Guest Blog by: Midge

As I spoke with my sister about her end of the summer projects, she mentioned the sad saga of her storage closet.  It has not been re-organized in over three years since the birth of her last little one.  Filled with homeschool memories and curriculum, this once neat and tidy closet has fallen into disarray.  It became the collector of all things “kid related”.  Empty VHS cases, broken toys hoping to be fixed, half filled boxes, craft supplies, board games and yes, in the middle of it all, the snow pants that started the avalanche last winter; they all fill up this rather large storage closet of which you can barely open the door.

Dread… a short list of synonyms thanks to thesaurus.com… “be afraid, cringe, fear, have cold feet, misdoubt, quake, shrink from, shudder, tremble”.  She used the word “dread” when discussing the closet.  In a frantic search for snow pants last winter, her two oldest girls caused the aforementioned avalanche into the center of the storage closet.  Game pieces, boxes of papers and random winter clothes were just a small part of what used to be the floor.  And instead of crying, she slowly closed the door on the mess knowing that spring and summer would give her the perfect opportunity to clean and organize.  Out of sight, out of mind!

Her project is finished as opposed to my “forever” project which is still not yet done.  It took her most of the summer working for short periods at a time.  The kids sorted, she sorted, the kids unsorted, she re-sorted, but she did not give up.  A sense of accomplishment and satisfaction had replaced the word “dread” in the house.

In retrospect, she told me she learned it was important for her just to finish the job.  She intended to let the kids have a yard sale but the organization was time consuming and the project was too much of an undertaking.  She lowered her expectations, tried not to give herself a hard time or become frustrated about how the mess happened to begin with, and persevered.

The final clincher helping her to finish the project was actually something Molly spoke about on her Facebook page last week… company was coming!  That is one of the greatest motivators to help a person get off the procrastination train.  Maybe I need to do that as well to finish my guest room project?

What project(s) did you complete this summer?  What helped you to get off your “Procrastination Train”?   Please share!

You can now see the floor and the vacuum has found a nice home again!

0saves

Save

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.