Peace of Mind Organizing

One year at a time

21 December 2009

I’ve written here before about the importance of habits and routines to make your life easier. I call it automating your life. Over the past couple of years, I’ve created some habits which have helped me maintain order around my home and office. (This is huge, because I’m a naturally messy person.)

Those habits include:

• Running the dishwasher every night and emptying it in the morning so that we can put dishes into the dishwasher throughout the day as they’re dirtied.

• Wiping the fixtures in the bathroom with a Lysol wipe after I’ve brushed and flossed my teeth in the morning. This keeps the bathroom company ready. (We don’t have a master bath in our century-old home; we share a common bathroom with anyone who’s in the house.)

• Going through my email inbox at the end of every weekday to make sure I reply to everything I can and whittle it down to no more than 15 messages that require action.

• Clearing off my desk at the end of the work day so that every day I start with a clean desk.

This latter habit has been so important to my productivity. Back when I was a writer, I was always battling the messy desk. Something as simple as creating a habit to clear my desk at the end of the day—a simple task when there’s only a day’s worth of mess there—has made a gigantic difference.

Creating this clean-desk habit was my focus in 2008. I started on January 5 and used the website Don’t Break the Chain to help motivate me to to keep the practice going at the beginning. Within about six months it was a habit. And by the end of the year, the behavior was so ingrained that I don’t think about it before doing it and can’t even remember if I’ve done it.

Flylady, an inspiration to thousands of people, suggests working on a new habit a month. She has you start with shining the sink in January and add a new habit each month, per her program. One of those habits, I believe, is cleaning the bathroom fixtures every morning (she calls it “swish and swipe”), which is where I got the idea.

I’ve learned that a new habit a month is more than I can expect of myself if I want it to stick. I’m going for a new habit a year. As I mentioned, in 2008, it was my clean desk. In 2009, it was my email inbox, I habit I’m still working on. It’s not yet automatic. I’m greatly aided by my friend, the wonderful organizer Aby Garvey, who’s working on the same habit. We email each other daily to say whether or not the goal was achieved. That is so motivating.

So now I’m thinking about 2010 and what habit I will try to instill. I’m not positive yet, but I believe it will be entering my business’s finances into Quickbooks regularly. I have a habit of entering them in (large) batches. I’m going to try out creating a habit of entering the data every day that there’s a transaction. That way, at the click of the mouse I’ll be able to see my current financial situation. That can’t be anything but good. Also, it’ll be great not to have that task hanging over my head.

Perhaps you can think of a habit you could create in 2010 that would make a big impact on your life. Choose something that is within your control. Don’t be discouraged by the fact you’ve tried it in the past without success. If you told me in 2007 that I’d be automatically clearing off my desk every day in 2009, I would have said you were nuts. Feel free to post in the comments the habit you’re hoping to create. Sometimes saying it publicly can be motivating too.

Tagged with: aby garvey, clean desk, flylady, habits, routines

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