The Hemp Connection + life

What remodeling has taught me about behavior change

I've been managing a pretty major remodeling project over the last six weeks. I have an 1100 square foot condo that needed new flooring. It had been decided that tile would be the option. However, when the tile guys got there, they realized that the older building my second floor condo is in, had sunk enough so that the difference between high and low spots was too significant to make tile the option. They had to work out a complicated mix of carpet and tile to do the job.

Here is the"before" photo. That table is office #2 from where many of these blog posts are created.

Here is the"after" photo. Well…for about 24 hours. Once the grout dried I immediately had to start moving everything out of the bedrooms and closets onto tiled areas so carpeting could commence.

The carpeting job ended 2 weeks ago, but this is pretty much what my dining room looks like today. Not because I'm lazy or sloppy, but because I decided that since I rarely have occasion to go through every single item I own and decide if it needs to stay or go, I was going to use this as an opportunity to perform a massive"feng shui".

I have a lot of papers that were stored in boxes, artifacts from the days before the Internet when us intellectual types kept every piece of printed material we had in case we needed it. Now we don't need to do that, because most information is somewhere in the cloud.

It's a hard habit to break though, hanging on to things in case you need them. I'm big on not wasting things or unnecessarily using landfill space, so I'm trying to make a good decision about every single piece of paper, trinket, electrical cord. My personality type is such that I can only do this for a short time before I lose focus and start throwing things in boxes to get the task overwith. So I promised myself this time I would not do that. I only ask myself to make 10"what should I do with this?" decisions a day. As you can see by the massive size of this pile (and it's only half of the pile!), being so diligent means I'm going to live with the pile for awhile.

The first week it felt like I was never going to get there. But the day before Christmas I looked and saw that one whole corner of the dining room was free of clutter. And the office, where most of this stuff had been stuffed into the closet and started to overflow into the room…was so clean and crisp that I was far more productive working in there than I ever had been. All that clutter was interfering with my focus and concentration.

The process reminds me somewhat of the old advice for eating an elephant: one bite at a time.

And as with gardening, it made me think of many of you. How you might be anxious to lose weight and how frustrating it can be to see it come off slowly, some days seemingly not at all. But how if you stick with it, one day you look up and the progress is just THERE. If you lose focus and start going at the task in a disorganized fashion, you'll get rid of the chaos at the superficial level by shoving it in the emotional closet, but that mess is still there…and as with my closets…has a tendency to grow and multiply on its own if left untended.

It doesn't matter how small your effort is today. If it's an effort and it moves you even a tiny fraction of a millimeter in the direction you'd like to go, it will pay off.

I'll post updates when both the office and the dining room are truly back in action!

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What remodeling has taught me about behavior change + life