When I am disorganized, like I am this week after a trip to the coast followed by illness, I feel vague, distracted, and worried.
Like all habits, organization requires effort and attention, and needs to be built slowly. It’s the little things I do on a daily basis that have an impact on the quality of my life. When I get my system down, and my habits are on track, things go smoothly and I’m more effective at each task because it gets my full focus. Also, I’m more likely to be responsible and keep my commitments, which leads to trusting relationships. I feel good about what I’m doing, and I’m able to focus on what’s in front of me, confident that everything else is in its place.
Like all habits, organization requires effort and attention, and needs to be built slowly. It’s the little things I do on a daily basis that have an impact on the quality of my life. When I get my system down, and my habits are on track, things go smoothly and I’m more effective at each task because it gets my full focus. Also, I’m more likely to be responsible and keep my commitments, which leads to trusting relationships. I feel good about what I’m doing, and I’m able to focus on what’s in front of me, confident that everything else is in its place.
Monday is my day to reset for the week and get my ducks in a row - make some plans for health and home, and prepare for Grandson fun and for a return to order.
Agenda:
1. Read "The Sweet Spot"
1. Read "The Sweet Spot"
2. Love meditation
3. Organization goals
1. Read "The Sweet Spot":
Chapter 2 is The Stress / Success Tipping Point. She talks about the importance of happiness to how we manage stress and succeed in the world. "Happiness broadens our perception in the moment and builds our resources over time It becomes an upward spiral of productivity and positivity."
This broadened perception is how we open up the sweet spot of lower stress, greater wisdom, and better social skills. "People whose ratios of positive to negative emotions are lower than 3:1 often 'languish,' as researchers call it. ... Languishing people become rigid. They tend to feel burdened by life."
Happy people are just more successful at everything. It's a fact. So the goal is to reach that 3:1 tipping point - by increasing positive emotions and by decreasing the negative ones.
How to increase positive emotions:
- Take daily actions to induce more good feelings
- Amplify present positive emotions and experiences
- Stimulate the physiological effect of good feelings.
2. Love Meditation:
Every month after the full moon, in the quiet-energy yin time of the waning moon, I practice a love meditation that progresses from receptivity, to gratitude, to generosity:Day 1: Practice a love meditation, and open to receive blessings - send a prayer to the universe asking to be showered with love, kindness, health, and happiness.
- 1 minute - Relax your body, and focus on the tender emotion of generous love. Allow a smile to settle on your face and in your heart.
- 1 minute - Visualize love as soft, tingly, warm, pink light, and see it move from your heart to every part of your body so that every cell is glowing and vibrating.
- 1 minute - Now see the pink light of love radiating to fill the whole room, then the whole city, and the whole planet earth.
- 1 minute - See that all people, plants, and animals feel warm and happy.
- 1 minute - Send an extra dose of love light to those people you want to have a better connection to.
3. Organization goals:
Organization makes me happy, no doubt about it! It has two manifestations - I learn to keep my things and my spaces in logical or useful order, and I learn to be efficient and orderly with my time, my habits, and my thinking. Organization requires me to:
- Create a place for everything - appointments, to-dos, requests, information, ideas, supplies, clothing, etc. “Everything has a place.”
- Put things where they belong immediately -record all my ideas in one place, and sort things whenever I get home, or open my inbox.
What kinds of disorganization are slowing me down the most right now, and giving me the greatest dis-ease? How might I solve them?
My Journal: My current disorganization is mostly in the physical realm: Papers, books, clothes, toys, food, and other stuff in disarray. This is due to in part to the laxity of summer, to being ill, and to the big projects I'm more focused on than on my daily routines, but I must admit that I've never really found that perfect balance of 'order with things' that I desire.
My Journal: My current disorganization is mostly in the physical realm: Papers, books, clothes, toys, food, and other stuff in disarray. This is due to in part to the laxity of summer, to being ill, and to the big projects I'm more focused on than on my daily routines, but I must admit that I've never really found that perfect balance of 'order with things' that I desire.
I have a schedule of simplification and organization tasks, one task each day, that I've gotten very lax with and I want to review and return to it in this next week.
- Sunday- Clear floors and surfaces
- Monday- Clear papers, notebooks, files, recipes
- Tuesday- Recycling
- Wednesday- Clear clothes, coats, towels; choose some to donate
- Thursday- Clear shelves, closets, cabinets (tackle one big space)
- Friday- Clear donation boxes - make a delivery + big toy clean-up
- Saturday- Clear the refrigerator and food cabinets
“The vast majority of our words and actions are unnecessary, corralling them will create an abundance of leisure and tranquility. As a result, we shouldn’t forget each moment to ask, is this one of the unnecessary things?” ~Marcus Aurelius
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