Dealing With Low Energy
One thing I have fought against while trying to get more stuff done and get my life in order is depression or general lack of energy. It's hard to get started, and the mess around you just makes you more depressed. So I've developed a series of strategies for coping with low energy.
Sometimes when the house is a wreck and I just want to get things tidier so I can calm down, I do one large, easy task that fits into a lot of rooms, like going around and gathering magazines and catalogs and dumping them in the recycling. It makes a uniform difference in every room. I used to clean just one small spot, but it turns out that I feel better when I see improvement on a larger scale, rather than when there's one tiny clean spot in a huge house.
On the other hand, when the mess is really contained to maybe one room, I might just want to have one clean area to start from, so I choose a square yard of space (usually my desk) and just work on that. Nothing on either side of it until it's done. Often the boost of getting that cleaned up will help me do another one. This is how I clean up after a major project, too.
Another thing I do when things are piling up and I'm suffering from great overwhelmedness is to put off decisions. If I see a pile of papers and know I need to go through them to clean an area, I'll stuff them in a box and put a date on it (at most a couple of days later; bills must be paid!), and on that date, I go through that box and that box alone. It means I can defer making decisions about everything, and move on to larger-scope cleaning without getting bogged in the details. (Of course, you have to actually go through the box on that date.)
These strategies can be generalized into something simpler:
- Break a large problem into several smaller problems
- Reduce the scope of your focus to a small problem
- Deliberately ignore problems outside the scope of what you're working on now
These are some basic project-management techniques for getting a grasp on a large, complex project, and they work remarkably well for households and your personal life.