Sometimes This Process is Utter Boredom

 So I spent most of yesterday in Clean Email working on getting a handle on my inbox.  To say it was boring is an understatement.  However, two days ago, I had 103,000 emails littering my inbox.  I now have 16,000.  And with it that much lower than before, I could adjust the task on my to-do list so that I work on it a little each day rather than focus on the tedious project all at once.  Knowing that it's dropped that much makes it seem less daunting to manage, and I can break it down to manage in portions.  I'm setting myself a timer of an hour per day in the program, organizing, so that my day isn't eaten by getting it under control again.  It's the sort of tedious task where time just slips away.  I honestly expected myself to unsubscribe from all the author emails because they're the biggest portion of what got me to where I am.  Not that all of them spammed me, I'm down to ones that only sent around 30 or 40 emails over the course of a couple of years, which isn't all that bad though it could be better. There are just so many of them, probably because occasionally I'd go to the mass book funnel listings and all of them require a subscription.  I haven't done that in a long time and I have to remember not to do it again.  Also, I hate when people do that. Why not let me read your book first and decide if I like your work before forcing me to sign up for your mailing list? Note to self: a page full of free books looks enticing, but it's not worth all the email you'll drown in afterward.  

Anyway, the four I've kept of author newsletters all had something extra and interesting.  This one guy makes the majority of his email random and weird animal facts.  His sales pitch is only about a quarter of his newsletter and the rest is just these strange bits of information.  He could use some better formatting and tightening up of the newsletter. When I print to pdf it's a 16-page email, but the animal stuff is interesting.  I'm mostly saving it for later in case I find it useful.  Another chick writes dystopian and most of her newsletter emails have some sort of technology article with her insights on how this new current technology may affect the future.  She finds some neat free online gadgets, too. Again, it's useful information and catered to her book topic that makes her newsletter not all sales pitch or yammering I don't care about.  One woman is doing a series about tarot cards and writing, not sure how that's going to work, but I'm willing to read and find out because it's a unique idea.  And the final guy puts in random historical research relating to his current work. One newsletter had stuff on the history of serial killers, another on vampires.  Love the clean format of the last guy as well.  The included research makes the four of them stand out as more than just a 20-page sales pitch that half these emails are.  And they don't subscribe to the ideals that they must pile the email with giant cover images for their book, all their backlist, and all of their friend's books, because those newsletters just look busy and loud.  I mean I'm just one reader so my thoughts aren't really the authority, but it's something to think about when compiling your author newsletter.  It's something I'm thinking about when I someday need to write one.  A clean, easy-to-follow format, concise length, clean layouts, interesting information outside of the sales pitch, and a once-monthly posting that doesn't exceed that.  

I'm not done sorting as I said I'm still getting down through all the sane authors that didn't really spam my email, just got buried among the others.  I'm down to people who sent me 30 or fewer emails.  So I may find a couple more newsletters worth keeping.  I scan the top few emails for topics of interest before deciding if I just want to unsubscribe, trash, and create a rule to send any one-offs there. So far, only a handful have even made me investigate further and most of those turned out to be duds.   

On a bonus note, I'm finally done checking into Amazon for newsletter control.  I got my 250 subscriptions down to 22. I adjusted my follow list to just authors I'm actually interested in following so my Alexas will stop giving me notifications about authors I've never heard of, but that I apparently entered a contest for a million years ago.   I put it on my to-do list to unsubscribe from at least 5 every day and finally I can take the task off the to-do list altogether.  

I finally learned how to make a free slideshow yesterday. Had to do it on my phone using an app called plainly enough, Slideshow. I went back and not only turned those 28 photos of my office into a slideshow so it wasn't the post that never ends, but I took photos of my laundry room, which I'll admit makes it look a bit like a crowded mess.  Despite how it looks it's really well organized. The problem is I have limited space which got smaller when we had to start using the attic regularly.  The door cuts into my laundry room area and I can't have anything blocking it.  So everything got shoved further into the room.  At the same time, the amount of laundry I had on a weekly basis doubled, so I had to switch to larger sorter baskets and add more baskets for folded laundry to the table. The hanging baskets are for the children, the baskets on the table are for the couples, and the ones under are for my sons.  The rack with clothes has two days worth of laundry that's clean hanging there, I don't force the kids to get it sooner than the weekend unless I have so much I'm afraid it will pull down my rack.  The washer was actually set up for today's load of colors.  The stuff on the door will go into delicates bags because of narrow straps, plastic designs or just being delicate.  I do those right before I start the load in case I have to double up more than one to a bag.  Starting the load this morning will only take a minute or so with collecting the new dirty clothes from yesterday and adding those.  The pictures don't do that room justice, because the organization set up functions so well considering the limited space.  I'm actually really proud of my laundry room, despite how it might have appeared in pictures.  Besides laundry rooms are about functionality, not about looking pretty in pictures. 

