You Can Do Anything for 15 Minutes

So, if January is generally a time of renewal and resolution, you may wonder why I'm still spending so much time talking about clearing out.  I think it's because the further I get in life the more I realize my brain is like a sponge, and there are temporary maximum capacities involved with what it can take in.  With teenagers, married kids and a little girl running around the house there are so MANY things I want to do and need to keep track of.  The more I get going on, the more I find myself forgetting important details.  And by important, I mean:

• I forgot I was supposed to take a meal to a friend in need, even though I just volunteered to do it a few days ago.  
• Visitors showed up at my door and I completely spaced that they were scheduled to come by at all.  
• I skipped dental appointments for the whole family because I made them a while ago, didn't get a reminder call soon enough, and it didn't even occur to me I was supposed to be somewhere.  

These are the things that happen when the psychic clutter is reaching a breaking point.  So, to manage it all, sometimes I need to squeeze out the sponge and make room for new input.  You might ask, "Why don't you just get a better calendar system?"  And, to that I would say, "Brilliant idea!"  But, I prefer to take a more abstract, metaphorical approach.  I always hope that maybe purging some of the clutter will make room for something more...namely cognitive coherence about things that are important to me and feeling more connected generally.

The irony about this morning's post is that I am awake early on Saturday morning.  The house is quiet and everyone else is sleeping.  And, I, rather than doing the work of clearing clutter in my life, am WRITING about clearing clutter.  This is procrastination.  However, I shouldn't feel too bad because one of my sisters recently told me that sometimes doing housework is just her way of procrastinating the work of WRITING.  Either way, I should get on with today's tip, so I can actually DO THE WORK.

Follow this image link, it's a good one.

Last time we cleared flat surfaces and learned about our magic three containers.  Today, I only have one trick to share, and it is called:

Beat the timer.  Or, You can do anything for 15 minutes.  

I am never so competitive as when a timer or deadline is in place.  Sometimes, when it's time to pick up the house before Dad gets home or clean up after dinner, I challenge my kids to a race.  We split up the tasks that need to be done and whoever finishes first gets a reward. If they beat me, I promise to do their next small chore for them.  If I beat them I get to sit out during the next short cleaning session.  It's awesome to see how quickly we can all work to accomplish our task.

Similarly, if I set a timer for myself, especially if it is for some short time, like 15 minutes, I will work quickly and without distraction to finish my task.  The timer even works for large clutter clearing jobs.  Often, on weekends, my husband gets serious about doing big household projects.  Ironically, the weekend is not my favorite time to do the monumental tasks.   And, I find myself empathizing with kids who continually ask during such a task "How much longer are we going to be doing this?"  His answer used to be, "Until we're finished."  But, I think he got tired of our whining, so now, OUR solution is to portion out the big job into lots of smaller tasks. This is system work, which he is really good at.  Though our total work time will inevitably be much longer than 15 minutes, we still set a time limit, and we find that accomplishing smaller tasks within the larger job keeps us motivated as we go.  Treats and bribes work well, too.  Work for an hour, get a drink from the gas station (I'll do a lot for a half-caf diet coke with lots of ice.) Finish another hour and we all go to lunch or the movies or get to have friends over or whatever else works.  For the record, he doesn't completely OWN this system yet, he'd still rather just power through until the job is done, but knows it works well for those of us with less focus.

Now GO!  Set a timer. Pick a shelf, or a drawer, or a Christmas tree that is de-ornamented but still has it's lights on it (i don't know why i thought of that one because it's the end of January and only Christmas Crazies still have that sort of stuff still up) and get the job done.