Breaking down house megaprojects

[benjamin]

I'm on my most recent effort to get going in GTD, and am having a lot of trouble in what I call megaprojects.

I have 3 areas of my house that need a lot of work and take up a lot of my brain. They are seriously out of order and full of stuff. I have got projects and tasks related to these areas, but it is not helping me engage with those areas. The 3 areas are roughly my bedroom, a group of rooms that hold my "indoor" stuff, and the garage/shed.

The bedroom has a bunch of work to (eg) sort out clothes, clean up some stuff in there that doesnt belong, sort out what needs to be removed.
The "indoor" stuff is massive (to me). It includes all my filing and paperwork, a bunch of computers and associated items (both digital and physical) and quite a few hobbies worth of stuff.
The garage and shed have more hobby and maintenance stuff too.

My challenge is twofold. Despite having some projects related to these areas, I keep having unhelpful thoughts about these areas being so out of order. On top of this, the tasks seem so overwhelming (and probably unclear) that I avoid starting much work on it at all. What work does get done on them I would class as sporadic and unplanned. If I look at horizons of focus relatred to these areas, my thoughts around the areas is it could well be 30k-40k horizon stuff to fix (it could literally take me years to sort and dispose of this, given I have other life roles that relegate this particular role sometimes).

Is this something where I need to create several projects per area and put them all in the list, and then say most are "someday"? Do I need to just focus on single projects and do a "finish this first"? Do I rearrange my thinking from physical areas and try to recategorise them and see if that help me engage better? I just know that in GTD terms, I keep thiking about these things and I am not making progress and often catch myself doing bad procrastination on them, which makes the feelings worse.

If it helps, my tool to manage my lists is Nirvana.

 

[TesTeq]

I have 3 areas of my house that need a lot of work and take up a lot of my brain. They are seriously out of order and full of stuff. I have got projects and tasks related to these areas, but it is not helping me engage with those areas. The 3 areas are roughly my bedroom, a group of rooms that hold my "indoor" stuff, and the garage/shed.

@benjamin Do you really want to do something with these areas? Why? Maybe it's not worth your time to change anything?

 

[mcogilvie]

How is the rest of your life? Have you taken the GTD assessment? Although organizing stuff is very much a part of GTD, there is a level of clutter which demands more. Do you have the resources (space, time, energy, money) to deal with your stuff without significant change? At a certain level of clutter, you have to just say “this has to go” and keep going. For example, when a basement floods, stuff has to be evaluated and treated appropriately. Yes, it’s a project, but planning Is no substitute for doing the work. There are experts in most large communities who can prove various forms of assistance if you need them.

The ultimate downside of clutter is pretty grim. In the case of my elderly mother, I had to make an “anonymous” call to the state, who sent an inspector who told her she couldn’t live in her house anymore. After family members removed a fraction of the stuff with sentimental value, we sold the house to a rehabber who threw everything else out.

 

[Gardener]

I have 3 areas of my house that need a lot of work and take up a lot of my brain. They are seriously out of order and full of stuff. I have got projects and tasks related to these areas, but it is not helping me engage with those areas.

Dana K. White, A Slob Comes Clean. Podcast, videos, and three books. The most relevant is probably "Decluttering at the Speed of Life".

I know you were asking for a GTD solution, and I use GTD while I work Dana's methods, but if you've fought with disorder and too much stuff and clutter without success, I suspect that her methods may be useful. They're designed for people for whom this stuff does not come naturally--and she's one of those people.

I use GTD to track specific tasks in the context of her methods.

Edited to add: Of her podcasts and videos, the most relevant would probably be the most recent ones about the five step decluttering process (Podcast 285), and about the Container Concept (YouTube video, The Container Concept Explained).

 

[Gardener]

Is this something where I need to create several projects per area and put them all in the list, and then say most are "someday"? Do I need to just focus on single projects and do a "finish this first"?

Ambling back...

The Slob Comes Clean method "finishes" single items, one by one. You can focus all those little finishes on one area for a while, and usually do, so that you see visible progress in the area.

Another way to see it is as a habit. You don't make a project of brushing your teeth and call it done--you just brush them every day. You don't make a project of decluttering and organizing your house--you just work on it every day. Someday it will be "done" for an instant, in the sense that you are content with it, and then you work every day on maintaining it. But the habits that got it done are the same habits that will keep it done.