Anyway, yesterday saw two members of my family down with some sort of bug, which sucked, but I still managed to do the maintenance on the cleaning projects I've gotten under control so I'm pretty happy about that.  The laundry is on schedule; the bedroom was cleaned; the office was maintained of any new daily clutter.  I am disappointed that I didn't move forward in the office, but I can't without help.  The top two totes in that massive stack are photos to be scanned, they get stored under the open side of my desk with the under the bed totes in front of the filing cabinet on top of them so they're all in here when I finally get around to actually scanning photos.  They're massively heavy totes and I have a bad back.  I can't move them or the fire safe without potentially hurting my back again and it's really expensive to get my back under control if I hurt it again.  With my husband sick, I can't move forward until he feels healthy enough to help again.  Once I get the office entirely back together and out of massive totes, I plan to work on a plan to get the photos scanned and out of my office.  I mean not quickly, but even if I scanned 10 photos a day, and either gave them to my kids or put them in mailers for people that might want them, eventually the totes would go away.  I mean, it doesn't sound like much, but 10 photos a day for a year is 3,650 photos.  I feel like that should eliminate at least one of the smaller totes.  I need a plan that makes scanning a tiny, quick part of my day, but also makes it a habit.  That said it doesn't need to go on the daily to-do list until the only totes left in or around my office are the ones containing extra cords, which are shoebox-size, or the ones containing photos.  They're part of the to-do next list that's in the back of my mind. I mean, obviously, we never actually run out of things to do. It's about creating a routine that allows us to work slowly at the things we need to do and allows time to do the things we want to do.  

Oh, so the other day when I was researching for the Expense template I came across a cool program called Zotero which keeps track of your research and creates a bibliography for you.  I haven't played around with it much, but it seems like it would be super useful to incorporate with the template.  The issue is that I don't quite know where or how.  Maybe on the links page of the main template.  I'm not sure how I want to use it, especially being an aspiring fiction writer, but just the idea of it, makes my inner nerd sigh with delight.

Personally, I have little to add to new developments. I spent the day organizing emails, trying to avoid public rooms.  My public rooms are trashed because one of my children had a tantrum about being asked to do something when they didn't want to do it.  Yes, I am aware they're supposed to be adults, but that is the rhythm of my life as of late.  If a task involves them, it's going to be a constant battle to get it done. This is why my bedroom brings me joy to clean, and the laundry is a fight I dread.  My cleaning and organizational plan has to work around them rather than through them because, specifically, one of them will tear it apart as fast as it occurs.  I'm currently pretty miserable in my own home so I try to stay in rooms that are just my space as much as possible.  And gaining back my office to make it my space again was a huge milestone for me.  I'm wondering if her tantrums will stand in the way of my Christmas decorating later this month.  I already lost out on Halloween decorating this year because of her mess.  If we lose out on Christmas too, I might consider moving out even if it is supposed to be my house.  This isn't how I want to live.  And I can't really talk about it to anyone because they're always quick with the easy solution without thinking about the consequences of their suggestion on people other than the people who are causing the problems.  The usual advice stresses me out more than the situation itself.  It's not helpful at all and it drips with judgment about my parenting skills.  

Anyway, that's all I've got to add for today.  Hopefully, tomorrow brings more prosperous tidings. 

It's Always Ups and Downs

 So on the house side of things I had a fairly positive day yesterday. I didn't achieve all my office goals, but I can happily say I got some of them.  I went off the reservation in my email and kept up with the other household chores belonging to me so maybe I broke even?

First, I forgot to mention yesterday when I was talking about the Expense template that needs a ton more research because I have a program to learn and I'm not an accountant that I already downloaded a bunch on both topics that I save into the file for quick access when I come back to it.  I'd like to at the very least get the tally page done soon because I want to tally all my research and craft-related books into there while I'm thinking that I want to do this.  I'd also like to look up how many years I subscribed to the different magazines I have in holders on my filing cabinets before I gave up because they never got read then look up how much I spent.  I expect my initial sales goal will not be small once I tally those things that I only bought because of the dream.  But it gives me a goal to work towards once I get to that part of writing.  It's not that I want to sink all my time into this now when it's not relevant to me. It's that I don't want to spend so much time with it later.  So maybe it's a matter of building a little here and a little there.  The templates are supposed to make my life easier once I have them built, covering all the aspects of writing, and I really do want to know if there's some way to make one for promotion and websites that's useful and can manage those.  

