going "micro" to clean up messes left behind

1) I go to bed almost every night at 2 am. I wake up at 11 and I feel disgusting. I am not taking sleep seriously. This seriously has to stop.

2) This just reminds me that I will most likely be sharing a room with someone at my aunt's place. It will either be my mom (who is needy) or grandmother (who snores rather loudly). Perhaps I should limit my time there...but how to do so tastefully, without hurting said aunt's feelings? :(

3) I am learning how to clean up messes left behind. Not trying to be philosophical here--my bedroom in my hometown was left a disaster from when I visited last summer. Now that I'm home for the holidays, diagnosis and confidence in hand, I'm in shock. SHOCK. I can't believe that I, as a human, could survive in that space for even a moment. There are CDs strewn all over the floor.  There's my cat's (clean) litter box from when I brought him over with me on the plane last summer. There's a scarf; countless plastic bags holding unknown contents; a dehumidifier; a broken heater; my window air conditioner; a broken handbag; a notebook, dirty clothing; my suitcases; a laundry basket; clothes to give away.

How the fuck am I going to deal with this??????? (Ridiculous punctuation irks me, but I think in this situation, it's warranted.)

Before my diagnosis, I quickly came to realize that the proclamation "I'm gonna clean my room now!" was is the biggest BS phrase ever. That never works. I knew I had to divvy the room up. So I got into the habit of sectioning up the room into "floor", "bed", "laundry", and "dresser tops". The converstaions in my head went something like this: "Okay--from 4-5, I will clean everything off the floor." This statement, along with countless others, also proved to be pretty futile. It would take days to get the place clean. Time would not stand still for me as I stood still, head slightly cocked to one side, staring into space with an object which I had no clue where to place in my mess of a bedroom. For a long, long time.

Today, as I basically stood on one foot (there was no room for the other given the state of the room) in the queasy realization that this HAD to be cleaned up, it finally hit me.

Bigger is not better.

Go micro. Make those steps even smaller.

What does it mean to go "micro", you ask? It means breaking your goals down to the smallest blocks possible. Survey the majority of crap all around you. What do you see? Divide them up into categories:

1) Paper
2) Plastics
3) Fabrics/Clothes
4) Etc

(Side note: I just got up to find my computer cable and I tripped on a pile of packaged gnocchi and nearly broke my face, with the chest of drawers breaking my fall. classy. and horribly scary. keep your room clean and don't let this happen to you, kids.)

Have a concrete destination for these things: let's take "paper", which I focused on today. Where does paper go depending on what's on it?

1) Recycling (clothing tags, receipts you don't need, etc)

2) The shredder (that mailed bank statement you keep getting in the mail that you *cough* haven't gotten around to cancel)

3) If soiled, the garbage (kleenex)

4) If important, in a box or according folder for bills and other important things (reciepts, bills, insurance documents, etc)

5) If an interesting article you happened to rip out of a magazine/printed out for someone, in a "box for interesting paper articles"

6) If a book, on the bookshelf

7) If a magazine, on/in a magazine rack (I would LOVE to get pretty much anything on this list) or wherever you like to place your magazines

8) If academic, in the according folder for later sorting (put a post-it stickie on the accordion folder so you don't forget)

9) What else can you think of?

Focus on the things that can be done immediately. Do you have a garbage in the room? A recycling bin? A shredder? Focus on what can be done right away, within arm's reach: this is so you don't get distracted with going in and out of rooms every other moment, and all the distractions that come along with this. Start with the things you KNOW can be disposed of in the same room. Once that's done, pick one thing that will require leaving the room for disposal. Set them aside, and then fixate your energy on bringing them to that room, doing whatever needs to be done (shredding, emptying into a recycling bin, etc), and commit yourself to coming back. Once that is accomplished, move on to the next thing that requires leaving the room.

PHEW.

Try that and let me know how it goes. I'll be reporting from here too.

Sam