Closed September 2017

How to Start Your To-Do List and Reduce Your Stress! | Clutter Video Tip

There are only so many pots you can keep on the fire at one time. You know that sinking, nagging feeling that you have forgotten something? Watch this video for strategies to pull all of those To-Do list items out of your head and onto a list before you get burned!

(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdtodo.)

Transcript:

Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and I just got back from being out of town for two and a half weeks straight, and I have a lot on my mind. I’m trying to regroup right now and get my brain around all of this and the best way to do that is with an exercise that I have in my on-line program. We have this handout called “What’s Eating You?” and it’s an exercise for less stress and more action. It’s a list of memory jogging items that help you extract that stuff out of your head that’s floating around in there bothering you. So it asks you to consider all of these areas of your life, whether it’s upcoming travel, children’s activities, phone calls, medical care, pet care, bills, loans, taxes, whatever these things are. You go through this list and anything that pops into your mind in that category you write it down and you pull all that stuff out of your head that is bothering you and then you can see it all in one place. I recommend that you either do this with pen and paper, if you strongly prefer that, or you get a laptop out and you type this out as you go through it. I kind of prefer the laptop, because I think pretty fast and I can capture more quickly when I’m typing than when I’m writing, and then at the end of that exercise I can copy and paste or kind of rearrange my list into whatever makes sense for me. If it’s all the phone calls grouped together, or everything I want to do today grouped together, but I can kind of move that around and make that work for me.

When you do this, it may feel very overwhelming to see all of this in one place, but remember that was all in your head. So thank goodness it’s all out of your head now and you can take action on it and really look at it. I want you to go through it and eliminate anything you can. If there’s something that’s unrealistic like baking a whole bunch of things from scratch, maybe you can go and purchase some things at the local bakery instead. There might be some things like that, that you can forgive yourself, let go of, and cross off right away. But whatever is left you can consider handling it now, handling it later, or handing it off, delegating it to someone else.

So go through and categorize everything that way, and anything that you can handle now, try to tackle that today or the next day. You can knock out phone calls really quickly for example. So get some of this off of your mind, get it all captured and put into your task management system. That way you can relax and know that everything is going to be handled.

If you do want to get our little handout with these memory jogging questions, you can check out our program at https://www.clutterdiet.com. We’ll see you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.

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