I have it in my head that it might be neat if I can manage it to build a site with sections and you'd have to have an account on the site to see most things.  At the end of each book would be a code that would unlock a new section of the site, therefore, avoiding spoilers but allowing the reader to enrich their experience in the world.  I don't know how to build that yet and I imagine it would be crazy expensive to have someone else build it, but it's on my wishlist to-do list once I finally start finishing things. I've read a lot about the push for Patreons. I'm wondering if there's a way to incorporate something like that without guilt.  If you had short stories for them, you'd eventually want them available for all the other readers too so they didn't miss part of the world. And the way many people crowdfund actually bothers me on a moral level because I feel like it encourages that sense of entitlement.  I don't want something for nothing, even if it seems like a logical income stream based on what I'm reading and watching.  So when I get there they'll be a lot of brainstorming about if I can use that and feel comfortable doing so, or if I'll just have to not do that one.  

My experience with email not just yesterday but over the last couple of months, trying to get back down to a manageable level, has me thinking a lot about newsletters.  I'm a sucker for 'want the extended ending? Sign up for my newsletter.'  And that would be fine if so many of these authors weren't downright criminal in the way they abuse the power of a newsletter. I noticed Unroll.Me had missed a bunch of these newsletters.  They were not all finding their way into the roll-up and I got it into my head it was because they weren't in the inbox, they were in the promotions tab.  I decided what I needed to do was mark them all unread and move them to the inbox, then unsubscribe from Unroll.Me, delete my account, sign up for a new one and then have it scan my inbox again.  So I did all this and it took hours moving more than 103,000 emails to my inbox and marking them unread and for the record, it didn't work.  UnrollMe picked up even less of the subscriptions than it had before it said I had like 10 on the new scan, instead of the hundreds I actually do have.  But now I had this inbox with 103,000 emails.  I couldn't leave it like that.  So I caved and subscribed to a paid service called Clean Email. It's costing me $29.95 a year for just one email but I had to do something.  I only intend to keep it until I get this under control.  But here's the interesting thing, it tells me how many emails each of these people had sent me.  Some of these authors had sent me 3,000 or more emails and I hadn't been subscribed to them for more than a few years.  That's not a newsletter, that's spam.  I don't know if it's the way you're supposed to do things or not, but if it is it's wrong.  I have a laundry list of issues with this.

One, I felt forced into subscribing because I wanted the ending of the book and that's not right.  Newsletters should always be a choice.  Two, you're not even just spamming me to promote your work, you're sending me an email every time you or any of your friends puts out a book and then some in between.  Half of them, you're teasing contests in the subject line where the body says to keep watching it's coming soon.  That's false advertising in my head.  A bunch had ridiculous subject lines where I think they're about something else besides more advertising and of course they aren't.  They just frankly spam and now I've had to spend money to get my inbox under control because of authors that won't stop spamming me.  I have no interest in reading their books anymore because I feel like they abused the trust of the newsletter.  I've already invested all the money I'm going to invest in them trying to get their spam out of my inbox.  Maybe that works for some readers, I don't know who, but maybe some people like it.  But for me as a reader, you've lost me.  

So like I said considering my own experience I've been thinking about Newsletters, I don't know if what's in my head is the right way, but I know when I have to write one this will be the way I do it, right or wrong.  First, there should be 12, exactly 12 in a year, one per month, so the reader remembers you're alive.  There should be no more or no less than that, so you aren't contributing to sending someone's email out of control.  The exception to this rule being some sort of email class that tells you in advance there are this many lessons and they'll come this often and at the completion of those lessons, the emails will stop.  First I'd pair the newsletter to a blog so that you can both keep it brief and have a place to be wordy.  I'd say the outline would go something like this.

Intro - Something short, only a couple of sentences.

Your Upcoming Releases.  Include the blurb and cover image for your stuff, but use a link for the excerpt that brings them to your blog if they want to read more.  Or maybe just include the excerpt, then click through to the sale page for the blurb.  Possibly a click back to the blog for a character interview or some other cool item.  You could even do a partial excerpt and a click-through to read the rest to maintain brevity.  Here's the thing you need to remember, most people are leading ridiculously busy lives.  You want to remind them that you're here and you have outstanding books, but you don't want to force them to read a novel in your email.  Give them chances to learn more when or if they have time, but if it's a book in their inbox that isn't actually a real book, they will not read it.  I've been a stay at home Mom the past decade, in most people's heads I have the most time of any adult on the planet and yet I managed to let my email build to over 103k and that's after deleting a few thousand a day for months on end,.  Also, I had more free time before I became a stay-at-home Mom, but that's a story for another day.  What might be cool here, is a click-through to something like wallpapers, Facebook covers, or forum avatars that you can only access from that newsletter link.  Not only is it potential free advertising for you if they use them, but it's also something cool to make the newsletter worth it.  Again, make it a link don't make it a massive email.

Your Upcoming Appearances - I would do this as something like I have some events this month, click here to check out my calendar if you'd like to catch up with me. I'd use this for both online and in-person events.

Cool Website and Social Media Updates - Unless this is short I'd again make it a link to check it out.  Something like got some cool new features or a revamp on the website/blog/Facebook page. Click here if you'd like to know more.  

