Tag Archives: getting stuff done

I have spent the entire weekend working on all the little things sitting around here that I haven’t had a chance to get to and have been driving me crazy. (I have a low threshold for the unfinished task.) (This is not a hard and fast rule, there are always exceptions.)

Main thing: I cleaned the bathroom. I love a clean bathroom. I did some gardening. I went through all the financial stuff. Transfered money around. Paid the property taxes. Finished the fed and state tax forms and got Bob’s signature and that’s stuff’s ready to go. I went through all the stuff that needed to be read and filed or recycled. I would go on but I just realized that no one on the planet cares about this stuff.

Earlier this week I found all this great stuff about this book called Getting Things Done (Here is the author’s website.) I think there’s a software tie-in which is why all these internet geeks so excited about the system and improving their own personal productivity. And who wouldn’t be? This book must be great.

I checked it out and found some site (sorry, can’t find the link now, probably could if I was working the system) with a basic summary the principles of the book and basically what he’s telling you to do is make lists, stay organized, toss worthless stuff, file stuff to do later and keep your “to do now” stuff in a pile. Only he uses different words: you “capture” the stuff you need to do and put it in “buckets.”

I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe a magic wand, because my whole life is about making lists and being organized but the things don’t get done unless you actually do them. That’s the part someone should write a book about. (I’m being a smart ass in case there are dimwits reading this who don’t know the difference.)

If I learned anything it was that I should be writing books about being organized. I didn’t know this was salable information. I thought it was common sense.

I know. I have about a million updates for you. I have photos, too. I just don’t feel like sitting here for more than 10 minutes at the moment.

I had my big night out last night. We went to see Particle. I stayed up until 12:30am. I didn’t get drunk or stay until the end, because I’m not that zany, but still, WAY past my bedtime and I stood at the front and shook my bootie with all the youngster hippies and loaded people and a wannabe Timberlake. It rocked.

I got to bed after 1am and then we were up and out the door before 9am to do our Thanksgiving food shopping. We went to Freddies, Costco AND Albertsons. (It wasn’t the plan to go three places, it just worked out that way.) Then we went to a greasy spoon and got breakfast and I drank real coffee. I’ve come completely unhinged.

In the midst of all this I’ve done about 5 loads of laundry and yardwork and food preparation and cleanup and, um, watched 4 episodes of Buffy.

Oh, I’m also watching season 2 of 24 and Jack Bauer’s daughter is a big fat idiot. Because, you know, if I was lost in the wilds and some strange forest dwelling man offered to let me stay in his cabin, I would surely emerge after my shower in a skimpy, tight white tank top with the world’s sheerest excuse for a bra.

I think I say this every week at this time but I just can’t seem to get my act together. I always optimistically spread my various projects out all over the floor the thought being that it will remind me to get it done and I can enjoy a feeling of accomplishment as I finish it and put it away. Instead I have crap everywhere which on the weekend I stack into an intimidating pile to be ignored until it is spread out on the floor for the following week. The current method is not working.

Meanwhile, I happened to look at LeRoy’s webpage that I made for him so long ago and it desperately needs updating. The work site (which I’m not even going to link) needs to be actually built. I have got to get my act together.

I think this is my record since I started this — two weeks and no blog. It was one of those weeks where all kinds of things went wrong at more or less the same time. I’ve had a small leak in the window in my room (the one that those rocket scientists at Home Despot installed for me) on and off ever since it was installed but it was minor and stopped right away so I never felt any urgency about dealing with it. Of course this week it’s raining like crazy and I woke up and the window was leaking and I put a towel on the window sill and I could wring it out a half hour later. So now I’m concerned and I tried to fix it myself and found something in the shop that said you could use it to seal things and I found something called a caulking gun but after wrestling with it for 15 minutes the stuff game out in giant non-spreadable gobs and I had to give up. St. Alan of Alan and Crystal was kind enough to come over at 9am to get on a ladder in the rain and look at it and came up with a temporary fix.

I got home that night and there had been a power surge and the VCR was fried. That didn’t stop me from plugging in the VCR and trying again every half hour, just in case it randomly became unfried. I was taping TAKEN which I thought I would watch after I finished my class but with no VCR I was screwed. I don’t know what we’re going to do — we had the same VCR for over 10 years and now seem to go through one a year. I just dropped a big pile of cash on a new vacuum and it’s the holidays so I’m not in the mood to buy another VCR at the moment.

I turned in my final project for my class on Saturday Dec 14. I didn’t think I could get it done since I only had 48 pages on Dec 7 and the minimum would be around 90 but I was extremely motivated and managed to get to 86. It’s not pretty but it has a beginning, a middle and an end and it’s just a first draft so I’m happy. But meanwhile I basically abandoned the rest of my life while I was working on it so I have a lot to do right now. I spent yesterday being a total slacker — read my book: Leslie Marmon Silko, Garden in the Dunes and went to see Harry Potter. I caught up on about 1/2 of the emails I had lounging around collecting electronic dust in my email box. I still have plenty of other projects sitting around here that need attention.