Busting the Productivity Busters!

What holds you back from accomplishing your household tasks? As I was working today to catch up on some much-overdo tidying, I tried to notice the things that threatened my productivity:

That overwhelmed feeling. You know the one. 
I looked up from the bed, where my cooing little baby was happily playing next to me, and thought "the time is now...now where on earth do I begin?" Everything was in disorder, and the further I looked around the house, the more disorder I found. A week of contracting had meant a week of no cleaning, and all was chaos. So, I decided to do the Dave Ramsey Debt Snowball method...and pay off my loans...I mean, pay off my...er...clean my house. Hey, it got me debt free, so I suppose it could get my house clean, too. The idea is that you start with your smallest debt/room, and add momentum as you move to bigger jobs. So, I tackled the bathroom. If the mess gets overwhelming, I'll just go stand in the bathroom and breathe for a minute. This room is done. I can keep this up.

Breakfast
As soon as I got some momentum going, I felt like I was going to die if I didn't eat something. The fact that my toddler was happily munching away on a delicious looking and smelling banana didn't help. So, I worked on...with a peanut butter-coated apple wedge in the other hand. Crisis averted.

Photo Credit: http://livelearnloveeat.com/2012/02/03/apple-peanut-butter-sandwiches/

Now I'm on to my bedroom, and it's mostly clothes. We don't do much in the bedroom and the kids don't play in there much, so it's mostly used for dressing and sleeping. After the bed was made, the clothes were really about 95% of the mess. Then it hit me:

The urge to start a major reorganization project

My closet is great. It holds our clothes and junk well. The only problem with closets is that we only have about 12 feet of closet space in our whole house, lengthwise, anyway. So, I'm never satisfied with how they look. I'm dying to revamp our closet space and get rid of about 50 things that live there, but I have to channel my inner Aragorn and say to the closet, "There will come a day when the strength of man prevails. But it is not this day. This day, we tidy!" So, I stayed on task, until...

The baby 

This little guy is incredible. He crawls, he leaves a hurricane in his wake, and he yells at me when he feels ignored in favor of a pile of laundry. And he was tired, so he began the call. I heeded the call with attention and a moment of play, then went back to my task. The call resumed. Finally, I decided to set him a few feet from me on the floor with a blanket and a toy while I spent 3 minutes hanging up the last of my clothes. He yelled at me the whole time, but did not die. After 3 minutes, I picked him up and rocked him to sleep. Mission accomplished.

Screens

I don't have a cell phone because we live in a place where there is spotty service at best. We used our phone so rarely that even having it seemed ludicrous, but I know that most people are on their phone screens a lot. My screen weakness is my desktop, but thankfully the toddler was watching 45 minutes of animated vehicles being washed in a car wash. Zzzzzzz. Most days that I am doing housework, I may put on some quiet music, but otherwise, the monitor and the TV must be OFF. Otherwise, I'll get sucked in.

The Phone
I am an introvert. I don't call people, unless there's something I need to communicate or organize and it cannot wait any longer. I may make 1 phone call a day. I may still manage to spend 1-3 hours a day on the phone because of other people calling me (between work and family). That, surprisingly, wasn't an issue this morning, and I went nearly 4 hours without anyone calling in. It was a beautiful thing.

Once you identify the barriers to success, it's a lot easier to keep up that momentum and get to the place you need to be. What are you trying to accomplish? Figure out those barriers and get to overcoming them!