The best laid plans

I had grand plans to spend a good chunk of time today making major progress on my office - it turns out, not so much. I have plans the next four weekends in a row - family coming from out of town this weekend and next, Thanksgiving at home after that, then a visit to Delaware to hang out with my friend Kate. But, I spent most of the day helping friends who found out just a couple days ago that the house they are renting will be foreclosed on, on two days. Which left them with this weekend, mostly, to pack up everything in their house and move it into a new (but much better - yea!) house. I'm glad to have helped them, and I know they're very overwhelmed right now.

All in all, this is actually a very good thing, because my grand plans to spend weekend days finishing some big project never really work out the way I intend. I work much better in short spurts, finishing one small thing at a time completely until I can move on to the next.

That said, I did make some progress in my office over the last few days. Whenever I needed a quick stretch break from work, I would grab a few things that could easily be put away and take care of them. And at night, I would grab a handful of papers, take them out to the living room in front of the TV, and sort through them. During the commercial breaks, I would toss the trash, quickly file what needed to be filed, and take care of the action things that could be completed really quickly (send a quick email, enter receipts into Quicken). For action items that will take longer, I file them into an Action folder in a file holder on my desk and enter a note into my Outlook task list (which syncs to my PDA). It may not be the most efficient system, but it works really well for me - I can spend several hours working this way, where I might only be able to convince myself to spend 15 minutes straight working through it without some distraction. I'm finding that I really rarely watch TV without doing something else at the same time anyway (though this was more true before my wireless router died and my laptop was chained to my desk).

All in all, I did manage to sort through the newly purchased Christmas gifts in front of the gift closet and make note of what size boxes I needed to buy (and use some that I already had). Later this week, I'll have to go through the visible things and hide them somewhere, so visiting family members don't see them. I've also made it through most of the papers on my desk (I'd take a picture, but the progress isn't quite visible yet).

I'll probably be helping Trish and Billy with their move most of tomorrow, but am going to try and make it through the rest of the papers on desk before I go to bed