Sometimes we look at things a certain way for so long that we begin to think of it as “right” or “normal”, or maybe even the only way. We make a plan, we work at it, and we refuse to budge when it comes to adjusting. But everything changes – our environment, responsibilities, commitment, and even us. Sometimes an idea isn’t so much, wrong, as it is just too rigid or out of alignment with what is going on in our lives. Maybe it’s the wrong time to work on that long-term project you started in the spring, or perhaps other goals have become more important to you. It could be that you’ve simply begun to see things from another angle and that new point of view has changed the way you think about what you were doing before. That’s why it’s crucial to have a goals alignment every 3 or 4 months to assess how we are progressing and to get back into alignment with our goals, or even change our goals altogether.
A great case in point is a goal I mentioned this week on the podcast. I have continually struggled to get my taxes and bookkeeping up to date since January 2020. As you may recall from previous podcasts, that is when I became the primary caregiver to my mother, who has dementia. I moved her from Lubbock, Texas, some 350 miles away into my home here in the Dallas, Texas area. (For those of you in Europe, that’s a farther distance than from Paris to Amsterdam.) Being January, this was, of course, the exact timing of my 2019 year-end bookkeeping and tax preparation, and because my mother’s illness was far more advanced than we had initially presumed, she took up a great deal of my attention. I was barely able to keep up with my workload for my travel agency and my household chores, which left no time or quiet work environment to take care of the bookkeeping. I got behind. Way behind.
Making use of some extensions and a lot of knuckles-to-the-grindstone, late-night work habits, I was able to get the taxes submitted just in time and then to begin on the next year’s set, but I never could get caught up. So when we recorded this week’s podcast, I was feeling the pressure of getting it done. It was the biggest, most important task on my to-do list, and months earlier, when my therapist asked me what one task would lighten my load the most, I answered, “the bookkeeping.” That was when she encouraged me to focus on just one task at a time and knock it out. It seemed like a good plan, and that’s what I talked about on the podcast…about working consistently at that one task to get it under control. And that’s what I did, but then other priorities popped up, the bills and receipts kept coming in, and pretty soon I was over-whelmed by it all over again.
So shortly after the podcast recording, I had another visit with my therapist and we were talking about how I resented the fact that the responsibility for the bookkeeping rests squarely on my shoulders and that my husband takes no part in it. I had asked him to help me by doing some sorting and organizing of receipts, and he obligingly did so, but only after I had reminded him several times. His excuse was that the tub of documents was in my studio, so he didn’t see it and therefore never remembered it. This led to a series of questions from my therapist about why the files are in my studio, and where else could they be stored so that we both had access to them.
Wait…what?!?!
I kept all the taxes and bookkeeping in my studio as a convenience to me, but I really only kept them there out of habit. I don’t need all the files stacked up on the floor of my studio where they are constantly in the way of all the other things I need to do there. I could move them out to another part of the house and retrieve just the files I needed when I needed them. It would also make things more convenient for Mark to help me with the sorting and processing. So this new perspective prompted me to move the bins to another room of the house, out of my craft studio and out of my way. What a relief that was! But it also got me thinking even more about how I approached some of the other tasks on my to-do list and the other things that were stacked up all over my room simply because I had no time to sort through them and put them away, like several boxes of my mother’s photos, documents, and other belongings.
The next day, I had a coffee date with a friend. We usually spend our coffee dates talking about our goals, working on our One Little Word projects, and commiserating about the particulars of our mental health. This day was no different, and so our conversation turned to my revelation about moving the taxes out of my studio and how I was beginning to realize that this same principle might also apply to a number of other things in my way. It also reminded me of a tip I had read in (I think) Better Homes and Gardens magazine a few years ago…the idea that people who have clean homes don’t use the floor for storage. So true. And I actually hate seeing anything stacked on the floor! So why had I allowed all this stuff to be stacked up on mine? This led to further discussion about what to do with all the stuff, and I realized that I was looking at one of my goals the wrong way.
To date, I had been looking at completing my goals in a particular order, starting with the taxes and bookkeeping. Once that mess had been cleaned up and caught up, I wanted to organize my studio, including going through all of my mom’s belongings. Another big task was to clean out my garage so I could park in it. It has been full of other people’s belongings since my niece, Ashley, came to live with us at the end of 2017. The piles of stuff just kept getting bigger as other people moved in and out…first my mom, then our friend Koy who passed away. It was my hope to be able to go through all that stuff, find a place for it or get rid of it, and eventually park my car in the garage again. The last task on my to-do list was to upgrade the storage and work tables in my studio, but the other tasks were more important, so I felt like they should come first, in that order, and that’s the way I’ve been working at these goals since I first conceived them. But I was wrong.
When I started looking at these goals from another perspective, I could see that I had the steps in the wrong order. The first (and most obvious) was that I couldn’t really organize the belongings in my studio until I had a place to store them, and I couldn’t create storage until I knew exactly what I needed to store. In order to do that, I had to collect all of the stuff in one place and sort it. It didn’t make sense to sort and store all my art and craft supplies in my studio only to have to do it again when I sorted through all the stuff in the garage. Likewise with my mother’s belongings. So the obvious answer was to gather all the stuff in one place. The second part of this epiphany was that I couldn’t organize and store all this stuff until I had adequate storage for it. I needed shelves, bins, tubs, and boxes.
So what started as an afternoon talk about moving my taxes to the mud room snowballed into an action plan for getting both my craft studio and my garage whipped into shape in what I hoped would be quick order. This new plan had me start with gathering and sorting all the stuff first, using broad categories like donate, work-related, craft supplies, home decor, electronics, holidays, and yes, trash. That meant taking all that extra stuff in my craft studio that didn’t already have a home to the garage with the rest of the homeless stuff. With my room thus emptied, I was able to assess where I could create storage, and I already had a plan for that, which my friend and I had already projected. A few suggestions from my husband along with a trip to Ikea and Home Depot, and I had an awesome, custom-built workstation and storage unit that took less than a day to build. The last step was (and still is) to sort through all the piles. That first sort was just a macro sorting by the broader category. Now comes the more tedious task of micro-organizing…where I look at each individual document and file it into the appropriate folder in the file cabinet, divide the craft supplies into paint, beads, and scrapbook paper, toss out anything that is damaged, dried up, or otherwise unusable, and work my way through each of the piles in turn until all the piles are gone and I can finally get my car in the garage.
While all this was happening, I did set aside the task of working on my taxes. This task was more important because the anxiety caused by all the clutter in my studio made it impossible for me to work there. I was beating myself up over goals that had been on the list for years, but that I could never get to because I was always putting the taxes or something else first. But that stress was having a real effect on my motivation to do the other tasks, so I wasn’t really getting any of them done. Sometimes, you have to look at the bigger picture and rearrange the steps to get the best and most efficient outcome. In my case, doing a few things that gave me a quick win (all the extra stuff is out of my work room and I now have a great workspace) makes it easier to work on the other goals like the taxes. And although it is much too hot the last few days to spend much time in the garage, everything is sorted into broad categories, so I can find anything I need, and I’m bringing things back into the studio a little at a time as I need it and create space for it. It’s really a perfect solution. And all because I approached it from a different direction.
As we begin this second half of the year, I encourage you to reassess your goals. Look at them from every angle and really question why and how you approach them. Is there another way to do it that will get quicker results? Can you do less to accomplish more (more on that next week!)? Is there someone who can help you or can help you see another point of view? Is this goal still as important to you as it was at the beginning of the year? What one thing can you do right now that would change the momentum of your progress? Think about what is most important to you and what you really need. Try to see it from a different point of view. After all, perspective is everything.
