August 17, 2009

Let the garbage be your guide

My friend Matt wrote/tweeted/posted the other day: "U know how sometimes U have so much to do that U just freeze up and don't do any of it and instead just sit there bored with nothing to do?"

Yes, yes I do. I have a very large list of things to do, and sometimes it is difficult to pick a place to start. It is easy to find a semi or non-productive distraction instead of tackling the stuff I should be doing. So on the weekends, I've been letting the garbage man be my guide.

The garbage man comes each Monday, and each week he alternates between yard waste and recycling pick up. And no, I'm not going to call him a sanitation engineer. Since there is such a backlog of things to get done, each weekend I need to make sure the bin is filled for the Monday pick up. So Sunday I spent a few hours in the garage going through boxes and making piles of: keep, give away, toss or recycle. By the end I had filled both the 30 gallon trash can and the 90 gallon recycling bin.

The list of thing to get done is still very large, but at least I have a no-brainer starting point each weekend. The rotating pickup schedule gives me some structure, and the 90 gallon bin gives me a nice target each weekend. A future target is how much crap I can fit in the truck for a trip to the dump.

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