I finally tackled one more desk surface in my office that was not completely feng shui for my creativity. I asked hubby to change it out to another desk and to take certain things away to his office. He did and what a difference. Each time I walk into my office, I’m staring not at a work space where I feel like pond scum, but I see my goals up on a mounted white board and a desk full of possibilities.

The difference? I can’t stop dancing whenever I turn on any music, no matter what it is. And this is not normal for me, because I’m sick. But sore throat and fever won’t stop me from dancing. So on I go.

And it reminds me that since it’s the Ides of March, I seem to get sick each year around this time, and I also always seem to need a minor spring cleaning to propel me into spring. Now that we’re headed fast to a new season, we’ve even lost an hour of sleep (but so worth it because it’s light in the morning and in the early evenings, which makes me deliriously happy). The consensus: the more I can sparkle up my house (and dance every chance I get), this is going to be a fantastic spring.

True, a year ago I was preparing to leave on my big trip to Italy and Greece, but I am simply thanking God that I got to go and marveling at all the places I got to go to besides Europe (twice). I’m also taking a step of faith and thanking God for the places I will get to go in years to come. My list continues to grow: Fes and Marrakesh, Morocco; Chimba, Malawi (to visit the orphans) and to snorkel at Lake Malawi (that’s where they found Livingstone all those years ago, you know), Sydney’s North Beaches in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and I’ve now added the Bay of Fundy and eastern Canada to the list. Sounds rather dreamy, doesn’t it?

That’s the thing about removing negative inputs in your life. For me, it’s all my failures hung around my shoulders like a heavy backpack. I have too many things coming my way to continue to focus on such things. The failures are not my friend, they are a sign pointing me to something else: what am I allowing to stop me? It’s usually ME stopping myself, not anyone else.

So, I reclaimed my office, I’m dancing, still sickly, aching all over, but oh well.

I win.

So glad it’s Friday! While it’s been a productive week, I’ve been busy rethinking my organization and time management here in my office and daily schedule. Always good to work with my strengths. Because I’m such a visual person, I need to “see” tasks in a very upfront, in my face way.

1. Out come the white boards. There is something about a dry erase white board that makes me feel very in tune with my goals and to-do list and anything else I’m trying to organize. I have one hanging on my wall, but yesterday, I hauled the spare board out from storage and divided my tasks and goals into five horizontal lists. Oooh, I love white board lists! Just looking at it inspired me so much, I got one major thing done and crossed off my list and circled on the white board (which means I get a cookie!). I wrapped up my workday yesterday thanking God for such an accomplishment. It felt great!

2. I am addicted to banker boxes–turquoise banker boxes. I use each one for a different project or as I’m calling them now, different curriculum. Yes, I’m reverting back to kindergarten, but didn’t we learn most everything about life back then? I learned about reading time, art time, play time, nap time, snack time. (I’m being silly, but still!) Sometimes the freelance life is much like college would be (had I ever gone), with me juggling multiple clients, classes, assignments, tests, schedules in one day. So my banker boxes are my college credits, yes. (I get another cookie!)

3. I have to see everything in the open to reiterate my top priorities. I am so visual, if I don’t look at my big-picture goals each day, I’m lost in the minutiae of my day. Of course, the minutiae are often talking to family and friends about their lives, talking with hubby, replying to friends’ emails, and chatting on forums with other writers, so it’s not like those tasks are a waste of time. I just don’t want to get caught up in it so that I don’t accomplish something I’m working toward. And because I’m so visual, when I see a cookie, I’m completely distracted!

4. Being visually oriented is actually a great way to remind myself that my day is not my own. I like that I can’t get too lost in my own little world. I like that an email from a friend or a call from a family member can stop me in my task so that I remember that there are other people out there, and my stuff is not the most important thing. Cookies might be though!

5. Being visual is rather chaotic at times. These next few months I will take time each day to organize and weed the clutter from each part of my office. This weekend is my immediate desk area for starters. Just one drawer, one shelf, one counter space and we can pluck 100 worthless pieces of junk out, to either file, donate, or trash. Right? I could do that just with my to be shredded junk mail pile. Now I need a cookie.

Have a great weekend.