Example:

For example, imagine that you have three sock drawers, and you're still overflowing with socks. You want to end up with one sock drawer, loosely full. The intuitive thing is to dump all the socks out, analyze them, figure out which ones to get rid of...and then the natural thing is to run out of time, leave all those half-sorted heaps there, and you've made things worse. Or you stuff them back in the drawer, and while it's not worse, you've invested time and made it not any better.

With the SCC method, you pick up a pair of socks that's sitting on the bureau, or on the couch, or on your nightstand. You open the preferred sock drawer, and you choose one pair of socks that you like less than the pair in your hand. Or you conclude that you like everything in the drawer better than the pair in your hand. Either way, you carry one pair of socks to the trash or to a donate box.

Evangelism?

And that pair of socks is done.

Yes, it's just one lousy little pair of socks. How could it possibly matter?

But it's DONE. Your house is better, by one pair of socks. You finished that single item.

You didn't invest time into getting nothing done.

You didn't make things worse, by dumping everything out and leaving little piles.

You put in a tiny bit of time, and you made a tiny bit of progress.

Someday you'll turn your focus to those extra two sock drawers, and you'll do it the same way--pair by pair, you compare each pair to what's in the chosen drawer, and get rid of something. And with each pair, you've made progress, and if you walk away and don't get back to the sock drawers for six months, there's still progress made.

If you keep investing time into getting one thing done, and another, and another, the house will improve. You'll have the temptation to use the dump-it-all-out-and-do-a-grand-sort method, because it SEEMS like it should be faster. And for some people it probably is. But if it hasn't worked for you, there's probably no reason to assume that trying it again will work for you.

 

[Deirdre]

@benjamin Oh I feel your pain. A few years ago, we were there. What was nice, my partner and I had a long talk about the priority; we had a very elderly dog who didn’t like us in the basement where he couldn’t join us and we both worked long weeks and by the time we got to the weekend, neither of us felt like doing anything. Here is how we approached it.

Knowing it might be a couple of years, we did a full sweep of the house and identified all the projects we needed to do. We broke up areas of the basement into quadrants -for example, in quadrant 1 (Q1), we needed to clean out 24 quarts of very old paint. To do that, we had to figure out how to recycle paint. And figure out the hours of the recycling center. So the projects were broken down into NAs and we could tackle those as we went. Q2 needed things fixed and cleaned, find a carpet cleaner, schedule cleaner, find a painter, etc. We identified projects for each area of the house. Q3 needed a full renovation – find a contractor, solicit bids, schedule the work. So Q2 went into Waiting For until the renovation was done because why clean carpets before renovation?

When we actually had time to tackle some of the projects, we combined some methodologies; we would set a timer (30 mins, an hour) and work on one of our NA lists. Sometimes, would we use Marie Kondo/spark joy. What we could recycle, we would; what we couldn’t, we would dispose.

It was remarkable to categorize all the work. Yes, it took a while, but we knocked out what we could and made great strides. Just putting down what we knew had to be done really freed us from the challenge of the overwhelm. BTW, the carpet cleaners come next Friday.

 

[schmeggahead]

we did a full sweep of the house and identified all the projects we needed to do. We broke up areas of the basement into quadrants

I recently did this for the entire interior of our home. It was very freeing to have just written it down.
Mind Sweep My World folder holds the list for each room.
When the weather is warming, I'll be doing the outside and attic.

I found this list helpful to set my mind in a positive direction when I'm doing the uncluttering.

30 Tips to unclutter your life

Thirty tips to unclutter your life with permission from Katherine Gibson, www.clutterbook.com Keep just those things that have a purpose, inspire you, or that you consider beautiful. Establish a set time for a daily “Ten Minute Toss”. (That’s...

bpcenter.com

@Gardener is right: one little thing done adds up and each is rewarding.

I enjoy the work, it feels good.
Clayton.

 

[Oogiem]

they are seriously out of order and full of stuff. I have got projects and tasks related to these areas, but it is not helping me engage with those areas. The 3 areas are roughly my bedroom, a group of rooms that hold my "indoor" stuff, and the garage/shed.

I understand. When we moved back to the farm we had 2 houses, 3 barns and some shed totally full of stuff that had been collected over the eyars. We actually used big 30 yard roll off dumpsters and I think we filled 12-15 of them plus gave away and sold tons of stuff. What was left is still in need of sorting and it's an ongoing and sometimes overwhelming task.

I've done major decluttering both the way Gardener recommends, a tiny piece at a time and also by pulling everything out at once in a particular category and dealing with it. Both work and I sometimes use the differences to keep motivated to press on.

we did a full sweep of the house and identified all the projects we needed to do.

