Peace of Mind Organizing

I hate breaking the chain!

27 June 2008

Yesterday was a big day because my awesome and awe-inspiring friend, Sally, came over to help me put together the IKEA furniture I purchased last week. (“Help me” being a euphemism for actually doing all the work.) It took all afternoon and once I clean up the mess and put everything away, I’ll post pictures.

In any case, it took a little longer than the time we had budgeted, so after Sally left, there was a scramble to get to a date we had at a friend’s house.

My point: I didn’t clear off my desk yesterday before ending the work day. The reason is that end of the work day didn’t involve my desk. But still, it was a shock to arrive at my desk this morning and see some clutter on it. The worse part is that it was very little clutter—it would have literally taken about 60 seconds or less to put everything away.

I’d been working since January 5 to create the habit of clearing my desk at the end of each day. I use the website Don’t Break the Chain to help me.

Now, I also broke the blog-writing chain yesterday but that doesn’t bother me as much. I’ve come to the realization that I really need to write my blog post in the morning, before walking my dogs, or it becomes a bit of a hardship. (I have a separate chain to motivate me to blog five days a week.)

The clean-desk chain was going along so well. This was just the third break since January 5. So here’s how my clean-desk chain looks so far for 2008:

Every red box is a day I cleared my desk at the end of the day.

I’m looking forward to building up the chain of red again. It’s incredibly motivating for me. If you have a habit you’d like to instill, I encourage you to try it!

Tagged with: accountability, clean desk, desk, don't break the chain, ikea, motivation, sally brown

Comments