Clearing the Dining Room

The dining room, after clearing most of the stuff away

Many houses have a room that serves as a clutter magnet. The room’s original purpose, whatever it was, has been buried under all the stuff that no one knows what to do with. Whatever people have, if they don’t know where to put it, this room is where it is most likely to end up. Most often, the room in question is the dining room.

And that’s what it was in my house. From the day I moved in, the dining room was just a place to plop things down. I did not even own a dining table, so the idea of using the dining room for dining seemed remote. Still, I didn’t like the idea of a room just filled with miscellaneous stuff. I was sure I would want to use the room for something, so I decided to clear it all out.

“I Don’t Know What I’m Going to Do Today”

In my last post, I suggested that when you get to the point of saying, “I finally got caught up!” you use the extra leverage of that situation to get caught up in other areas of your life. If you take that approach, you may soon get to the point where you wonder whether there is anything more for you to do — where you look at your schedule and say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do today.”

It is not that there is nothing to do, but the few things on your list look like they might take you only a few hours to complete. What do you do then?

“I Finally Got Caught Up!”

I finally got caught up.

I’m talking about my online media list. There used to be a long list of magazines, newsletters, movies, and podcasts for me to look at and listen to on the Internet. As of late this morning, I got through them all. I also caught up on my e-mail — at least, I read every message that has come in.

But the fact that it took me so long to get to this point tells me something is off.

Bob Doyle Video on Limiting Beliefs

A difficulty many people have in breaking free of their to-do lists and clutter is the seeming conflict between that challenge and the law of attraction. The law of attraction seems to say, “Don’t pay any attention to your to-do list or your clutter, because if you do, it will just expand on you.” Yet that strategy does not work either. People try to pretend that the clutter and to-do list do not exist, and what happens? The clutter still gets deeper, and the to-do list continues to get longer.

“I Lost All My Files!”

It was a day like today when my computer went kablooey.

Around this time last year, the power went out, and the computer whirred to a stop. The next time I tried to start up the computer, it destroyed my user account. The computer literally wouldn’t boot up until the user account, which contained all my personal files, was removed. I had to save my files, but how? It took more than a day of trial and error before I managed to create a new account and save all but five of the files from the old account.

That was lucky. Those episodes don’t always turn out so well. On other occasions, I’ve lost days of work and months of e-mail messages. And there is always a chance of losing everything that’s on a computer or any other device where you have files. At least five times a year, I hear from someone who says, “I lost all my files! What can I do?” It seems to happen to everyone eventually: a broken hard drive, a misplaced CD, a stolen laptop, or a phone that won’t turn on. And then an important file that could so easily have been copied and secured the day before is gone forever. Or, in the worst case, all the files are gone.

“I Don’t Know What to Do”

“I don’t know what to do.”

This is the biggest thing keeping people from improving their lives. They don’t know what to do because they don’t know what they really want to do. Often people just muddle along until things get so bad that they know they have to change something — and more importantly, then they have a pretty good idea of what kind of change they want to make.

But you don’t have to sit around waiting for something to happen to give you that kind of clarity. The next time you feel bored with life, instead of checking to see what’s on television, check to see what’s on . . .

How Long Does It Take to Create Lasting Change?

“Hey, let’s build a garage this weekend.”

I don’t know if that’s quite the way it started, but people driving to work this morning might notice a new garage in town, one that wasn’t there on Friday. On Friday after work, I saw two people working with a pile of lumber. On Saturday, you could hear a lot of cutting and pounding, and by the end of the day, the new garage had taken shape. Now that it has been built, it is likely to still be there 120 years from now.

For any lasting change, you can trace it back to the one day it got started. We tend to think of big changes as taking a long time to happen, but that’s not always the case. It only took a weekend to put together a garage, and I can think of similar examples from my own life.

Takin’ Care of Business

One of the most enviable qualities you can have in tough economic times is the ability to find comfort in your work. If just doing the work you do can make you feel better, that sure beats sitting around worrying about the economy or wishing you could go shopping the way you used to.

Finding comfort in your work is a difficult idea to explain when most people experience work as one big hassle. Just getting to work is an exasperating process for most of us, so how can work bring you back to a feeling of relaxation, comfort, and confidence?