This is also how I started. I actually at that time had a paper bound notebook that I documented everything in. I went area by area and also took pictures.

Down to the nitty gritty I decided that the bedroom and clothes were the areas where I have the least emotional involvement so I could sort and clean them up much more easily. For this are I did the one thign at a time idea. I had lots of clothes that don't fit or that i don't like for one reason or another. Whenever I'd put laundry away or got get soemthign out of the closet or drawers I'd try to look at adjacent things and decide if I still wanted them and could wear them. I kept a box handy to put the clean but unneeded clothes in and then took it to either Goodwill or the local charity shop that supports the local animal shelter. This got it down pretty well in about a year. Then my husband and I took a weekend and pulled all the clothes out of the closet, sorted them together (we share t-shirts for example) and the decided what would go back in where and put them away. All the other stuff went to goodwill. We need to do it again as I realized I have a bunch of things that are getting worn out that can be trashed but overall that worked.

For books where I have huge emotional involvement I had to do it by pulling everyhting out all at once. The house was a worse mess for a month with piles of books everywhere. The reason is I had been putting books on shelves wherever they would fit and not in any decent category so the first thing was to group them according to how I wanted to shelve them. I found some duplicates and also hundreds I could give away. Some got repurchased as Kindle versions. Unwanted books went to a library fund raising sale. Books like old computer manuals went directly to trash. Then I did a deep clean and wash of all the bookshelves and as I put books back I cataloged them into BookPedia. So now I not only have all the books only 1 layer deep n the bookshelves but I can easily find books I need because thare are arranged by categories. And I can look up what I have before buying another bok to be sure I don't already have it and also that I didn't have it at one time and decided I no longer needed it.

We have display shelves in the entrance to our house. They were stuffed to the gills with knick knacks that all have lots of meaning to us. My tactic here was to decide the shelves are the 'Museum of Us" and that like any good museum we wante dot have some things on display and some off and rotate them. I had 3 tote bins and decided that I would put 3/4 of the htings in thos ebins by season and only have 1/4 out at any given time. We took everyhting off, cleaned, decided on categories and also assigned shelves to those categories then sorted into what would fit and be on display each season. For example we have a shelf that is reserved for travel and country of origin mementos. Right now (Dec-Mar) It's got things from our Tonga trip. Next season it's going to have Japanese and Chinese things mostly from our relatives as we have not been to those places.

Our next area to work on wil be the pantry. Due to COVID we have changed how we buy and store food and tother items to have a suufficient supply to handle it if we have to isolate for a month or more. So I need to rearrange what is in there to accommodate the new reality. It's going to mean getting rid of things we will probably never use again (camping gear for example) to make room for what we need at this time in our life.

I still have my original notebook. It had things crossed off and stuff in it that I like to look back on when I see how much more we still have to do. In fact I'm about to start a new section and do the same thing all over again. Go through the houses and all the barns and document what is still left to do.

 

[radioman]

Ambling back...

The Slob Comes Clean method "finishes" single items, one by one. You can focus all those little finishes on one area for a while, and usually do, so that you see visible progress in the area.

Another way to see it is as a habit. You don't make a project of brushing your teeth and call it done--you just brush them every day. You don't make a project of decluttering and organizing your house--you just work on it every day. Someday it will be "done" for an instant, in the sense that you are content with it, and then you work every day on maintaining it. But the habits that got it done are the same habits that will keep it done.

Example:

For example, imagine that you have three sock drawers, and you're still overflowing with socks. You want to end up with one sock drawer, loosely full. The intuitive thing is to dump all the socks out, analyze them, figure out which ones to get rid of...and then the natural thing is to run out of time, leave all those half-sorted heaps there, and you've made things worse. Or you stuff them back in the drawer, and while it's not worse, you've invested time and made it not any better.

With the SCC method, you pick up a pair of socks that's sitting on the bureau, or on the couch, or on your nightstand. You open the preferred sock drawer, and you choose one pair of socks that you like less than the pair in your hand. Or you conclude that you like everything in the drawer better than the pair in your hand. Either way, you carry one pair of socks to the trash or to a donate box.

Evangelism?

And that pair of socks is done.

Yes, it's just one lousy little pair of socks. How could it possibly matter?

But it's DONE. Your house is better, by one pair of socks. You finished that single item.

You didn't invest time into getting nothing done.

You didn't make things worse, by dumping everything out and leaving little piles.

