After I reflect on something, I spend time making changes that during my period of reflection I thought were not great uses of my time or energy. This month I have found myself making time to work on what one of the blessed IGRC souls called “guilt stacks.”
As she described it, I looked around my office and sadly discovered that I had plenty of these guilt stacks. They are projects, ideas, maybe even sketches or drafts of something you were going to do, but for whatever reason, didn’t so. We still like the idea but for whatever reason we can’t or won’t pursue it ‘right now’ but we hope to sometime in the future .. so we keep the information where we won’t forget about it, and we don’t. We tend to feel guilty about not pursuing all those good ideas and even the half-baked ideas because after all, with time and effort, they have the potential to be good ideas. Potential, there is the key word.
Not everything we think of is great or comes at the right time. I created some ground rules before I tackled my guilt stacks.
If I could answer "yes" that I planned to pursue the idea within one year, I’d put it in a file labeled 1.1.2020 because pretty soon it was going to be 1.1.2019 anyway. If not, I set it aside in one mega-stack. I did this over lunch and evenings over the last month or so because I needed the stacks to be gone.
Then I went through the mega stack. Was there a piece of information that was or could be useful? IF so, how? And I filed those categories of information away in a file drawer and tossed everything else. I thought it would be hard to do it, but surprisingly, I felt extraordinarily free. I feel ready to start a new year full of new challenges and new experiences.
A thank you to all of you for being a part of my 2018 year.
Peace and Love,
Shauna
