cleaninghouse2019

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The lost post

I made a post not too long ago that disappeared, and it was something about the idea of starting a task even if you aren’t in the mood, because sometimes we mistake the fear of comfrontation for the feeling of guilt of not having done something in awhile, and sometimes we feel as if we haven’t got any creative energy left, when what we actually have is a tank that is so full of creative energy that we feel stiff and uncomfortable. Maybe it hurts to stretch your leg at first, but that’s only because you let it fall asleep!

Anyway best wishes to the lost post, wherever you ended up. And best wishes to you dear reader, I hope you find the will to stretch your creative legs

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Loftinterior

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Mindbodygreen

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A needle felted Golden Retriever.  5 inches tall. Wool, acrylic fiber, plastic eyes and handmade polymer clay nose.  

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Paris apt

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The Messy Desk

My desk is a disgrace. The drawers are full of papers and pencils and paintbrushes, makeup and notebooks and even, I hate to admit, a few empty cans.

Why is it such a mess? Every time I open a drawer, usually looking for something that would be easy to find in an organized desk, I think to myself “How did it get to this point?”

Basically, I was lazy. But not just that. I was not deliberate in my actions. The reason that there are paint brushes littering the inside of several drawers is that I didnt ever once sit down and decide to paint at my desk, it was always a distraction or a side project while I waited for something on my computer to load, or before I heard a response back to a question I’d asked over text. You see, a quick and distracted painting session leads to a quick and distracted cleanup, resulting in the shoving of brushes and other supplies into the first semi-empty looking drawer of the desk. Before long, it’s out of sight out of mind, and the result is only to later find these supplies the next time we are distracted, when cleaning is the last thing on our minds.

First step is to deliberately clean the desk. But all future steps involve deliberate actions, in other words, doing one thing at a time.

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Picking up a lost thread

In 2019, I want to have a clean slate.

That’s why I did something challenging and I drafted out an email to someone I’d been afraid to reach out to. The reason I’d been afraid had nothing to do with a negative situation, but there were a lot of unknowns. For a long time I’d been working for a close family friend, with our contact being mainly through email as she lived far away. I realized, during a period of radio silence between us, that I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to be in the field we worked in anymore. I worried about telling her this, afraid she would be disappointed. On top of that, I was unsure what was owed to me in terms of pay, not feeling as though I had earned the sum we agreed on. I wondered if she was feeling the same way and wasn’t sure how to tell me. Almost a minute after the email was sent, I got a reply, and it was lovely. She wasn’t angry, she was interested in what I would like to do with my future instead, and she was far from thinking I hadn’t earned my pay.

It doesn’t always turn out this well when we confront things, but in my experience it’s always been better to know than to guess.

Sometimes we mistake our feelings of stress during procrastination for the fear of a negative result.

I hope that this idea brings you some peace in the new year.

Have you ever decided to confront an issue you had been avoiding? How did it turn out?

Till next time...

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A great setup!

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Furnlovers

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The Anxiety-Free To-do List Part 3:

PART THREE. This post will be the final installment of a series on writing a to-do list that encompasses all of your responsibilities while giving you a feeling of control over them. If you would like to know more about the initial stages of that process, please look at parts 1 and 2.

Last post, we placed our tasks in a column, and made another column for things that we have done, and a third column for notes. Now all we have to do is accomplish things. The only issue is knowing what we should prioritize when we can’t tackle everything at once. My biggest suggestion is allowing yourself the freedom to make changes to your plans, but keeping a sort of blueprint that keeps you from veering too far off course.

Now, if you read my post on sticking to your schedule, you may be confused about what seems to be me throwing that entire concept out the window, and you would be right to wonder. However, I assure you

there is a clear distinction between allowing yourself to meander and forgetting to respect your schedule;

Forgetting to respect your schedule is  more about the loss of a routine that you built, while meandering involves swapping tasks in and out within the parameters of your set routine.

