What makes my life

You can read a lot about decluttering and structuring yourlife. All those people used to working in a clean environment are perfect in describing it is so easy and it is just a simple trick. In real life I feel like a kid in a candy store when reading about decluttering and structuring your life. I’d like to but I feel I can not and I keep failing. Where to start and what to do when I fail? I felt like helping myself and those wishing they would be better on structuring and decluttering by writing some articles on what to do. This wil not be a top 10 tricks or a quick how to hack your way through life. I tend to focus on real behavioral change without any academic claims.

1. Its a habit change not a trick.

When you like to live a more structured life with time for yourself realize that you are about to change your habits. This is not done overnight and it will not feel as help in te beginning. It’s like quitting to smoke which I did so I must know how this works. Whenever you stop you feel a sense of euforia. Great, I have stopped smoking (or started decluttering). Then after a few hours you feel the urge to smoke. It gets stronger and stronger and finally you grab a sigarette and smoke it. This works the same with decluttering. You started to declutter great. You picked up a big brown bag and dropped everything in this bag just to get rid of it. Then new stuff keeps coming in. You keep working to put everything in the right place but eventually you cannot keep up. You feel like you have failed and both when you stop smoking as wel as when you start to declutter you give up on your effort feeling a failure. This is all because what you are trying to change is your behaviour. This is one of the most difficult things to change. You are acustomed to your behaviour as are others. They act to you in a way with their expectations of your reactions taken in acount. They will not help you. It’s is your wish not their command. Be prepared to work on your behaviour.

2. Quit quittin’

This is the easiest part which is just as much the most difficult part. When you have set your hopes on a goal accept your own failure and start over again and again. The same when you quit smoking. If you have failed yourself and taken a cigarette smoke it, enjoy it and then try to quit for a longer period of time. Over time this period wil be hours, days, weeks and all of a sudden you haven’n smoked in a year. Same with decluttering. When everything is a mess again. Pick out the old big brown bag again and start cleaning. Only then you can help yourself. Start over and over again. The time between the times you have to start over again keeps getting longer and longer until you feel you never have to pick that bag again. But don’t fear it, someday you will need it again.

If you know me you will confirm that I am a pretty structured person. This is not because I need a structure to do any work it is because I am convinced that a structure for the things needed to be done creates the opportunity to use wahtever is left to do things you like to do. I will be investigating some suggestions I got recently to reduce workload.

First: I am setting up this weblog so I can track my own improvements and keep records for myself. To much time I search for thing I cannot find again.

Second: Make a list of things to do every day, week, month, quarter and year and the time it takes to do them. This is not to difficult it seems since I do this every day with several other things such as eating, wtching the eight o’clock news and my groceries.

Third: try to have things done by someone else. GetFriday.com offers a kind of service like that.

Fourth: Besides that I got a nice tip telling me to use an auto responder to all my mail telling e-mail senders when I will be reading my mail and when I will be responding to it.

Another day another decision. I start with using my trusted systems again. The last few months were very busy and I let using my structures slip. It led to more stress, less sleep and less productivity. So I will be using my structures again. Bottom line is that I would like to be able te predict things very accurate. I do not wish to promiss something and then not being able te deliver. That causes me the most stress.