Contests/Giveaways - If you're doing one, don't just tease it, tell them where and when to enter or find it.  Or give them a link to more information. I don't feel like this is necessary to have each month, but I feel like it's a jerk move to tease coming soon about contests instead of just hosting them.  

More Features - I'm not sure I'd call it that but like some sort of sign that from here on out it's a click-through if you want the rest so the people that aren't interested in these things can skip it.  Under this section, I'd put:

• Writing Updates, if people want to know about future projects you're working on that aren't ready to release yet or where you are with writing that book you're waiting on. 
• My Life, if you've done something interesting you'd like to share.  That neat little anecdote you think people might like.  You could put an interesting spin on this if you don't lead an interesting life, like making it a sort of feature where every month you write about someone you saw on the subway or at the grocery store, what you saw and then make it sort of a writing exercise on what you think their story is, inviting readers to interact with ideas.  If you did something like that, maybe you could write a short story at the end of every month using all the ideas or the best of the ideas that you can only get the download link to in the newsletter.  I mean, you obviously couldn't profit directly from it, but it might be a sort of fun interactive project with readers.  And again it's a sort of fun thing that encourages people to subscribe to the newsletter without forcing them to.  You'd probably have to look into the legalities of it, but still, it's an idea.  
• Writing Tips, like something you learned that month or just some trick of the trade you'd like to share with the aspiring writers in your midst.  
• Research Corner, I'd probably include the topic here, but you have to do research for your books and some people just eat up random research tidbits.  
• Reading Recommendations, If you're connecting this with a blog you could hook up all those friends with a sort of weekly feature where they just talk about their book and that would link up in the newsletter without making it too long.  At the bottom of your weekly posts, you can put a little section of cover images for your other friends you want to promote.  

My point is that you could have all these cool parts to your newsletter without making it long by connecting it with a blog or with posts that are only linked from the newsletter if you didn't want to share on a blog.  

And then at that point, I'd sign off, but I'd use one of those signatures that has the backlist links in the sign-off.  

Now I'm not sitting here pretending I know how you're supposed to write an author newsletter. I've never even published a book. What I am saying is that as a reader, that would be my ideal author newsletter.  That would be the one that never got on my nerves and I wouldn't mind staying subscribed to forever.  It's reminding me that the author I like exists and letting me know of his or her upcoming release and just giving me bookmarks for it I want to know more about other topics, it's short, sweet, and only comes once a month.  It even works in some neat freebies that are only for newsletter subscribers.  If I do find a way to make a scrivener template to manage newsletters and blogs, I'm so making this one of the sketches. I might alter it here and there based on actual research on the author newsletter, but I'm keeping that basic design and maintaining that more than a monthly newsletter email is freaking spam.

Anyway, I'm sort of forced to deal with my email again to be able to find the things I actually need in there because of my idiocy yesterday. It will probably take up a lot of my day.

But in the house, I kept up with the laundry, which was super weird this week because I didn't even have a full load of jeans.  I went searching even.  I ended up throwing in some darks just to fill the load.  The bedroom got cleaned its daily cleaning.  My son got transported to and from college. (I really need to find time to finish teaching him to drive.) But my office was the real pride and joy of the day.  I didn't get the picture totes put back, and I decided to wait on mopping until I schedule it in for a weekly thing, but it got swept and all the surfaces got cleaned. The cobwebs were cleared and every decoration new and old was dusted and given a home. My husband actually cleaned most of the decorations for me because I was worried about breaking some of them.  I figured instead of a description, I'd share pictures because I love my office. I put them into a slideshow because I took so many.  Hopefully you'll enjoy.

Getting Started

Hi, my name is Jenn and I'm helplessly disorganized.  It's been a lifetime constant and regularly gets in the way of pursuing my dreams.  It's not one aspect of my life, it's most aspects of my life and it's not my only issue, but it is a large one. I have no idea if this blog will be of interest to anyone else but me, but that's not really the point of it. It would be nice to find people with similar issues to share ideas with, but I guess I'm not about to hold my breath for that.

So I've actually been working on this process, of getting organized, for a few months now, but I thought it might be helpful to the process to create some form of accountability. Or maybe just to see the process written down in case I ever want to repeat it when I inevitably get all disorganized again. 

