On the whole, I’m a tidy and well-organized person. Clutter makes me crazy and disorder makes it difficult for me to concentrate. Granted, while I am deep in the creative blood fever of a project, I might not notice that seventeen layers of artifacts have accumulated in my workspace. This includes both my physical desk as well as my computer, where I have occasionally amassed upwards of 200 open tabs on my browser. My wood shop isn’t exempt either.
The older I get (I am not unaware of how frequently I use that phrase), the more I am finding myself capable of pushing detritus to the corners of my periphery where it can accrue at an astounding rate if unchecked. Again, this detritus can be virtual as well as physical. While those stacks of unread books, newspaper articles, magazines, and whitepapers grow on both ends of my desk, the list of to-do items, long neglected and not written down, accumulates at the edge of my unconscious mind.
It takes some major event to propel me into housecleaning mode. It could be a guest threatening to drop in, or that object desperately needed and known to have been seen since the last move but now nowhere to be found, ot that pesky cancellation notice from the power company that arrives after the monthly bill has slipped unread into the lower depths of the to-be-read stack. It could also be a dust bunny of monumental proportion rising from a dark corner of the office and threatening utter annihilation.
The most recent event was a realization mid-holiday that I had too many balls in the air and not enough arms to land them all. I’d managed to get all the Christmas gifts made, wrapped, and posted but at the expense of the RV rebuild. I had two accompaniment tracks to record for one of my wife’s students now weeks overdue. I had pulled out my tattered “Nutcracker” score as I do every Thanksgiving to play from during the holidays but hadn’t touched the piano in three weeks. The floor was so filthy I was afraid that our children would walk in at Christmas and have us both declared incompetent. I had a meltdown.
Okay, it was more of an epiphany than a full out meltdown, but it was clear that I couldn’t wait until spring for a thorough house cleaning of my head space. Fortunately, it was not the trauma I expected it to be. The first task was the most difficult: set priorities. What are the most important uses of my time? I really had to be honest with myself about this, and that personal honesty stuff was the tricky part.
Second, I had to ask myself what was it that was getting in the way of productivity? The answer was easy enough to identify. I had allowed my time to be fragmented in a way that made plowing through the to-do list nearly impossible. To be honest, there really was no daily to do list.
Third, I had to accept that there were items or tasks of lower priority that either I had to abandon as unnecessary or find a way to hand off. It’s humbling to have to admit that at sixty-seven years of age, I’m no longer capable of handling everything on a 2.5 acre spread all by myself. Moving is not an option, so a groundskeeper will need to be retained.
Finally, the issue of the to-do list. During my career, I had been assiduous about the list of to-do items that I kept in my notebook. I carried that notebook with me everywhere when I was at a client site. That wasn’t practical at home. I had experimented with keeping a similar list on my computer, but the constraint of proximity (I’m rarely at the computer) made that fail as an option. Quite by accident, I hit upon a solution. I began bringing my consulting notebook to the dinner table. I found that as my partner and I talked through the day and what was coming up, the list fell out of our heads. First thing the next morning, I polish off the low hanging fruit and scope out the time buckets necessary to meet my other obligations.
One week in, this seems to be working admirably. I have been able to eliminate the stacks on my desk and keep them gone. The daily to-do lists have become shorter as there have been fewer carryovers from day to day. Best of all, I’m finding longer expanses of time for the top priority activities.
It’s a good feeling – almost cathartic – to have returned order to my head space. A sense of calm has descended and I can look past my laptop screen and see the corners of my desk. This affords me a renewed precision of focus that I cannot recommend too highly. I almost feel as if I have returned from a two-week vacation and not found two-weeks of accumulated work waiting for me. Dare I say that I feel downright light-hearted?
There is one aspect of the spring housecleaning that slipped through the cracks, though. I did not deal with the dust bunnies of unusual size. They still lurk formidably in the dark corners of the house, waiting to pounce. If I squint really hard, I can avoid looking at them for now. I suppose I will have to deal with them sooner or later, but in the words of Scarlet O’Hara, “Tomorrow is another day.”
Erica and Friends 