For example, I have set aside time in the morning to go for a walk outside after I have breakfast. Today, however, it is -9 degrees Celsius (without the windchill!) and when I set out today I made a sharp turn back towards the house after walking almost a block. However, all is not lost. I also have an exercise bike in my room for days like today, and I am going to use that instead. I am not going to beat myself up for not sticking to my plans because I captured the essence of what I wanted to achieve and honoured it.

For some of us, the very act of writing down a task makes it harder to accomplish. As someone who often has trouble sticking to plans, this was something that helped me see that, even though I am a "free spirit", who might have a touch of ADD, I'm still able to be productive in unexpected ways. Maybe today I stayed in and cleaned rather than studying like I wrote on my list. But I could just have easily planned to clean and beat myself up for choosing to study instead. In reality, both needed doing at some point, and I simply shifted my priorities within a safe zone. I hope that you too, through writing out your priorities and goals before constructing your to-do lists, will understand what it is you truly want to achieve, and will figure out ways to create a safe zone for your priorities. There will be more posts on this subject to come, but for now this concludes the series on the anxiety-free to-do list.

Adieu!

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Imagine having a decorative black apple in your pristine, white tiled kitchen.

Jillimdetmer

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These are some interesting ideas. My only addition would be that it’s not ‘feigning’ your life is together, that is what having your life together feels like. When you have enough stability and confidence to take care of yourself, you will be able to self-soothe and face challenges you might not otherwise take on.

How to Feign Your Life is Together

Have a signature accessory, clothing article, make up look, or hair style.

Have a fragrance. Make your hair scents and lotions match your perfume.

It’s okay to dine alone. Bring a book or people watch.

Love your hair. Research the best brands for your hair type and use masks weekly.

Your nails don’t need to be fancy, but keep them maintained.

Stay worldly. Know works of art, artists, designers, films, books, politicians. Spend your lunch break reading the paper or a magazine.

Crying is not a weapon. It’s okay to feel your emotions, but never use them as an excuse to avoid your problems.

Jealousy is boring. Love and appreciate others. If you can’t love them, forget them.

Boost others. Flatter others, but don’t deprecate yourself in the process.

Don’t sulk. Don’t let the whole world know your problems. If you don’t want someone to give their opinion, don’t share your situation.

Your life is between you and the universe. Don’t post your personal matters for others to see.

Don’t emotionally blackmail others. They hurt you? Let them know and then move on. It’s between the two of you and not the world.

Cook dinner. Cook dinner and listen to music, the radio, or a podcast.

Treat yourself to candles and flowers. Be your own cheerleader.

Take naps. Take a cat nap on a Sunday afternoon with the blinds open and the fan on high.

Drink your water, eat your vegetables. Take care of your body.

Never have time to take off your jewelry before bed, but always have time to take off your makeup. Your nighttime skin regime is important.

Mystery is beautiful. You don’t need to reveal much of or about yourself.

Never appear other than as you are. Don’t lie about yourself. Embrace who you are at your core.

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Anxiety-Free To-Do List Part 2: Sorting

THIS IS PART TWO. In part one we covered the part of the to do list where we air out our feelings on paper. Now we are going to start sorting tasks, the same way that you would sort your laundry into lights and darks. Let’s go:

Next, you will flip the paper over (or find another writing space),

and on it make a table with three columns: To-do, done, and notes.

Transfer everything you underlined from the page before into its respective category. You should end up with a page of tasks and some notes.

You might be wondering what the “done” column is for. Well, that column on the table is not just for tasks on your list that you’ve completed, it’s also for tasks you’ve completed that weren’t on your list! How many times have you had an accomplished feeling, only to look at your list and feel discouraged because you hadn’t accomplished anything that was on the list?

Our aim here is to reward ourselves for everything that we’ve accomplished, rather than only focusing on whether or not we stuck to our list. Maybe what I thought would be a simple task ended up splintering into several smaller tasks. Writing all of these down on my "done" list allows me to at least feel that I achieved something today, even if not what I expected of myself, and I hope it will similarly encourage you to focus more on your accomplishments.