It's NaNoWriMo and I should be writing, but I've been having difficulty finding my voice even though I know what I want to write about. I think it's because I feel so unsteady. So at the beginning of 2020, before the world fell apart, I decided I was going to organize my entire house. I had lists and inventories for some rooms, but with one of my biggest problem areas, my office, I thought everything needs to be pulled out and put back in one thing at a time so it's organized and not just tucked away.  Except then the world fell apart and most of my office is in laundry baskets in the next room. Not only does this make it a little more difficult to do laundry, but it also makes my office difficult to use at all. Worse, a bunch of other crap has filled the space of the old stuff while it's been in baskets and boxes.  The entire room looks like one big catch-all.  I'm old school. I still prefer a desktop over a laptop because of the setup, the feel of the keys, and most of all the lack of a touchpad.  I was using a laptop on and off for years before I finally learned how to disable the touchpad, so my cursor stopped jumping all over my screen from my fat hands.  My husband upgraded my desktop and it down to the point that it just needs the software installed and was intended to be Linux because I'm not a huge fan of the new versions of Windows and that's been waiting for like a year.  There's just this debilitating stack of things I need to get done and it's not just in my head, it's visible in my house, which is made worse by the sheer number of people currently living with me.  Have you ever heard people talk about how, when your space is cluttered, your mind is cluttered?  It's so true because it's like I can't think clearly anymore because everything has passed my threshold for disorganization.  

So basically I started this blog to talk about the process of finding my way back to clear thinking and hopefully dream realization.  I know I'm a bit old to still be talking about dreams, but I feel like if you reach your forties and that dream is still there in the back of your mind, you're never going to be content with your life until you find some means of achieving it.  I want to write fiction novels and I used to dream of the mainstream publishers, seeing my ideas in a bookstore, but as I've grown older, I think more of my ideas lend themselves to indie publishing simply because I like to genre blend.  I like certain concepts and tropes in fiction you don't really see in those mainstream publishers.  I'm sure I have ideas that if I ever finish may fit nicely with a mainstream publisher and if that ever happens I'd love to chase that dream too, but right now my dreams are focused on finishing a series that I'd like to self-publish and hopefully when I do, earn enough to at least cover the costs of creating it. I don't have dreams of getting rich or making millions from the stories in my head.  My dreams are just seeing those stories on my bookshelf and maybe finding a few people that enjoy them as well. My only financial dreams associated with writing are not going in the hole to put my work out to the world, at least not permanently.  I feel like that's achievable.  

But that's more than just a process of Scrivener putting words on the page, it's a process of fixing a lifestyle gone off course to make those dreams achievable.  So I won't just be talking about writing, I'll be talking about cleaning and laundry and to-do lists. I need to clear the clutter around me and keep it cleared in order to keep my head cleared.  

Like I said, I started this process in September with a Scrivener template.  I didn't like the Basic Template for Fiction. There's not enough to it. I'm too prone to going down the rabbit hole searching for something I need that's not there.  So I went hunting for template downloads except a lot of them don't bother worrying about things like formatting in the notes and that drives me nuts. Some just cater to one genre. A lot of them do questions instead of categories and I don't like that style of character and setting sheets.  Most of them have just the basics in those categories that you're supposed to customize for each individual setting and I'd rather have sheets that are at least customized to the major types.  Like I don't want just a basic setting page that I have to customize myself every time I'm trying to plan a dimension, country, city, business, etc.  I want setting sheets already designed specifically for each of those things and then a basic setting sheet for the stuff that doesn't fit.  Because I want a setting sheet that reminds me to think about the stuff that I might not quickly consider, like history, climate, plant life, among other things.  And I don't want the setting sheets that aren't for bigger places to be bogged down with a ton of things that aren't relevant. The same goes with characters.  I feel like most of these templates were crap on the planning stages and specific to one type of story arc that I'd never learned.  I do intend to learn what a beat sheet is, but when you're looking at a novel template for one never having learned Save The Cat, it looks insane.  I realized to get the template I wanted; I needed to build the template I wanted, and in researching one thing, I kept finding others that needed to be a part of it.  So yeah, I'm still working on the template.  My goal is to at least get a draft done and then keep rewriting that draft as I go along. I still need draft one though. So far I know I'm temporarily happy with my series planning sketch.  And I like my lefthand organization system. It's the sketches I keep working on. I've got this great outside links section that takes me straight to the help I need when I'm writing and I've even got some visuals saved into the sketch for describing features.  I'm a huge fan of visuals.  I also have a ridiculous amount of icons that I really wish Scrivener had the capability of organizing into folders.

As I was going along I realized I wanted a quartet of templates instead of just one.  I like the organization system and I feel like even though that's not Scrivener's intended purpose, it would be a great place to keep track of financials that you need to get in the habit of keeping track of.  As far as my personal ones go I'm just keeping track of the cost of things I've bought for writing, not because I can write it off on taxes, but so I can set myself a sales goal when I actually do publish.  So like I bought Scrivener just for my dreams of writing and while I bought it a while ago and just paid for the upgrade, this is a new practice for me so I listed it as the current price of $49.  That was an expense I wouldn't have had if I didn't want to write, so when I publish I'd at this point at least like to earn $49 to reimburse that expense.  I just want to know that when I pursue my dream that doing so isn't going to become a financial sinkhole for my family. So I'm keeping track of things I never would have bought if I didn't have this dream and adding them up as my sales goal when I finally publish.  Besides an initial expense tally sheet, I'm creating a monthly expense section for when you actually do start writing to get me in the habit of keeping track of the things I'll need on taxes. I know you can write off a certain percentage of household bills like electricity and internet expenses so when I release my first book (in a few years when it's written and ready) I'm hoping having this template made will remind me to start keeping track of those things. The idea is that the Expense Tracker template will have me entirely prepared for tax season when I publish.  

