Celebrate Your Accomplishments and Prioritize Your To-Do's - What can You Eliminate?
 

December is the time of year when we celebrate a variety of holidays based on religion; but December can also be a time to celebrate yourself and what you’ve accomplished during the year.

Instead of looking at your to-do list and beating yourself up over those tasks you didn’t accomplish; consider everything you accomplished this year and that will give you many more reasons to celebrate.

Let’s face it…your to-do list will never be complete, no matter the length or how organized it is.  

If you don’t have a system in place for tracking your to-do lists, perhaps this will be a priority for you this year.

As the saying goes, “out with the old and in with the new” is a fitting slogan for organizing and for looking ahead at January which is National Get Organized Month.

Take a look at your to-do list from this year, what were you not able to accomplish?  Have you considered that perhaps it was not a priority?  We typically make time for those “to-do’s” that are a priority, just as we spend money on priority items.

The end of the year is a great time to reassess and eliminate those to-do’s that are no longer a priority or no longer serve a purpose in your life and start with a fresh list next year.

Be realistic about what you add to your list for the year, so you have a feeling of accomplishment, rather than a feeling of overwhelm.

Building on the “out with the old and in with the new” theme; here are a few quick projects to kick-start the year.
 

1.  Eliminate magazines older than 3 months and newspapers older than a week – more will soon arrive and unless you have an unlimited amount of time for reading, be realistic about the number of subscriptions you have when deciding to renew the subscription.

2.  Spend 20 minutes taking a quick pass through your closet.  What “everyday” clothes didn’t get worn?  These are good candidates for a homeless shelter or transition home for women.  Be sure these clothes do not require mending. 

3.  Do your children have toys they no longer play with or books they don’t read?  Now is a great time to have them help you make some decisions and donate their toys and books they have outgrown to children in need.  Google “foster care” along with the name of your city for places to donate.

4.  Spend 30 minutes giving your kitchen command center or desk a once over to determine what papers need to be shred, recycled or filed.  Be ruthless – over 80% of what you keep you will not reference again.  Keep in mind that documents that must be kept (whether hard copy or electronically) – are kept for tax or legal reasons; everything else is discretional.  If you are not sure what kinds of papers to keep, how long to keep them, or how to organize them, consider my Eliminate Paper Chaos class I will be teaching in our offices on February 12.

5.  In less than 10 minutes give your bathrooms and linen closets a once-over to find unused toiletries or blankets to donate to a homeless shelter.  These items are always needed especially this time of year.

If you decide to tackle these five projects, they will only take you about 1-2 hours in total – which is not a lot of time to restore a bit of order and help someone else out along the way.

There is so much to be grateful for and celebrate. The minute I start to beat myself up for not accomplishing everything I had hoped to do for the year, I must remind myself that I am so very fortunate to have a wonderful family, fabulous friends and most of all, good health.  Over the years, far too many people I know have been diagnosed with cancer or lost their life to the disease.   So as this year comes to an end, I will celebrate life, good health and the company of friends and family & will re-prioritize my list and set realistic goals for the following one.

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