You put in a tiny bit of time, and you made a tiny bit of progress.

Someday you'll turn your focus to those extra two sock drawers, and you'll do it the same way--pair by pair, you compare each pair to what's in the chosen drawer, and get rid of something. And with each pair, you've made progress, and if you walk away and don't get back to the sock drawers for six months, there's still progress made.

If you keep investing time into getting one thing done, and another, and another, the house will improve. You'll have the temptation to use the dump-it-all-out-and-do-a-grand-sort method, because it SEEMS like it should be faster. And for some people it probably is. But if it hasn't worked for you, there's probably no reason to assume that trying it again will work for you.

Very well stated.

I often use the following:

Question: How do you eat an elephant?

Answer: One bite at a time.

 

[dtj]

When get overwhelmed and don't know where to start, I just start where ever. Maybe look at big wins, like a single item that can be removed and get you a win. One of the key notions during National Novel Writing Month is to turn off your inner editor. When really getting rid of stuff, I stop trying to optimize where it lands and just put it into the garbage, or take it to the dump, rather than trying to get it to someone who can use it. That little bit of friction derails so many good intentions. Likewise, with other large numbers, and perhaps multi-faceted, projects, I just get busy to create momentum. For instance, I scanned much of my paperwork, rating back 30 years, by just getting a scanner and starting to churn paper. Apart from source, there is little organization, as trying to make the best organizational system is more like a delaying tactic than something useful.

 

[schmeggahead]

I have got projects and tasks related to these areas, but it is not helping me engage with those areas.

Opening up with "take up a lot of my brain" and then talking about "engage with those areas" are very different problems.

To solve the "take up a lot of my brain" there's a project: Capture what's coming into my mind. Then I would do a thorough mind sweep of these areas. I would repeat the mind sweep a couple of weeks in a row. Then read / review these mind sweeps. Get the full scope of the open loops. It's ok for the current projects to be put back on the mind sweep. These are options to move forward on these areas. When you see the full picture, your gut will probably pull you towards one or two. Keep sweeping these areas until you feel better about the collection part. It doesn't have to take long. Done looks like this: you walk through those areas and nothing pulls at you. (This is how I approached my entire house which was full of unprocessed, partially started projects, blocked projects, etc. That was the completion statement for my project to do this.)

To solve the "engage in those areas" there is a project planning session using the natural planning model. Assume that all the work you've done is constructive but needs to be tested against the processing flow for clarify & organize and value assessment and motivation examination. If these are the projects you think will help these areas, give yourself a great motivator to engage in those actions. I put my current projects on an incubate list except for one: to bring focus. I chose the highest value from an ease of completion.

When I did both of these, I found that there were great small wins and discovered new things that affected the current projects. I walk through my house without distraction, except for a few mind sweep items that I easily capture. This was my experience.
Hope it helps,
Clayton.

 

[TesTeq]

For instance, I scanned much of my paperwork, rating back 30 years, by just getting a scanner and starting to churn paper. Apart from source, there is little organization, as trying to make the best organizational system is more like a delaying tactic than something useful.

@dtj Thank you! You've motivated me to start scanning!

 

[dtj]

@dtj Thank you! You've motivated me to start scanning!

Excellent! It's just sort of a turn the crank operation, where little mental energy involved. I just maintained a big input pile, sorta sorted by source (ie. bank, etc) and a big output bag to eventually take to the shredder vendor. A few filled grocery bags properly disposed of and I definitely felt the momentum.

 

[Blanka Dibtr]

Very useful comments above. What I can add is that when I last renovated a place and moved I had the following titles - maybe you find it useful:
- projects for outsourced resources: this is in project planning, a decision to make up front: what is that we try to do ourselves and what will we contract for. In those projects the next actions looked like: find contacts for such expertise, call, make appointment, get quote, arrange schedule, etc.
- project for us: must do and nice to have separated, things that could be done any time, or what is needed for it to do it, like a whole day, a van, etc.
- breaking down items to sort things and remove: it is one thing to clear out the wardrobe, another to take the outgoing to places.
At this point we are planning a move and many things come up that "if we don't move, we will get done" but if we move, I don't mind it staying as it is.
And of course I often go back to the why?
Another constraint for me is delegation. Do I really want to do it because I will enjoy putting the effort in or do I just want to get it done and someone else is going to do it?
Sometimes the answer comes to doing all the thinking and letting it go.
It is funny when I hear about these situations and I wish I could be involved and help to get it done!