The third template, besides the novel template and expense tracker, is an Idea Library Template to store all the loose untyped pages in boxes and files around my office and all the computer files tucked all over the place in multiple file types.  I want to put them all in one massive file that I can use as a playground when I need a break or when I'm looking for something new to work on, just go in there and play and bit until something takes off.  So when I do pull it out to be a project, one it's used all the same files as my novel template so it will transfer really easily. Two, a lot of it's already done for me and I've left it in the idea library until I felt excited about the idea again so I'm ready to work on it again.  The plan is to read through each idea, try to add one thing before you move on, or add until you're bored with this idea again. Or maybe steal the entire idea to incorporate into the current story you're working on and delete it from the library altogether.  It's all in one place so it's not a huge scavenger hunt, so I feel like once I finish this, it will work really well for keeping me organized.  It also gives me a place to throw all the new ideas in my head so I can focus on the one I want to be focused on.  Getting ideas is not my issue, focussing on one is my issue.  But building this and using it would clean up a lot of the file mess on my computers, and storage drives making me feel more organized.  Making them look less daunting. 

The final template is a Research Library for all the random that might be useful someday bookmarks and file downloads on my machine.  Again, it sorts those things into categories and makes them more manageable, it's already there to drag and drop if I need those topics in my current manuscript,.  It cleans up my bookmarks and file storage.  

So it's a template quartet, all in progress. I'm intending to share with two of my writing friends, honestly, they're my only writing friends at the moment, once I at least have a first draft to share.  I'm doing this because I'm terrible about doing things for myself.  If I make these intending to share them with other people, with the thought in my head that I'm doing it for those other people, I have more of a chance of completing these templates than if I'm making this for myself.  I'm terrible at doing things just for me, something I need to work on yes, but for right now I just have to be creative about finding my way around my failings as a person.

In other matters, I've started using a to-do list program called Todoist. I'm trying to get all my personal failings, cleaning to-dos, and writing to-dos in one place.  I've divided them by type into separate lists because I'm still using the free version, but it puts everything from each list onto the today tab.  

Step one was laundry. I read a writing email that said do a load of laundry every day because that way it doesn't fall behind or take up too much of your day. I don't really see the need for that exactly. I also feel like the writer probably doesn't sort their laundry and pity what their socks look like because I know how socks mixed in with jeans can end up looking.  So I sort my clothes into jeans, darks (dark grays, black, and sometimes navy blue), colors (depending on which I have more of I might put navy blue here too), whites (white, light grays, light khakis, and tans) and finally towels & bedding.  I put my schedule in order of need, what we run out of first, then what we get the most of in the laundry on down until I had a daily schedule.  Mondays are jeans, Tuesdays are darks, Wednesdays are colors, Thursdays are towels and bedding, Fridays are whites.  I then set a schedule of who strips their bed when, there are eight people in my house at the moment so if I have them all change their bedding the same week I'm going to be doing laundry all day Thursday into Friday trying to get it all done.  Half the house gets washed one week, the other half the other. Sometimes if I know there's a lot, and I get done with colors early on Wednesdays, I'll do a load ahead of time.  On the weekend, I hound my family to get their clean clothes out of my laundry room.  It's had mixed results.  

On the positive side, it's really nice to not do any laundry on the weekend.  Laundry doesn't feel as daunting and overwhelming anymore because other than towels and bedding, I normally only need to wash and dry one load per day.  I have a front load high capacity washer and a mini washer so that might be part of why I don't have to do two loads even with eight people.  Even so, it takes a lot less time to only concentrate on one type of item instead of all the laundry. Gathering and sorting every weekday before I get started only takes a few minutes instead of the hour-plus it used to take to find my way through laundry mountain people threw in my laundry room. It allowed me to come up with a method of avoiding laundry mountain by putting a pop-up laundry bin for people to drop clothes in at the entry of the laundry room.  When I'm done for the day I can start loading tomorrow's load to save time and then starting the load doesn't take as long.  I'm not a morning person. I move slower when I first wake up so this actually gets done a lot faster when I have it mostly ready the day before.  I keep up with laundry pretty well and haven't had a lot of I'm out of these, conversations since starting this method.

