4. Unfinished projects
Kathleen Hamilton, an entrepreneur in Montreal, buys perfume bottles and samples for craft workshops she plans to hold -- one day. She has also bought armloads of wool, remnants, coloured threads and other odds and ends for craft projects not yet begun. It's easy to chastise yourself for being a procrastinator, but the reason you procrastinate likely has to do with time constraints, changing priorities or the realization that you've overestimated your skills. As time passes, just looking at those still-to-be-tackled projects can make you feel ashamed and incompetent.
Though abandoning unfinished projects can be difficult (it may mean giving up the promise of what might still be possible in the future), addressing them -- either by completing them or letting them go -- will stop your negative feelings of self-worth.
The fix
• Keep only those projects that are still fun to do and that you can realistically complete.
• Set a firm start and finish date for the keepers. Begin with the easiest (success is motivating).
• Inject new life into the castoffs by donating them to others.
• Before starting a brand-new project, ask yourself these questions: Do I really want to do this? Can I fit it into my schedule? Do I have the know-how to do it?
• Commit to a definite start and finish date before saying yes to any new project.
5. Virtual clutter
A father chats on his cellphone as he plays with his daughter in the park. A friend anxiously steals glances at her BlackBerry as she listens to your account of last night's date disaster. Modern technology is a tremendous convenience, but ringing cellphones and pinging e-mail alerts are blurring the boundaries between work and leisure time and flooding the family room, coffee shops and bedrooms with a tsunami of disruptions. “My five-year- old son gets annoyed if I interrupt my time with him to check e-mails,” says Donna Hall, a director of Solutions Research Group in Toronto, a company that studies women and technology. “He has a right to be upset.”
The pressure to be instantly, and always, available makes us edgy and hurried and plays havoc with our inner calm and our personal lives.
Putting the brakes on runaway technology slows the pace of our hurried days and opens us up for soul-nurturing pleasures that give life an authentic buzz.
The fix
• Choose only essential technology and use it only when you need to.
• Set boundaries. Turn off the phone during meals, relationship time and leisure time.
• Consider unplugging a few evenings each week and one day on the weekend.
• Delegate a separate phone for work-related calls and turn it off after hours.
• Press the pause button. Insist on gadget-free family time.
• Designate space at home as a tech-free sanctuary.
Page 3 of 4 -- Remove distracting clutter from your life with tips on page 4.
