Cleaning House

Do you ever get the urge to simply change things up a bit? I did today, and I don’t know if this spur of the moment type of day will stick or if it’ll last until I open my eyes in the morning. I cleaned up in the administrative sense that may, hopefully, give me more time to do what I should be doing and what I want to be doing. It’s hard coalescing the should’s and the want’s, but I’m trying to anyway. What did I change? One of my biggest time sinks, both directly and indirectly, is all the web reading I do through the RSS feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years. You have no idea how many hours I spend a week simply scanning headlines and never actually reading anything. That’s insanely unproductive and wasteful. Instead, I chose the few sites I really like and subscribed to their newsletters, at least those that offered them. I’ll see if this saves me any time. If it does, great! I bought more books yesterday and I still have a lot of books left to read, so I hope I get to them soon.

The next thing I simplified was my OmniFocus projects list. I now only have 33 projects (I don’t remember what I had before, but it might’ve been close to 50), and about 260 action items, down from over 700. I don’t think I’m done weeding and culling and organizing this yet, though, so it might still go down more. What’s left over makes sense to me, and it has given me a greater focus as to what I want out of life right now. Many of my projects naturally breed other projects that I want to have on my list because they’re life changing type of projects. But I’m not there yet. I’m still reaching for the stars on a few things, and I’m failing.

I wasn’t able to take the pack test today because my scheduled physical is still a few weeks away, and I can’t take it beforehand. So I spent all day today watching Gilmore Girls and rethinking what I want out of my life. I’ve found it dangerous to have all this time to think (just look at my weekends), so I bought wine and tried to forget about my life for a bit. It didn’t work. I almost cancelled my blog today. I really wanted to; it felt right. I’m going to cancel it come September, as in I’m not going to renew it. I’m going to finish out the year. I set out to write for a year, and I intend to see it through, no matter how much I don’t want to, and right now, I don’t want to. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know what I want to do, but as I’ve learned, I need more than just wanting to do something. I need to motivate myself to do something, and so I went back and reorganized and fiddled with my OmniFocus task list.

I feel like I’m going around in circles. At least my house is clean.