Cher once said “words are like weapons, they wound sometimes.” Boy, isn’t that the truth? Words are powerful and can even be dangerous. Recognizing this word is only half the battle, watch this video to “turn back time” and learn what to do about it when it comes up.
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Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of The Clutter Diet Book and on-line program, and I was doing my weekly planning recently – I was looking at a calendar very much like this one – and I noticed there’s a Tuesday and a Thursday and a Friday, but there’s no “Someday” on here. And that’s funny, because I hear that word all the time. I want you to start treating the word “someday” as a trigger word to catch yourself delaying a decision or delaying an action that you need to take. So let’s think about the “someday” items in three different flavors.
One is things. So people may have a bin of hand-me- down clothing for their children, and there is a very realistic scenario that says your children are going to grow into a larger size and you are probably going to need those someday. That’s true. It’s not a wish, it’s a plan. It’s really thought through. And that’s a great idea. Save those. You might not know exactly when that’s going to happen, but you do have a realistic scenario for it.
Another example though is weight loss, weight gain, people keeping that pair of jeans for one of two reasons. Either they’re going to lose the weight, and they’re going to fit back into those jeans, or they might gain the weight back and they better keep them just in case. Both of those have unique issues around them, and I want you to really think about “someday” things in regards to how they make you feel. So, with the jeans that you’re trying to get skinny to fit into, is that motivating for you? Does it make you feel positive when you walk into your closet every morning? If so, if that’s helping you stick to your health plan, then maybe that’s a good thing. But if you’re keeping those jeans that are too large in case you might grow back into them, that’s very de-motivating and it really gives you the message every time you look at them in your closet in the morning that you don’t believe in yourself and that you’re afraid of keeping the success that you’ve achieved. So, my recommendation is to let those jeans go. Donate them and say, “That’s going to give me even more incentive to stay where I am and maintain my weight loss.” So think again, “How does this make me feel?” And that might help you decide about your “someday” things.
So the next category of “someday” things is ideas. So you have a lot of things that sound like a good idea that you might want to do. You need a place to capture that. You need a capturing tool. We talk about this in some of our other videos. I love using Evernote and other note-taking tools. And I believe that Evernote is a really good place to put those “someday” items. You can do that by creating one note that’s called “Someday” and you can make a list in there. You can also create a separate note for each idea and tag those with the tag “someday.” That would be a way to group them across all your notebooks. That’s a really good idea too. But it’s just going to be what works for you and what works for you brain. You could also use a paper task list and have a page in your notebook that’s for “someday” or “future tasks.” So an example might be, I really want to see Lyle Lovett again in concert, which is true (he’s amazing). So I might want to go and grab his tour dates and paste them into Evernote so that I can refer to that later. And I believe in Evernote you can even flag yourself with a reminder. So you can capture everything somewhere where you know you can find that idea later.
And that brings me to the third flavor of “someday” items which is tasks, things that you should do and they have an indefinite time when they should be done. So, for example, changing your water filters. You know you’re supposed to change them, let’s just say every six months. You don’t know what day you’re going to really be available to do that. So I would say put that on your calendar –hopefully an electronic calendar you have like Outlook or on your phone – where you can be flagged to do it on a certain day and then if it’s a day that doesn’t work for you, then you change the date and you move it to the next weekend or whenever it is convenient for you to do. But at least you have that coming up for you and providing you a cue, which is part of our “five letter Cs” that we talk about in choice management. So you need to have a cue to remind you to do something. So whatever it is in your system that can prompt you for later, that is a great idea to set those tasks out in the future.
Whatever you do, I want you to make it make sense for your brain, and I want you to remember to consider the word “someday” as a big trigger and catch yourself saying it before you create more clutter. If you need help with any of this, you can get help from our virtual consulting from our team in our Member Message Boards. You can check us out for free with our Light Program and find out more about that at clutterdiet.com/learnmore. See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to stop procrastinating or or staying on top of organization.
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