Recently I relocated a secretary desk from one room to another. It wasn’t a seismic change. However, it was enough to get a fresh perspective on two rooms. I had space in both rooms, so luckily only the one piece of furniture had to be moved. Sometimes when rearranging furniture, it results in a lot of heavy lifting and major reshuffles. Although it did require some major dusting and a quick run with the vacuum to get the new space prepped and the old one cleaned up.
With the new furniture arrangement, it opened up possibilities for reorganizing in a new way. And naturally, this inspired me to start chipping away at the pile of boxes, still unpacked from the latest move. I don’t like to spend time thinking about how long the pile has been there. It’s been there long enough to start collecting dust and become part of the landscape. In other words, too long. Time for some late spring cleaning.
During the clean up I found a copy of my book floating around. In flipping through it, I rediscovered one of my favorite tips: timing myself. Basically, timing myself means I sit down to do some dreaded, or undesirable task. The kind of thing I will literally do anything else instead of. Then I time myself to get a new perspective on it. Sometimes this helps get over the “hump,” especially when I discover the hated task doesn’t take much time at all to do, as in under 5 minutes.
I often use this technique when I’m procrastinating. Or if I notice routine clutter in one area and staying that way. For example, I have a bad habit of dumping my clothes in a pile at the end of the day instead of putting them away. I don’t have a good reason for this. Most nights this is the only thing standing between me and sleeping. Thus I can’t tolerate any delays, even for something that takes me less than 5 minutes to accomplish.
Having reacquainted myself with this valuable, useful tip, I plan on using it to whittle away the piles of stuff left exposed from the latest rearranging. Armed with my stopwatch, and established purging criteria, I feel inspired to finish unpacking.
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