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Thread: If I just did 10 things every day....

  1. #31
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    exactly, donating is not always easy. It’s better to just not bring it into your house to begin with.
    Ahh, we all know that now, but I'll guess almost all of us found that out the hard way.

    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    Well I do not like dumping things into the landfill, I have to be realistic about what is actually useful in donating AND in placing out in our alley. Fortunately, anything metal is picked up by the metal scrappers, of which DH is one. But he doesn’t pick up appliances. They do.
    I've found that trying to donate and recycle appropriately adds a tremendous amount of time to the cleanup process. There's a store not far down the street from us that accepts donations of items people can use for arts and crafts -- egg cartons, old calendars/magazines, broken costume jewelry, etc. -- covering their costs by selling the donations. Great idea! There's a place for the 2020 calendars and the egg cartons we go through each week and that weird plastic film stuff that would make a fun collage or miniature stained-glass window. Alas, they only accept things in their season. If they're not accepting calendars and old magazines, I have the choice of waiting until they do take them again -- or get them off my list and recycle them.

    Similarly, the local Goodwills will not accept things like Christmas ornaments any time between January and October or old skis except before winter. Other thrift stores here are more -- umm -- accepting. But that means figuring out who will take what: Arc won't touch the tools or skis. But they'll take craft stuff that the place down our road and the other thrifts don't always take. We had saved some items to recycle at our city's recycling roundup; none of them were held last year because of the pandemic. The place that used to recycle carpet (for $) doesn’t recycle it at all any more. There used to be a collection point at our local post office station for old ink cartridges to be recycled; that's long gone so now we have to make the trip to Best Buy a couple of towns over.

    Or do what a lot of people do and just put it in the trash. I don't like it but if I were staring down the barrel of a deadline, I certainly can understand the appeal of "just this once" and taking a vow to police future acquisitions more closely.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

  2. #32
    Yppej
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    If it's not something a family member or friend would want I just throw it in the trash. I leave home at 6:20 and don't get home until 5 and I'm beat. And I'm not going to spend my weekends hauling stuff to donation sites or seeking out donees.

    My contributions to the environment come in generally not making unnecessary purchases to begin with and not traveling outside New England. I also vote green and am a vegetarian and I only had one child.

    I do utilize curbside pickup for recycling.

  3. #33
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    Quote Originally Posted by SteveinMN View Post
    You define the task (write for 15 minutes, look at 10 items a day, whatever). Doesn't matter when in the day you did it. Doesn't matter if you exceeded the goal by a factor of three or six; it's the same X on the calendar. The thing is to keep chipping away at whatever the task until it becomes a habit. I've found it to be effective in my life (though I don't have paper calendars on which I can place an X, so I adapt that part).
    I use a variation of this method. I have four pages in my GTD notebook labeled "Repetitive Tasks Yearly", ...Monthly, ...Weekly, and ...Daily. The yearly sheet has a list of things I need to do every year like taxes, insurance, and certain household maintenance tasks. Monthly is mostly bills/statements and a few other things. Weekly is for things that only get done once or twice a week. Daily is for things I want to do every day but tend to forget, which mostly means new habits I'm trying to establish and things I tend to avoid doing if I don't have a reminder.

    Each sheet is plain lined notebook paper (like in highschool) with the tasks in a single column down the left side, and I draw vertical lines to make as many columns as I can easily fit on the page. I label the columns with months on the yearly and monthly sheet and dates on the daily and weekly sheets.

    Here's the difference: When I start a task I put a diagonal line in the square for that task, and when I finish it I turn the line into an X. Example: When I receive a statement or bill, that task gets a diagonal line. And when I actually examine/reconcile/pay it so it's ready to file away and forget, it gets an X.

    This variation is especially good for repetitive tasks that have more than one part or take long enough to get interrupted, but also works for short tasks where you just put an X when you finish without using a diagonal line. I like using the diagonal line because it flags things you started but haven't finished yet, and having four sheets lets you add new repetitive tasks by just writing them on the next line of the appropriate sheet.

  4. #34
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    Quote Originally Posted by Teacher Terry View Post
    Fortunately I have never suffered from a lack of getting stuff done. David Allen is correct that most people don’t change until the pain of staying the same is more than the pain of changing.
    Or to put it another way:
    You have to want your goal more than you're afraid of the journey.

  5. #35
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    Quote Originally Posted by iris lilies View Post
    I just like to say that “just” doing 10 things is actually doing a crap ton of things!
    I think you're misunderstanding "things" as meaning something bigger than what I'm talking about.

    The intention is to just look at ten physical objects or ten pieces of paper or ten computer files, and if they aren't where they ought to be, move them to the right place; or if they are obviously something you may want to get rid of, move them to a "Maybe It Goes Out" box. The point of my ramble is that a few minutes a day looking at a few things would result in everything in you house eventually getting looked at and organized, but whenever I try to do that I fall off the wagon.

  6. #36
    Yppej
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    I do 10 a day with things like emails, but if you have more than 10 a day coming in you will never get caught up.

  7. #37
    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
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    George, you are so right about taking care of things daily. Since retiring it’s been easy to do most days even when working part time. With Mr Messy gone it will be a piece of cake to keep up.

  8. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by catherine View Post
    "I Don't Know" boxes in the basement or garage and they never got touched again. And I had a LOT of "I Don't Know" boxes going back to the 80s.
    Just to clarify: The "I Don't Know" boxes I'm talking about are for things that "I Don't Know What This Is Or Why I Have It" not "I Don't Know If I Want To Keep This".

    IOW The "I Don't Know" box is a short-term holding area for things you don't recognize or you're not sure where to put them. By it's very nature it stays in an easily accessible place so you can add or remove things. Once you label a box as "I Don't Know If I Want To Keep This" without a definite "Open Me On..." date, all hope is lost.

    This is what David Allen said about it:
    "If someone had to call Organization Paramedics for you because you’re so out of control, they could simply bring in a big box labeled “All the Stuff I Don’t Know What It Is or What to Do with It.” They’d scour your whole environment and throw everything in that box that fits in that category. In an hour you’d be totally organized—if you didn’t know where something was, you’d now know where it was! The best part would be that the totality of the rest of your world would not have any of that “stuff” in it, and a fresh breeze would be blowing through your psyche."

  9. #39
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yppej View Post
    I do 10 a day with things like emails, but if you have more than 10 a day coming in you will never get caught up.
    That's why you have to GTD your email and inbox everyday; doing what can be done quickly right then, moving things that are for reference only to your reference files, deleting thing that are of no interest, and moving things that require action to the appropriate Next Actions list.

    The process I'm talking about in this thread pre-supposes you've found a way to keep up with your daily tasks but you aren't making any progress on your organizing/decluttering backlog.

  10. #40
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by GeorgeParker View Post
    I like using the diagonal line because it flags things you started but haven't finished yet, and having four sheets lets you add new repetitive tasks by just writing them on the next line of the appropriate sheet.
    I like this variation. I think I'll adopt it!
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

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