On the negative side, it's a massive battle to get the kids to get their clean clothes out of my laundry room on the weekends.  It's a battle to get the empty hangers back when I need them.  Sometimes my laundry baskets fill up before I'm finished doing laundry and again it's a fight to get them emptied and get them returned when I need them.  It's really hard getting used to leaving dirty clothes in the other laundry bins when it's not their day to be washed.  Sometimes my kids try to help except they don't understand my system, so I have to spend some morning resorting my bins the way they're supposed to be sorted. Sometimes the kids won't bring laundry out until I've finished the load for the day and then get upset when I tell them it's going to be a week before I wash something because I'm trying really hard to hold firm to this schedule.  I guess the biggest battle is getting my family to understand this is the way I'm doing things now and they need to get on board with that.  

Next, I moved to my bedroom, which had become sort of a catch-all for everything, much like my office.  I should probably explain that when I want to do something, a lot of times I'll go in there instead of to another room, so my bedroom is sort of treated like a public room.  Especially since at one point when we were first getting everyone situated in my house, my office was being used as a large closet and couldn't be used as an office.  So I started with writing a maintenance plan even knowing that the initial clean-up to perform those tasks was going to suck.  And yes, it really sucked.  Pulling out all the furniture to sweep up everything that had fallen behind and underneath, dusting the furniture, clearing all the surfaces to put them back the right way, it took a couple days, mostly because I have a bad back so I have to take a lot more breaks than an average healthy person so as not to injure my back worse than it already is.  But once I finished it, my bedroom makes me so happy.  I have a list - stock the mini-fridge, take out empty boxes to recycling, straighten the mini-fridge corner, straighten the nightstands, empty the ashtrays, (yes I'm a smoker) put laundry in the basket, pick up any large items on the floor, sweep as needed, check recycling and trash, change as needed and make the bed.  Now that I've done the cleaning, that entire list takes ten minutes or less to complete.  On Saturdays, I have dusting and mopping, which takes a little longer, maybe a half-hour tops, and monthly tasks like windows, curtains, walls, and ceiling which may expand the task to an hour.  But my bedroom only depends on my husband for my routine and he's on board with it, so it's clean and stays clean.  It makes me happy to be in there, it makes me happy that the entire task is finished in a few minutes.  

Most of the other rooms are chores. There are eight people in this house. Six of them are legal adults now, even if I call them kids. They are my kids, it's just that my three kids are all over 18 and one collected a spouse that's also over 18.  My office, my bedroom, the laundry, shopping, and any complicated cooking are my chores. If it comes in a box, I'm probably not making it because I don't actually like to cook and if they can't throw something in an oven and set a temperature and timer, I've completely failed as a mother.  I'm also supposed to be the one who's making sure everyone else is getting their chores done.  And before you think it sounds like a lot, one person has bathrooms, cans, and yardwork, another has dishes and cleaning the laundry room, one has cleaning the living room, and the last has cleaning the kitchen and pantry and taking out the trash.  The final adult in the house pays the bills, cleans his office, and fixes the broken stuff.  Everyone has their own bedrooms on top of that list.  Nobody has a massive list of things to do.  These lists become hard with errands, jobs, and the small children needing attention in the house, but they're designed not to be impossible to complete. 

So next on my to-do list is making detailed lists like I did for my bedroom for all the other rooms in the house.   That way no one can say they weren't told and hopefully I can start getting a handle on my house.  I'd like to decorate for Christmas soon. I can't do that with the house in the constant state it's in by people failing to properly do their chores.  Just because they are someone else's chores doesn't mean I'm not working on them when things occur, like a need to use the table or sit on the living room couch.  Did I mention every room in this house has been treated like a catchall of late and that's a lot of the reason why I've passed my threshold for disorganization?  

So that's where I'm at currently on the house. Assuming I keep up with this blog, which I don't have a good track record of, I'll keep you updated on progress.  I'm well aware they keep saying you can't have it all.  I've read it a million times. If you want to write, you should expect your house to get messy or to have to pawn off cleaning and cooking tasks to other people in the household. You should expect to miss out on things with family.  But my question is why?  What if it's just that those people didn't look long enough for the right system because they were driven to get to the words?  I can understand that mindset.  But there's also a mindset that says clean spaces make it easier to concentrate and think and while I'm a naturally disorganized person, I can really understand that too.  I think it's a matter of finding the right system. So I delay getting to really writing a bit so I can get my space clean and find a method of maintaining it that doesn't require a lot of time.  So I may not get a ton of time every day to indulge in my dream, but I maintain good relationships with my spouse, children, and grandchildren. I just need to find the proper balance.  Right now I'm admittedly not finding that balance.  I have zero boundaries with my family and they know it.  It doesn't matter what I'm doing, most of them expect me to stop and give them my undivided attention whenever they wish about whatever they wish and that needs to stop.  I need to carve out a set time where they actually agree to leave me alone and let me be.  I just haven't figured out how to do that yet.  It's on the agenda.  I could accomplish a lot in two silent hours a day if I could find them.  And don't give me get up earlier or stay up later because one I have both night owls and morning people living in the house, it's rare to find a time where everyone is asleep, and two, I have trigeminal neuralgia and a lack of sleep tends to cause flare-ups.  To give you an idea of what that means, have you ever had an abscessed tooth? Imagine that every tooth on one side of your mouth is an abscess. Now add a sinus infection and ear infection on top of that.  It's like having all of that at the same time on one side of your face.  If I get a flare-up it's hard to get anything at all done.  And while the meds help, sometimes when they're helping I feel dizzy, high, or nauseated, all of which are hard to concentrate through.  I have to be careful about how much sleep I skip out on or I'll find myself in worse shape than I already am with trying to get personal things done.  

