Monday, July 02, 2012

The Nice Thing about My Job

My real work --the work at home-- is never-ending.  It's nigh onto impossible to catch up on the cooking, the cleaning, the homeschooling, the laundry, the repairs, the errands, the gardening.  Sometimes I'm caught up, as it were, in one of those areas.  But never all of them.  Never even most of them.  Oh, let's get real, I can't even remember being pretty much up-to-current in more than two of those things at once.  That gets wearying.

The easy thing about going away to a job is that it's clear-cut.  You go punch the time clock.  You do your work.  Sometimes there you get everything done.  [gasp!]  And then you might be able to twiddle your thumbs or surreptitiously flip through a magazine until the next customer arrives and you snap back to efficiency again. And at the end of the day, when you're done, you're actually done.

So after a week of going to my paid-job every day, now that I'm home again, I'm overwhelmed.  Where to start?! It's especially hard to make decisions and to get motivated when you're being overwhelmed by some other things in life.  And come the end of the day, even if I zip and zap and work like a maniac, the undone items on the to-do lists will still stretch before me. 

So have any of you found solutions to this?  How do you live with the perpetual knowledge that you're not doing what needs to be done?  Or is the only real solution to reduce the amount of jobs you're trying to do?  (Such as ditching the garden or quitting the job or hiring a maid?)

5 comments:

  1. I live with it. It's constantly there, nagging ate.

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  2. Nagging at me, that should be.

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  3. Prioritize. There are some rooms and objects that I want clean more than others--for instance, kitchen, dining room table, the bathroom I use the most--but bedrooms, linty laundry room, dusty bookcase, etc, they can slide. Be like FlyLady and do 15 minutes a day hard and fast, clean up after every meal, and toss the coffee tables: they're "hot spots," magnets for stuff to pile up on. Throw out stuff: mail and newspapers can make clutter super fast and throwing out is super easy. Laundry: one load thrown in before bed, dryer in the morning, and who cares about the wrinkles that collect while at work, put away at night. But, yeah, it's hard.

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  4. Anonymous (Jane S?) -- it sounds like your priorities are a lot like mine. Oh, and floors are more important to me than dusty furniture or dirty windows. Getting rid of clutter as it comes in the door is high priority. It's the clutter that's already here (and really isn't too bad, compared to most people's) that I don't have time or mental energy to sort through, that's where we sometimes get a little hairy.

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  5. Hi Susan, this is Jane S. Nope, that was not me. I'm flattered, though!

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