Try To Get A Handle On All That Clutter

Happy New Year. Today is a day of football, plates of cheese and crackers, visiting with good friends … and, did I mention football?

Today is also the day for making an imaginary list of good intentions that promise to change our lives for the better. Of course, rarely if ever, are these intentions kept. Old habits are hard to break. Still, with the new year comes the promise and intent of cleaning house, so to speak.

Heading my list is the proverbial diet - beginning Monday, of course. No sense starting too soon.

Directly following that good thought, comes the commitment to work on organization. This year I’ll work on clutter and getting things done.

Getting rid of clutter

Old magazines: Throw out garden magazines that date to the beginning of man. There is very little, if anything, in them that’s of any real value. Modern technology offers us up-to-date and better methods of plant care including disease and insect controls. The use of DDT and arsenic went out with black-and-white pictures.

Speaking of photos … dull, faded pictures of flowers and landscapes hardly compare to the lifelike glossies found in today’s magazines.

As of today, all magazines up to 1995 are gone. (Hey, this is a big move for me. Sometimes, baby steps are required.)

Stacks of papers: Two-foot-high stacks of papers line the office walls. They’ve become a collection of various club newsletters, horticultural periodicals, garden company product announcements and what have you. I’ll never live long enough to sift through all this stuff. They’re all going. No more stacks of paper.

As for incoming paper material, I know the modern saying is “handle the paperwork only once.” Again, I have to work my way into this modern way of thinking. I’ll give myself a week. What doesn’t find a permanent home or doesn’t get taken care of immediately, will have one week of grace. After that, it, too, gets chucked.

Lost items: I must find a place for everything and put everything back in its place.

If you’re anything like me, you wouldn’t want to calculate how much time is wasted looking for misplaced items. Tool caddies have been created for people like me. They come in all shapes and sizes. Hand-tool caddies can be belts that wrap around your waist or around buckets.

They can also be as simple as an apron with pockets. No more looking for misplaced tools.

To help in this project of quick finds, I also plan to paint all the handles of my garden tools with bright yellow paint.

Getting things done

In order to keep the day to day chores from piling up, which leads to procrastination and frustration, daily to-do lists will be marked on a calendar. The calendar must be the type with large spaces for each day.

I’ll begin each month by filling in daily, weekly and monthly chores.

I’ll indicate specific dates for fertilizing, seeding, transplanting, pruning, etc. Above all, plenty of time will be allotted for handling a given chore. I get myself into a mess of trouble with this one. I am notorious for biting off more then I can chew. What I think will take a half-hour may take three or more hours to complete.

There, I think that’s enough for one year. The list I made last year was eventually rolled up and used as fire kindling, but I do believe this list is achievable.

May all your New Year’s resolutions come to fruition. Happy New Year.