Getting my house in order

Lent reminds non-Catholic me of the powerful idea of making a change for a finite period of time. Hat tip to mactavish for mentioning the idea of taking on a discipline.

Thirty minutes per day on any of (or any combination of) the following tasks:

• House cleanup (doing dishes, putting books and papers and clothes away, what the cat did, fridge purge)
• Organization (finding places for things, filing papers properly, getting photos into albums)
• Financial organization (set up a 2005 Roth IRA, do 2005 taxes, update my will, Quicken, etc)
• Online organization (get rid of the old e-mail address!)
• Decluttering (papers, clothing, kitchen junk, the garage, jigsaw puzzles)
• Minor improvements (replanting flowers, finishing the printer table, finishing a shirt I'm making)

By the end of this I'll know which of these tasks I use to put off others. I suspect I'll also have a place that's halfway nice to live in.

House In Order, day 1

- Signed a big pile of financial papers Rob put in front of me. Yes, they were a good thing; yes, it counts toward the challenge.
- IMMEDIATELY FILED the one piece that should stay with me. In the CORRECT folder, which is even LABELED (my bugaboo).
- Discussed interior decorating improvements with Rob in preparation for his meeting with a decorator type person tomorrow. (I can't be there because she only works during work hours. I am amazed she gets enough business to stay afloat, if her entire clientele is people without day jobs.)
- Folded one load of laundry and put another in the dryer.

That was well over a half hour. It just happened that there was a lot to do tonight. The decorator and the paper signing both needed to be tonight, plus I was out of socks. Still to do tonight: litterbox.

I am starting to suspect that what this will REALLY teach me is how much time I already spend doing this stuff.