neadods | The State of the Nea

There is something completely out of whack when it seems like reckless abandonment to flip through magazines for half an hour.

That said, I am doing *slightly* better on the chore-life balancing. Slightly. I'm certainly glad that I made time to go to Chort's last annual privateer feast. I'm even gladder that I put an antique candle mold on the flea market table - that went fast and I hope it brought in good money. It was a bittersweet time last night, knowing that this was the last, and knowing that this year we were donating money not for Team Wench's generic cancer fundraiser but for our hostess' medical bills.

I've sold an essay. I don't actually know for how much, though, which is hardly the grownup way to be a writer.

Although I'm not using the kanban board I built on the fridge, the idea of splitting all my chores into agile sprints appears to be a good one. However, I'm already having to fight the idea that "oh, yeah, I need to work on that eventually" is an appropriate way of dealing with the chore du sprint, and the fact that some important things are falling through the cracks because I haven't thought to write them up as a sprint. So the bones are good, but I need a little more discipline.

Don't I always! You may start getting a Sunday 7 list from me. Boring, I know, but the public name-and-shame of it has always helped me keep on track.

However, I can also point to a couple of little victories. Finances, for one. I'm one of those people who just threw everything - receipts, statements, bills, ATM slips, etc., into a bin and then stuffed the contents of said bin into a holding box for the legal 7 years. Just tossing things places was quick, but inconvenient to dig anything up.

So two months ago I sat down and took an old bunch of large envelopes. On the front is a list of each monthly bill I have to pay, so I can see when I did and how much. Clipped to the back of the current month's envelope is a tally sheet so I can write down how much I pay the credit cards (all but 1 are paid off and the last one will be done soon, but I still want to know how much I use them for over a year), a tally sheet so I can track the status of the furlough loan, and the rent slip for M. In the upcoming months are blank rent slips, a deposit slip, and the appropriate pages out of the mortgage and furlough loan books so I can pull them out when they're due.

There's a differently colored envelope for tax stuff, with its own check list.

I'm still basically throwing things in a bin... but it's a bin sorted by month that makes it very easy for me to leave notes for myself, organizes my paperwork where I'll need it and when I'll need it, and lets me keep track of everything at a glance. Not bad.

What's even better is that sniffing around my piles of "This may be useful someday" stuff has coughed up enough envelopes for me to have another 5 years of this system before I have to purchase anything for it. I also found yet a third set of envelopes good for using for investment mailings.

... and to give you some idea of how much of a packrat I am, they're labelled with various months in 1994.