Cleaning vs. Shuffling – It’s all about decisions

As the Extreme Cleaning project rolls on, I’m finding myself hitting a common problem: shuffling.

Anyone who has studied any sort of organizing book or system has come across this problem.  Ever heard of “touch it only once”?  This is a common office organizational tip.  The trick is to make sure you only touch a piece of paper once.  In other words, make a decision about what it means and where it goes the first time you run across it.  Often you’ll find stacks of papers on the desks of many people, and you can be assured that these people are not using this as a fancy organizing system.

The difficulty in making decisions can be a frustrating problem.  Not only that, but in the mostly digital age we are living in, it is overly easy to shuffle your digital junk from one undecided folder to another.

Where does shuffling come from and how can this be solved so we’re not shuffling our crap around from one place to another?

Solving the Shuffling Problem

To solve this problem, we need to figure out what it really means to make a decision.

Making a decision about your stuff is coming to a conclusion about what something means to you.  It’s as simple as that, but can complicated beyond belief.

To solve the decision making problem, we need to address our Life Purpose.  I will address the critical aspect of deciding a Life Purpose in an upcoming post, but for now we need to address the reason why this is so important.

If you don’t have a direction in your life, a purpose, or something to flow your energy towards, the resulting confusion can show up in many ways.  Common ways are varied: watching too much TV, overeating, depression, messiness, boredom.  This all stems from not having a true purpose that fulfills the core of your being or at least gives a direction to point towards.

Let’s see how this applies to our little shuffling problem:

Let’s say that you have not given serious thought to your Life Purpose and you have a vague sense of “what you like” in life.  You know something isn’t the way you want, so you sign up to certain mailing lists online that provide excellent articles on a particular topic like starting a business.  These emails come in frequently and are chock full of amazing tips and resources.  Each time one comes in, you get excited, read it, and then you either leave it in your inbox or file it in a folder called “Starting a Business.”  Then you go about your day.

What happened here?

This was done incorrectly and will ultimately lead you to probably never act on starting a business.

This happens to a lot of raw hopefuls out there.  They sign up to blogs, mailing lists, buy recipe books, but they are not serious about being a raw foodists.  Maybe they’ve made a few recipes, but their growing collection of raw information isn’t helping them go raw because they have not made the decision to actually do it.  They are still in the “someday” phase and it’s almost like a drug.  They get satisfied when the latest raw email comes into their inbox, thinking they are doing something for their health when dinner time comes they just go out and eat dinner like always.  They will probably feel a little twinge of guilt while eating or a lot of guilt afterwards, and then resolve that this won’t happen again.

But of course it does.  The cycle continues.

This cycle can be broken by making a decision.

Decision Making is a Muscle

Just like anything in life, decision making is something you must work at.  You’re probably going to fail once you make your first few conscious true decisions, but once you get a few under your belt, you’ll understand a little more about what it makes to truly make a decision.

Start small and follow through.  Build that  muscle.  But you will need to come to a point where you can trust your decision making abilities 100%.  Once you get to that point, you know for a fact that when you make a decision, you will stick with it no matter what.

Once you have this decision making muscle in full-swing, you can then use it to tackle other parts of your life, like during Extreme Cleaning or some other process you keep finding yourself shuffling things around in.

Just learning to make decision isn’t going to solve shuffling.  You need to turn your awareness on to catch yourself when you are doing shuffling instead of making decisions.  We humans have a tendancy to shuffle and not even notice that we’re doing it.  In this age of information overload, this decision making muscle is going to become more and more important as more things vie for our attention on a daily basis.

Now, don’t just file this article away in a  “cool ideas for later” folder.  Act on it now.  Work on a Life Purpose, strengthen your decision making muscle, and catch yourself red-handed the next time you are shuffling.

What is the 24 Hour Cleanup Project?

I have a problem.

I’ve been going strong on my Extreme Cleaning project for the past few weeks, only to hit a roadblock.

I found myself constantly putting off the deeper, more meaningful physical cleaning that I want to do because of the stuff around me that needed constant, immediate attention:  dishes, laundry, the boxes sitting out, etc.

Since it’s going to be quite a cold day tomorrow with a possible storm tonight, Heidi and I are planning to hole ourselves up in our home and turn off all access to everything.  We are going to take the next 24 hours to focus all of our effort and time to completely and utterly clean up our surrounding area until everything is spotless, in its place, and ready for the deeper cleaning we both have planned…

Preparing for Extreme Cleaning is Just as Important as Extreme Cleaning Itself

If you choose to join me, you can use the opportunity to prepare for a more conscious, deeper cleaning of your physical environment (like Extreme Cleaning), or you can use it as a way to prepare for any New Years Resolutions you may have.

The problem with most New Years Resolutions is not that they are difficult to maintain, but that we are not prepared for them when they come.  Do you think that after a whole day of drinking and partying that you are going to want to start on a resolution the next day?  Maybe, but you probably won’t stick to it.  I know I wouldn’t.

So use this as a time to get ready for a real New Years Resolution, one you will actually keep.  Find out what it is, what you need to do to plan for it, and you can then hit the ground running on January 1st, fully prepared and ready to go.

If you are ready to join me, then log off the Internet starting at midnight tonight, get a plan together to tackle your mess, and get ready for some Now Cleaning.

If you are going to join me, go ahead and Tweet or blog about it, announce it to the world!  Make yourself accountable!

Do it now.

Oh, and make sure to turn off your phones, prepare your food, and get anything else ready so you have no excuse to be distracted.

Happy cleaning,

~ JS