Anyway, back to getting organized. It's not just my house, it's my systems.  They need to be uncluttered and easy to use, since trips down the rabbit hole are a regular activity for me that's not the case.  So with my bookmarks, I'm moving all the writing and research-related bookmarks into my writing and research templates.  I don't need a bookmark on Greek Mythology for regular usage of my computer. Zeus doesn't really impact my daily life.  I'm making sure all my recipe bookmarks are moved to my Pinterest board.   I'm checking to see if they even work anymore and the things I bookmarked for other people I'm emailing off to them and deleting.  I started by taking all my bookmarks mobile and otherwise and putting them into the other bookmarks folder then deleting the folders I currently have, the plan is to sort through ten bookmarks a day until that folder is empty.  I want my bookmarks bar to be quick and easy to use without a ton of scrolling or distractions.  So we'll see how that goes.

The second thing I've really been working on is email.  I have no idea how I get on so many mailing lists.  I get on average over 100 emails a day, most of them garbage I have no interest in reading.  I've been avoiding my email for years and I tend to miss important correspondence.  My attention has been brought back to it recently because Gmail has sent me messages about how I'm close to my storage limit and either I need to pay for more storage, clean out my email inbox, or stop getting my emails.  Only option two is an acceptable option, no matter how much I don't want to do it.  I use a service called Unroll.Me which has its benefits and its downfalls. 

The benefits: You can clean up your inbox so that it shows up in just one newsletter.  It figures out all your subscriptions and allows one-click unsubscribe.  And you decide what's in the roll-up and what isn't. It's also totally free. 

The downfalls: Apparently they track information in the roll-ups, I don't know to what extent but I read about it when Clean Email, a paid service, tried to get me to switch. Personally, I don't see it as a big deal that they know Old Navy spams me with ads.  They don't actually delete the emails put into the roll-up, they're simply moved out of your inbox into another folder in your email called Unroll Me that still has to be sorted out at some point.  

I like it because it fools me into believing there's not a lot in my inbox and the unsubscribe feature actually works.  It's more of a temporary tool for me while I work to get my Gmail back under control because, let's be honest, I have no interest in reading 1200 newsletters.  I don't even have the time in the day to do all that.  

So I have an email to-do list because again it's a daunting task.  I do the current month plus one month backlist in each of the top categories, inbox, social, and promotions.  First, I scan the headings for things I have no interest in reading and delete them.  Then I move stuff I want to keep in my email into labeled folders like account information and receipts.  That should just leave writing and research-related stuff for the most part.  I print those to PDF and save them into my research library to read later.  If there's anything that doesn't fall into those categories, that I will take the time to read right then, but very few inbox emails don't fall into one of those categories.  I repeat this process in the other two headings with the same constraints.  I've actually cleaned the Inbox tab to just this month. Social is usually empty because of Unroll Me and Promotions is on October 2020, I did a year's worth so far. Yay! I scan the headings in the trash for anything that shouldn't be there and the same with spam and empty both.  I check drafts and sent for anything that doesn't need to be there, downloading any attachments I'm worried I haven't saved elsewhere.  Then I check the category folders. I started with one per day clearing it out with the same process I used on the tabs. Now I check the ones I've already done and start with a new one.  If that category has more than a couple thousand emails, I break it into pieces and do it by months.  I've actually made really good progress. I went from 99 percent full to 79 percent full so the process is working. I spend about an hour working on emails, which is more than I want to be spending but eventually, it should pay off and become manageable.  When I'm done, I empty the trash and head to Amazon, where I learned I have a ridiculous amount of subscriptions.  To get to those, I go to my account and it's in one of the lists on the bottom left.  I unsubscribe from at least five before heading to Unroll.Me where I do the same.  I want the subscriptions gone, but I don't want to spend my whole day unsubscribing from them.  So again I break it up into small manageable portions and try to concentrate less on visible progress and more on being able to check off my daily box and be done with it knowing that I am making progress.  

I'm trying to get the rest of my space and files organized but these are really the only places I've made progress so far and this post is kind of long, so I'll try to check in tomorrow to let you know where I'm at with getting organized and my writing journey.