Declutter (an optimistic post)

First off: I'm home from Puddletown. Christmas went off with very few hitches (and we are a family who loves our hitches).

But now is the time to look forward. I have good reason to believe that the next six months will bring a great deal of scurrying and exploding head syndrome at work, from the get-go, with no chance to pause and catch my breath. There are also some Very Good Things in the offing, though. And to prepare for both of these, I need to declutter.

Clutter, whether physical, digital, or mental, tends to make it impossible for me to work. I have a zillion and one three- to five-day tasks to get done in too little time. When that happens, my natural response is to practice denial about all of them. But, after many attempts, I've determined that this does not produce the desired result.* Furthermore, doing the Next Indicated Thing actually does produce results: The Thing in Question gets done, and I feel lighter.

So, today, on my arrival home, I am devoting myself to doing the major decluttering my physical and mental environments. This means 1) putting away the stuff from the trip; 2) sorting through the many piles of papers accumulated throughout my teeny apartment; and 3) making a list (long) of the tasks I need to accomplish in the month of January, and actually prioritizing them. The invisible 3b is for me to get started on the first of these tasks tomorrow.

And fair warning: this may be part of a semi-ambitious project to Finally Get My Shit Together. Notebooks have been purchased, anyway. But I won't say more about that now, for fear of overwhelming myself. For now, I will simply do the next indicated thing. And the next indicated thing, today, is decluttering. For now, that will be enough.


*The desired result being that the elves swoop in and finish my projects while I sleep, leaving them done, proofread, and neatly printed and collated for my perusal. They also have yet to repair my shoes.