As I was weeding through piles of papers this morning, I was struck by my train of thought:  Why does this always happen?  How do I get on top of stuff, only to let it bog me down again?  How on earth can I keep up this time?  How do women who work outside the home do it–I’m home constantly and I’m still buried by junk!  How many times will I go through this pile again?

Aha!!  I caught myself, and realized exactly what the problem was.  It was suddenly so clear I felt kind of silly for not seeing it before.  While I do battle the incoming stream of papers and “stuff” that enters this home, 90% of the problem was me:  I was forever putting things aside to deal with later.

I’ll put this here for now.

I don’t have time right now.

I’ll take care of that after _______.

There’s no point in doing “x“now, I’ll do it when I do “y“ and save some time. (ha.)

I’ll stack these up and take care of them later.

Oh, the list goes on and on…..but it’s all the same.  Procrastination.

The Flylady website designates each Wednesday as “Anti-Procrastination Day,” challenging you to tackle something you’ve been putting off.  I decided this morning (a kid-free surprise) was my Anti-Procrastination morning, and got to work.  (Kid-free mornings are quite hard to come by in the summer.)  The “office” cabinets in my kitchen I am no longer embarrassed to open in front of people, and the laundry room closet was dealt with before it got out of hand.  (I guess that’s progress, right?  To work on it before things are actually falling on my head?)  The most important part:  papers are actually in the recycling bin, and trash is actually bagged and in the garage, ready to be dumped in our cart.  These are, officially, Things I Will Never Have To Weed Through Again.  Thank goodness.

I wonder what else I could get to before the kids get home?