COVID and various other lurgies meant we spent an awful lot of time at home this Christmas. Sigh.
I vented my cabin fever on every nook and cranny in our house, cleaning, tidying and purging, while my family hid their favourite possessions, just in case.
It hit me that so much of the clutter was only ever meant to be a temporary fix.
My husband’s woodworking stuff piled in the corner of his home office that was ‘just for now’? It’s been two whole years.
Boxes of my book, Email Attraction, stacked up on the landing while I found a ‘proper home’ for them? 9 months and counting…
The makeshift shoebox filing tray, overflowing with paper? 12 long months.
None of it was ever meant to be a permanent solution, yet here we were.
Band aid fixes and processes to help us get through the heady combination of lockdown and home schooling were still hanging around.
And bad email habits, that I’d allowed myself to slip into ‘just for now’, were now causing me problems.
‘Email creep’ had set in, with my inbox sucking precious hours from my day.
And I’d become way too attached to my phone, checking social media more often than a 25 year-old Instagram influencer.
So I’ve resolved to go back to better, long-term solutions:
- Devoting 2 blocks of time to email and social media per day. The rest of the time, my inbox and feeds stay closed so I can work on stuff that really matters. (Repeat to self: Email is not a strategy)
- Putting my phone on the opposite side of the room (or even in the room next door) when I’m working.
Not as daunting as big old resolutions (god knows, we don’t need the stress right now), these are more like little new year tweaks.
