So I had an epiphany this morning when I was drinking my coffee and going through my feed reader. I know, what a place for enlightenment, in front of the time-sucking force known as the Internet.

Anyway, as anyone that’s read my blog for a long time knows, I have struggled with, but always desired, a neat, clean and organized home and by extension, a neat, clean and organized life and by further extension neat, clean and organized lives of each of my family members. But I have never been able to achieve it without making myself feel as though I was sacrificing time spent elsewhere, on other things doing what I HAD to do, not what I wanted.

Then this morning I realized what the problem was. See if I want to clean and organize one of the kids rooms, for example, I always plan for it to occur after the cleaning for the day is done. As if it’s not okay to get to what I really want to do until I’ve completed what I HAD to do first. And the HAVE TO list always gets longer by the minute - picking up, dishes, vacuuming, laundry, grocery shopping, banking, and on and on until there’s no daylight left and I’m exhausted.

So back to the feed reader. I realized as I was going through all of my reads, that I was scrolling through and skimming all of the other feeds I have subscribed to first except a certain category of blogs that I really want to devote time to read. What kind of insanity is that? I was doing what I felt I HAD to do in order to get to what I WANTED to do. Why not read the ones I really wanted to first? Why the sense of obligation to the others? Like I said, insanity. And this is the way my brain works, regularly. It’s no wonder I suffer from swirling-brain-syndrome.

And I’m the same way when it comes to getting my home organized. I have to reprogram my brain to know that if the girls room needs to be cleaned out and organized because it is a full on disaster area, I don’t need to get the rest of the house cleaned first, it can wait. If I want to read my favorite category of blogs first I can, I don’t have to get through the others first thereby leaving no distraction behind. I swear sometimes the neural connections in my brain must look like that jumble of extension cords you pull out of your junk drawer, or the tangled strings of Christmas lights you pull out of the holiday decorations box.

I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Now just to get to the stuff I really want to, first.