Week 2: I Am A Slave to My Habits

As part of my “journey” with MKMMA, this week, all of us were asked to write down a “chore” that we would be able to complete over the next week.  The chore must be one that we can complete on our own, that doesn’t require any money or any help from anyone else.  The chore I have chosen is to clean the home office, for what seems the 1,000th time in the last few years.  I’m not talking about doing some dusting and vacuuming.   I’m talking about going through the piles of papers, piles of magazine articles, piles on top of piles.

I started this chore on Monday and decided that I would take some time each day this week to get through the “clutter” that I have created.  Why not just take one full day to tackle the entire thing? Quite simply, this “mess” of mine has become an “elephant”.  And how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.  Fast forward to today(Thursday morning) and this “chore” is 3/4’s of the way done, and there is “light at the end of the tunnel”.  I know I will finish in the next couple of days, because “I always keep my promises”, but the “old me” wonders: how long will it be before I’m saying: I have to clean all these piles up in this office?  Well the “new me” has an answer to that: not going to happen!

The “simple” chore of cleaning the home office has made me do some “searching” to see where the “clutter” comes from(and perhaps a bigger question is WHY) and quite simply the answer is: me and my good/bad habits.  I have the “good habit” of wanting to feed my mind with knowledge through reading various magazine articles, etc.   But I also have the “bad habit” of tearing articles out of magazines and other publications and putting them in piles to “read at a later date”.  Funny thing is: very rarely does that later date arrive.  I create folders for the various types of articles” travel, fitness, business, personal development, etc.

I’ve been a “slave” to this bad habit for years and it has controlled me.  But that ends now!  I know that I will always be a “slave to my habits” but as Og Mandino wrote: I will form good habits and become their slave.  With regard to my particular habit of hanging on to article, after article, I am creating a new habit.  Touch it once.  Read it right away and either discard or file it.  No piles!  The same will be done for my emails, but that’s another story for another day………..

“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains and we never even know we have the key……” The Eagles