Thursday Then and Now: One More Thing-itis, Part 2

Yesterday, I ended with a cliffhanger -- will she make it?

I did. Just barely. I finished my post with a minute to spare and was just finishing up posting it on social media when my alarm went off. I finished within a few seconds, turned off the alarm...

...and did just one more thing -- jotting these notes for today's post while my thoughts were fresh in my mind. My notes were a little sloppy and there were some typos, but this was one of those times where settling for imperfection was a good plan. As long as I could read it, that was all that mattered. Mistakes could be fixed later.

Overtime? 4 minutes. But, since I'd built in a cushion, having my alarm go off before I truly, finally needed to stop, I was not only on time for church, I was early.

In this process, I uncovered another underlying motivation for my one-more-thing-itis: do it before it slips my mind. And, the older I get, the more important this becomes.

A little more than two years ago, I wrote a 3 Keys Thursday post with specific strategies about taming my one-more-thing-itis habit. In that post, I touted deadlines, alarms (to reinforce the deadlines) and lists.

One of those strategies -- setting an alarm -- clearly came in very handy yesterday. Alarms give me an undeniable reminder of the time I'm supposed to stop. I have a slew of technology just waiting to assist with this -- an iPad, an iPhone, an Echo Dot -- and I can make the alarm as pleasant or annoying as I wish.  This, along with a running list so I don't forget where to pick up after I've left off, might be the trick to making progress.

While my strategies then continue to be my strategies now, I also need to think about the root of this habit. Yesterday, I considered the roles that optimism, denial and dread play. Writing that post caused me to pay closer attention to myself and the habit in question, and revealed that fear of forgetting is sometimes an underlying cause as well -- one that is perhaps a subset of the "dread" category. But, regardless of how I label it, can be addressed by my list strategy.

Strategies are the key to making progress. Strategic locations and strategic containers form the foundation of our style-based systems and they work because they address our underlying habits, whether drop and run, cram and jam or I need to see it. And, although time is a lot harder to corral than stuff is, applying the container concept of "room to grow" by building in a time cushion is perhaps another strategy that can save me from my one-more-thing-itis.

The bottom line is that now I still have plenty of room for improvement when it comes to time management, just as I did then. I've seen so much progress in myself (and my living and working spaces) since I started organizing by STYLE that I sometimes forget how long I've been at it. And, though time management is a natural extension of stuff management, organizing something intangible comes with challenges of its own. So maybe I just need to use my strategies, adjust where necessary and remember that what I regularly say about organizing also holds true for getting good at time management.

It's a process.