Starting My Decluttering Action Plan.

I don't know if I'm breaking some kind of blogger code here, but I will continue the AD/HD in the workplace series. If I don't, put it down to AD/HD. That was a joke. It will get covered in the near future.

I divide my time between two residences. My girlfriend's apartment, which is also my workplace. The other place is my own apartment. While I'm happy to accept it as just a place to store my stuff (as George Carlin put it), it is meant to be my space. The two places aren't that far apart, so I don't know if we qualify as "living apart together" in the postmodern refugee sense. Maybe I'll discuss that elsewhere.

I have a book called 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD by Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D. I also have a membership at TotallyADD.com (which is a fantastic website I'll likely mention a lot on this blog). I'm going to use both of these sources in formulating my action plan. I'm sharing it here because it may be of some use to some AD/HDers who might be reading this blog.

Yesterday evening I went to my apartment with the goal of tidying the place up and organizing my possessions, but I was totally overwhelmed by all of the clutter. Further research had to be undertaken. I extracted the aforementioned book from the rubble and brought it to the sanctuary of neatness that is my girlfriends place.

Originally, I was going to use a tip from TotallyADD.com, but where would I go from there? What follows is the first part of my action plan, which starts with the tip and some advice from Sarkis' book (paraphrased and fractionally reinterpreted, of course).

1. 
   
   
   
   Pile all of my clutter on my bed.

   The good folks at TotallyADD.com advise that I then deal with it in bite sized chunks. Thats where it lost me.

2. 
   
   
   
   Organize my belongings into five piles, or four boxes and one garbage bag. The boxes are labled "Fix It", "eBay" (Sarkis suggests "give it away", but I'm in a bit of debt and every dollar helps), "Keep", and "Unsure". The final pile or garbage bag is as implied, garbage.

   This advice comes from 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD. Its what I was missing last night

3. 
   
   
   
   Then what?

   Sarkis suggests Feng Shui. Next time I'm in Borders and I remember, I'll look into that and try to write a kind of Feng Shui for AD/HD primer.

Now that its here, the appropriate follow up would be a report on how it went. Hopefully you'll see that sooner rather than later.