The First Step

It’s been a couple of weeks since I made a commitment to taming the chaos in my schedule, to get a handle on how I am spending my time. It’s working. I’ve cleared out a dozen things from my work-related To-Do list. Once I wrote my list of priorities, I put them in my calendar in “order of importance” and it was easy to move through them.

Nothing was really difficult – once I got everything organized, there were two major task categories: delegating and long-term planning.

Many items fell into the first category of delegating. I had postponed making decisions in this area and now I needed to get going. That meant finding people, interviewing them, and deciding who to hire, in the areas of technical assistance, social media and other things that eat up my writing and coaching time. Plus these are things I am not skilled at. I hired some help.

The second category was in the area of project management. I had gotten used to the day-to-day, ad hoc mentality, as I wrote about earlier. Now, with my renewed commitment to having a structure to my days, I wrote down my longer-term plans including completion dates. For example, I had agreed to give a workshop for a local women’s group, and once I picked the date, I could work backwards and create a list of what gets done when by whom. For me, just seeing it written out on paper clears out some mental space. I don’t have to keep thinking about what, when, where. I have my list and I implement it.

Once I handled the basics that were in the way of my moving forward, I found a little more breathing room. I discovered more time to do some of the bigger projects I want to work on, such as adding new modules to my programs and writing a couple of new reports for the website. I find that I have the time and energy to work on the trainings and workshops I’ve wanted to get to.

Not only do I have more time and energy, I am able to be more spontaneous and go play that golf game or go out to lunch, because I am not coming home to chaos. I am coming home to something that now feels manageable to me.

The Next Step

And…I’m ready to tackle the housing crisis.

Actually, I plan to have fun with this one. Day One – walked through the house with an interior designer who helps me figure out what to get rid of, what can be repurposed and what, if anything, I need to buy. When she left, I had a list of great ideas to create more space, flow, and a more relaxed home environment. As with the other important issues I identified so far, (schedule, house and money), the problem is clutter. But I am not randomly throwing furniture away – only things that truly no longer have a purpose for us. When it comes to the big stuff – furniture – Jeff and I are pretty much in agreement about what stays and what goes.

We have not yet figured out where we can put the beds we have accumulated for Lukas, the dog. Talk about clutter – right here in the living room, Lukas has “his” couch, covered with his chocolate fleece dog blanket with the paw print pattern. In this same room, he has his kennel, as well as the former kitty bed which is one-third his size but is one of his favorite places to curl himself up into a ball and sleep. He has one more bed – it’s in the bedroom. Getting rid of any of Lukas’ furniture is harder than giving up any of the other pieces of furniture.

The Small Stuff

Right now both of us are committed tossing or donating old magazines, my books from graduate school, fiction, clothes and unused blenders, waffle makers and the like.

With a shared vision of how much more room we can have if we got rid of things no longer in use, we have barely any conflict. There’s some discussion about when and how, but it’s pretty smooth. So far so good.

The Big Stuff

Our old cassettes and VHS tapes are stored in built-in cabinets installed by the original owner. Every square inch is filled with things we haven’t looked at for over 10 years. Of course we can’t get into these cabinets because the couch is about 12 inches front of them, and that makes them inaccessible for every day use. They are really for storage, and in the mode I am in, I am not sure there is much I want to retain just as “storage”. I’m ready to donate…toss…recycle. I’m ready to unload my esoteric cassette collection, for example:

• Laughter Heals, a tape made in the 1970’s by Edwene Gaines, a Unity Minister in Alabama who now has her own website.
• O Great Spirit by Robert Gass who founded Spring Hill Music and is selling this cassette on his website for $2.95
• The original soundtrack of Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance) composed and recorded by Philip Glass. I heard this performance live in Lincoln Center before I moved from NYC to New Mexico.
• Leon Russell, his debut solo album released in 1970.

But here is where we are getting stuck: the music.

If I can get rid of my collection of books (hundreds of books), which I have lugged from New Jersey to New York City, to Santa Fe, to Boston, back to Santa Fe, and then to Albuquerque, certainly Jeff can get rid of old VHS tapes. But it’s not going to happen. The VHS tapes are more personal to him than my books are to me. Jeff has a hundred or more of him and his quintet performing over the past 35 years. I can see this feels to him like a big part of his legacy. If the tapes were converted to a DVD format, maybe his kids or even our so-far hypothetical grandkids would watch one or two. (In the 15 years we have been married I have never seen any of these tapes, not that I wouldn’t watch them, but they have never been taken out of storage.)

The Right Stuff

Just mention getting rid of or even reformatting the VHS tapes in these cabinets to Jeff who is already on overload gets his hackles up. What was meant to be helpful was received as criticism. So typical…not just for us but in families in general. I have to go back and look at my own negotiation/conflict resolution curriculum, that I teach others, to prepare for this weekend when we will tackle miles and miles of tape.

What are some of those lessons I’ll be reminding myself about?

• Ask questions instead of making statements.
• Be curious about what is important to the other person.
• Have empathy.
• Restate, so he knows I am hearing him, by using phrases such as, What I hear you saying is…
• Stay focused on our common goal of clearing out space, instead of focusing on each others’ faults and personality quirks.

When I made the decision to clear up the clutter, I knew there would be bumps at different points in the journey. Clearing up the clutter is not just dealing with the material world. I’m sure you knew that. It will also raise emotional issues, create conflict in the relationship, and who knows what else. I guess I am going to find out.