack, productivity, Time Management