In the next post, we’ll be looking at the way that we can categorize tasks and work them into our daily routines. Until then, hope you have an excellent day!

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A perfect example of a functional space— the table is obviously a fly leaf kitchen table and yet the only things on the table are the book, a glass of water and a plant— in other words there are no traces left over of any previous uses.

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The Anxiety- Free to-do list part 1: Airing things out

While the other posts were a bit more conceptual, this post will be more technical. You might want a peice of lined paper to follow along.

After seeing how long my initial post ended up being, I’m going to split this one into three parts. For now we’ll just cover the mind-clearing and prioritizing, and we’ll leave the structure of the to-do list itself for part two and the categorizing of tasks for part three.

I was watching a YouTube video— not a self-help one but one where A creator I’m a fan of was answering questions with her friend— and she mentioned at one point her journaling method. Since she wasn’t a fan of journaling, she compelled herself to do it writing on one side of the page all of her problems, and the other side her solutions to those problems. Ideally, she would never come across the same problem twice, because she had already thought it through and written out a solution for it. Been there done that and so forth.

Not only was this a journaling game-changer for me, and you should try it, but it also became something I used when writing a task list during an anxious and busy time.

So how does this method work in a to-do list? Won’t that just turn into more chaos and confusion? So glad you asked. No it won’t because the goal of this excersize is to end up not only with a list of well thought out tasks, but also a complete rationale for why these tasks need doing, and how they will be done. Ideally, you will end up with a method that you can apply when your responsibilities feel overwhelming.

The first thing you will do is write. Write everything that you have to do, write how you feel about what you have to do, and write when you have to do it. It should look like any normal journal page when you are done.

The reason we start here is that it has many benefits for someone who suffers from anxiety or even just a “busy mind”.

Why? It takes some of the mental load off of your brain and places it on paper. Keeping tasks on the “back burner” is a huge drain on our mental energy. Spending a good amount of time writing and reading over your tasks will bring up any other responsibilities you may have had lurking in the corners of your mind.

It also allows you to justify for yourself what you have chosen to prioritize. Rather than second-guessing and arguing with yourself over what you should be doing at any given time, you can just re-read what wrote. If you still disagree, write a new page.

Finally, it also gives you insight into what might be stressing you out about a task. Maybe there is something that is blocking you from doing something , but you don’t really know why. Rather than beating yourself up, you can look it head on and ask it why you are having such a difficult time with it.

Then, you are going to reread the page, and underline all of the important information: tasks, timeline, and any relevant details. Keep this paper handy for steps two and three.

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The Importance of Planning: My own dirty laundry

Recently, I forgot my own advice. I stopped trying to plan things before I did them. It’s very easy to to: In my case, I went back to work, something that I hadn’t really factored into my plans, and, as a result, I didn’t post on my blog that day. I should be clear; I usually write a post each morning after or during my morning coffee. This allows me to have a clear head and a clean slate when I write. On Friday however, I woke up at 5:15 realizing I only had 15 minutes to get ready, pack my things, eat my breakfast, have my coffee, and head to work! As a result, I missed my blog post. I’ll be honest, I thought about the post when I was at work, and after work when I had time, but I didn’t act on my feelings of guilt. Why? Because I hadn’t planned to do anything. In my mind I wasn’t violating anything I had promised myself because I hadn’t given myself a firm task in the beginning.

This is why we should treat planning as the first step in any task list: because it dictates how we feel later when we confront that task.

It’s also important to plan not just what we have to do but WHEN we have to do it. If you’ve read my previous post on the importance of making a routine and categorizing tasks, you’ll already have an idea of what I mean. If not, don’t worry, I’ll be covering this topic later in my next post: The anxiety-free to-do list

P.s. Answer to the riddle in the last post: planning