Two books, which I've mentioned in the last few entries, have been guiding many of the actions in my days recently. The newest one, It's hard to make a difference when you can't find your keys by Marilyn Paul explains many of the organizational principles I've felt were missing from David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Paul espouses some pretty simple and common-sense (some would say old, others might say time-tested) principles of organization of space like "A place for everything and everything in it's place." It sounds pretty trite sitting there all by itself out of the context of a larger organizational system, but she explains those too and ties it all together.

Over the last week and change I've reviewed my physical environment. I realized that in my eagerness to be prepared for anything and everything with the proper equipment I have not given the proper respect to the few essentials. Once I was able to grasp concept of keeping things in the proper space and the proper time, their usefulness doubled.

My kitchen cabinets and shelves were so cluttered with all the things that I could use for cooking that they crowded out and hid the things that I would use, if only I could find them when it was time to cook. In theory I had medications for all sorts of ailments and injuries in my medicine cabinet, but when I really needed something for relief, a trip to the CVS for a new one was easier then rummaging through an pile of miscellaneous medications and bandages.

There is a long way for me to go in organizing spaces, but the time savings and refreshing energy that comes from my office, bedroom, closets, and kitchen is so invigorating that my thoughts begin to turn back to how to best focus this energy in the right direction. It comes back, not surprisingly, to the GTD method and Allen's book.

This long weekend I will be happy to relax at home and highlight things I really want to do and their order of importance with as little sentimentality as possible. This itself is going to take a bit of planning. I intend to stock up on food and snacks and caffeine enough to create a workable set of lists in a form that I can keep with me.

The end result, I hope, will be a solid understanding of my path forward and the steps to get there. It won't be an inflexible plan, but will provide me with a way to bounce new ideas and demands on my time and energy off a solid visualization of my responsibilities, priorities, pleasures, and passions.

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