Janet Luhrs’ The Simple Living Guide: A Sourcebook for Less Stressful, More Joyful Living is one of those books you reread every year just to pick up something new. This year, I’m especially interested in the food and nutrition section (because I’ve been sick).

Luhrs touches on how much is really enough, how to make less enough, and just offers a nice discussion on simplifying one’s life.

Definitely worth checking out from the library each year. Grade: A

1. Kirkus Reviews closed up shop this week. Susan Wise Bauer has a great opinion on this over at her blog. My writing mentor just got a fabulous review from them a few weeks ago, but this is her eighteenth book and she’s been writing novels and memoirs for almost forty years. I think online blogging (very similar to what I do here and what other friends do around the Web) is the future of book reviewing. I know everyone thinks this may be bad news, but I’m kind of excited. It will once again level the playing field for book publishing. A self-pubbed, as Susan Wise Bauer notes, can sell just as much as a overly lauded book that got a Kirkus Review and is being picked up by librarians all over the country.

2. My husband is on a day hike over in the Olympics (near Forks) and I am staying home. Too cold! He and his buddy (who is in from out of town) are off hiking in beautiful forests and on gorgeous beaches in the bitter cold and I, his less-adventuring wife, am home today nursing a cold. I’m okay with that.

3. Trying to figure out which cookies to serve at our annual culdesac progressive snack/drink fest tomorrow evening. By the time everyone (around forty people) gets to our house, no one is hungry anymore, thus, I must pick some cookies to truly tempt them.

4. I am digging this pink Christmas tree from Making It Lovely. Saw another pink one in West Seattle the other night in a shiny new condo. It look really cool. I would have a turquoise one though. I’m mad about turquoise!

5. Today is proofing and reading and writing day. And sweeping and mopping and cleaning as well. Never a dull moment around here!

Have a good weekend!

I am planned and plotted for all of 2010. It took just a few hours (I’d been thinking about my 10 big goals for 2010 for a while now) and I quickly created a 2010 planning template in Adobe Acrobat Pro (a printable version of my template can be downloaded if you want it: 2010 Goals Worksheet template; happy holidays to you, my faithful blog readers!). It didn’t take long to fill in the blanks (I love filling in blanks!) and I’m ready. And already behind schedule. Yeah, that’s me, the Type A, born on Martha Stewart’s birthday overachiever crazy eyes girl.

I won’t ever change. My priorities might, but me, nah.

The hardest part was diluting the monthly tasks into weekly action steps. Why my brain has issues with THAT PORTION of planning is Resistance, I swear! So I made it easy for myself. I created a template with more blank spaces! Suddenly, all I had to do was think of “next action steps” and December (pre-planning) is full and I will be ready to launch in January with aplomb.

My little template worked. And after I planned out the next thirteen months, I felt great! Amazing how a little bit of planning can help you focus.

Now go to it! And enjoy.

One of my favorite writing teachers always takes time now to plan the next year. She gets herself a hotel room and doesn’t leave until she thinks up the big plans for her next year and breaks them up into little pieces to begin to conquer.

Totally inspiring and I’ve decided to follow her lead (after playing around with it for a few years). If you’ll remember from 2008 and 2009 that I have made proclamations on this blog. They get me farther than I would have gotten had I not made proclamations at all, but I don’t ever get everything done that’s on my list. I think that’s okay.

This year as I plan for 2010, it probably won’t be much different than past years, because me planning is like I’m trying to trump God. Seriously, I think I have to create the world in a day. I always have to remember it took God six days and He rested on the seventh, thus, this year, I will try to keep that in mind and not jam too much into my list.

But here’s how it’s done.

1. I use Moleskine’s X-tra Large Weekly Notebook for the daily stuff (19.95 from Moleskine). That’s where I write my daily to-do lists and where I plan out what I blog about each morning. One side has each day of the week and the other side has ruled lines for notes and important details.

2. For the overarching goals, I just use a simple notebook or legal pad. I throw down 6-10 big things I want to accomplish in a year. This is my downfall, though. Most of those big things are actually huge things, like, build a platform, get an agent, publish a book, etc. This year, I have another step that I’m going to focus on more than this big step.

