New year, new direction.

The new year always fills me with some kind of excitement. Planning (sometimes for the first time, really, in months), being creative, being filled with energy - nearly overwhelming. The new year is always a fun time.

This week, I managed to do some planning last weekend, including goal setting and cleaning up. I was coming off two weeks of vacation. When I got to the office on Monday, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it wasn't a gong show. I cleaned up, I did some organizing, and having done a mini weekly review on Sunday, I hoped to do another Wednesday.

The week flew by. I got stuff done. I didn't do a WR on Wednesday, like I hoped. But I got some minor projects completed, lots of tasks done, and was even in training for a full day on Thursday. Never did I get overwhelmed (maybe because so much of my staff was in training throughout the week), never did I get overworked. I had relaxed control.

I did do a Weekly Review, Friday afternoon. I did a thorough one. Sometime last year I put a VBScript into Outlook 2000 that lets me make a tast from an e-mail, and I had lots of those there that were stale, outdated or done, but poorly named. Weeded 'em all out. I weeded out old stale phone calls. If they need me, they will call back, but I know I had returned many of those. I got a lot of stuff out of there that had started to rot. I worked through two e-mail folders - on for Next Actions, one for Waiting Fors - that was holding stuff that may or may not be on the lists, and put it on the list, or deleted what was done.

It took a long time on Friday, but I did it. Then, I started to plow through them. My calls list was too long, as was my follow ups and waiting fors. Oh my, I felt so good knocking them off. And I did get more creative. And when I got home, I felt like it was ok to be home, that nothing needed to be done this weekend from the office end of things.

Just like the post below, it is true - cleaning up does create new directions.

By the way - I heard a little suggestion about using Baroque music as a way to shut out the background noise during the weekly review. I loaded some onto a CD (you kids should look up what those are), along with several other instrumental albums including the iconic Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, and it was remarkably calming and useful during the weekly review. I recommend it!