Personal ruminations on attraction to organizational culture.

Any transitory movement is comprised of both fulfilled and unfulfilled emotions.  It is in this limbo that one sheds old habits in favor of the tentative, new formation of habits that hope to support the actions and behaviors that will be required in the next stage.  Until one is able to finalize their feelings about where they are coming from, and is able to take from that time meaning and understanding as it relates to the larger picture, there is little hope of allowing for a successful transition.

It is here in this interim time that I feel as if I actually have the time to stop a moment, look around, and reflect.  With the first two years of higher learning down, and a mess of paperwork and regulations to navigate through in order to start the next two years, I fully and consciously understand that I am a lucky, blessed human being.  It isn’t often that I look back at my life and allow myself to feel truly proud and pleased with what I’ve done; usually I’m too busy trying to improve, to advance, or in the case of the last six weeks, simply maintain while my daily tasks and requirements far exceeded the amount of hours in one day.

Needless to say, after speeding through this summer semester of 7am-2am between work & school, I appreciate the opportunity to be comfortably conscious and deliberate in my daily actions, to step back quietly and think about what I am really doing with my life.

It is in this space after being on maintenance mode for so long, that I’ve decided to pursue a more formalized version of task management in order to increase personal exposure to goals and to attempt to become more aware of the passage of time as it relates to the ultimate ends that I want to accomplish.  Every single weekend this summer I’ve thought about how I’ve had the same penpal letters in my inbox for months, quietly requesting a return reply but generally being sighed over and shuffled to the back of the pile while everything else gets in the way.

I see the forms for the CPC exam that I was supposed to take in July but never quite got around to submitting, the inch-thick stack of recipes that I’ve been meaning to try if only I would remember to purchase the ingredients, the daunting creative projects that sadly collect dust on my bookshelf, the intangible amounts of time that I have spent not in active pursuit of the larger goals because I simply do not have a unified structure in place to actively record, revise, and review

Cue the productivity system.  I understand the concept of starting small, of the first step.  I spread out boxes of pens and markers and pretty much anything one could use to make marks on any other object and I organized them so that I could have my favorite writing utensils handy and spread out throughout my home desk, my backpack and laptop bag, in my car, and at work, because not having the correct pen for a task can be demotivating, annoying, or just plain not good.  I then dumped all of my paperwork and miscellaneous odds and ends into milk crates, spent four hours researching GTD, filing systems, and other productivity/workaround systems, all while rocking an awesome Journey-based Pandora station.  Within a short time I’d created the bones of a filing system, had the milkcrates all cleared out, and had a stack of various other organizing tools that didn’t seem to quite work piled up in the garage .  Granted, the folders weren’t labeled, and I still had one small plastic organizer filled with random objects that seemingly had no place to go, but hey, it was a good start.

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