3. The monthly list. Those 6-10 things must be broken down into smaller steps in order to get them finished. Thus each of them will break into twelve smaller pieces and each of those smaller pieces will be on my monthly list. This is complicated for MY BRAIN, so no worries if you’ve lost me already. I can’t seem to translate the big stuff to the monthly lists. Or what David Allen (of Getting Things Done fame) says, I haven’t broken them down into small enough pieces quite yet. Next step.

4. This is pure David Allen of GTD fame. Take those monthly tasks (the ones I wrestle with all year long) and write the first thing to be done (this is the next action step). This can go on any of my weekly Moleskine calendars, preferably the first week, because when you take one action, it invariably introduces another action. This is my strategy for 2010. I am going to break things down into GTD action steps and I’m going to keep at it until I run out of things to do. Ha!

5. By the end of 2010 (as it happens at the end of 2008 and 2009), I do have progress. I finish several tasks, get started on these other tasks, but as it always happens, I don’t get all the big stuff done. Me without an agent at the end of 2009, for example. But that’s okay. No need to panic.

After all, there’s always 2010.

How are you planning for 2010? Have you started yet? Are you like me and tend to have too many goals? Or do you not have any goals at all? Let’s discuss.

Having book storage issues again. Here are some ideas that I’ve found while trolling the Internet.

This first one I love.

But we need shelves to go up super-high.

The windowseat idea Todd wants to put in on either side of our fireplace (and how we want the mantle to look).

I like the thicker divider and lower cabinets too, though.

Inspires me today.

Are we there yet? To the weekend I mean. What a week. Between dentist appointments galore, car in the shop to get tricked out, and work and life and grocery shopping, and oh wait I need to fill up my gas tank, this week has just zoomed right over me.

So, for Wednesday, I am taking a breather. (Not in real life, the day job is flying, and the freelance work is still chugging along, and I’ve got two pieces out for workshop to my writing groups.)

Insert breather here.

Oooh, pretty.

Have a great last day of September!

Photo by Sarah B in SD

A terrible photo, but the one from Todd didn’t turn out, so this one I pulled off Flickr because it had the same info. This is what we’ve been enduring in Western Washington and on down the I-5 corridor. It’s worse down south, and has surprised many of us around Seattle. The mall was packed yesterday as was the Pro Club in Bellevue (right near Microsoft) until around 10 pm last night. Everyone was escaping into air conditioning and/or the pool.

I promised someone that if I saw a body of water I would just jump in. So they kept me from the river so I could have a sit-down dinner.

Hot!

How does one work (on a computer) through this? You get creative. You get up  really early to open up the house, you run fans directly on you while you work on the computer, and once the sun goes down you move every fan you can find into your bedroom to start airing it out.

No, we don’t have a/c (never think we need it) yet, and my BIL is a a/c contractor. Someday we plan to put it in when we replace our furnace, but the weather doesn’t wait for someday. All our neighbors got the “bought air” this year, but we’re tough. We can handle it.

You don’t sleep well, but you survive. It’s not like Seattle gets months of this. We’re cooling off tonight and tomorrow and even more on Friday. We can hold out.

It’s just fun to keep track of how hot it actually is outside. I can’t really see anything because all my blinds are closed, but I get updates from hubby who is usually running around during lunch.

Tonight I’ll join my writing group out on the beach deck of my teacher’s house (on Alki Beach) for our discussion. It should be chilly even. Sounds perfect to end this day.

Stay cool Pacific Northwest people!

Nicole Balch over at Making It Lovely has a great post up this week on picking the perfect pink paint color.

I love her choices too. Very soothing, very not pink all the time. When I think of pink, I think of the three pink paint colors that every bedroom in my house sported when we bought this place. It was intense pink. Mauves and peachy pinks. The only pink left is the peachy-pink in the guest room and it will go away soon enough. It can be lived with. Hubby just couldn’t have a mauve office, no way, no how.

Paint is tough. The best advice I’ve read recently is not to paint swatches on the wall, but to paint a board and move the painted board around the room to other elements, the floor, the windows, in the light, out of the light. It’s easier to pick a color that way. Can’t remember who told me that, but I think it was Young House Love.

Anyway, thinking on paint as I have a very busy work week and as my hubby transforms our backyard into something of beauty. He’s doing great!