Peace of Mind Organizing

The clean slate

17 January 2011

So far this year I’ve established a couple of new habits that benefited greatly by starting with a clean slate.

One is the backyard poop scooping that I blogged about last week. Starting by cleaning the entire yard and then establishing a daily routine of scooping has made that activity practically painless.

The other is Inbox Zero. On January 2, I got my email inbox down to zero messages, not by declaring email bankruptcy, but by actually dealing with each email, so that there were none left in my box.

Since January 2, I’ve reached Inbox Zero every day. The reward of an empty inbox is so enticing that I’m taking action on emails I would ordinarily have let languish for at least a day (or month). That’s improving my productivity and it also has an extra bonus: the peace of mind of knowing that no emails have slipped through the cracks or scrolled out of sight. My email inbox doesn’t nag at me. It’s wonderful.

This principle of clearing the backlog and creating a daily habit can be applied to many things, like filing (I still have a “to file” pile that needs to be cleared and then I’ll try to follow my own advice and file immediately), shredding, and cleaning the bathroom or kitchen.

I’m thisclose to having cleared another giant backlog. Yesterday I completed inputting my Quickbooks data for my business for 2010. Back on December 21, 2009, I blogged that I was going to try to create the habit of entering Quickbooks data as each transaction came in and I failed miserably. On Sunday of last week I started entering my backlog, which went all the way back to February.

But now I’m caught up with 2010. All I have to do is enter the receipts and deposits that have come in in the last two weeks and my backlog will be cleared. And then I’ll really try to create the habit of very frequent data entry — at least weekly.

Part of me says that if I can enter a whole month’s receipts in an hour or two at the end of the year, why bother keeping up? I find that this year I crave the knowledge and control of staying on top of my finances. I think paying attention to my books on daily or weekly basis will help me get past some of my weird money issues and will reap great rewards.

I hope a year from now to have a much better report about staying abreast of my finances than I did for 2010!

Tagged with: backlog, email, habits, money, routines

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