I probably won't post an entry for each day's 15 minutes of work, but I figured I'd at least post for this first one. I started by getting all of the books onto the bookselves. There's a little rearranging that needs to happen because I have more books than shelve space at the moment. I'm also not happy with the arrangement of my non-fiction. (Fiction is easy, alpha by author, then in series order or alpha by title) Non fiction is harder, because of the difficulty of classification. (Does the Backstage Handbook go under Reference or Theater? How about Pocket Ref?) I also took everything that wasn't books off of the book shelves. Then I started on the tool shelves. There is a lot of sorting, paring down, and such to happen on the tool shelves. I've got 3 tool bags, 4 tool boxes, and several boxes of unsorted "stuff" that need to be organized. Those will be my primary goal for this week.

Also, 15 minutes isn't a lot of time. One of the challenges I'm seeing is that, since the office is so small, there is not room to do a lot of sorting in here. However, I don't want to leave a mess in the front room after I'm done working for the day. We'll see how that goes.

Major Project for January
My Goal for January is to organize my office. This consists of:

• Clean Out File Cabinets
• Organize Shelves
• Organize Hard Drives
• Organize Tools

This works out to a project a week. I'll post my methods and progress as I go. I'll also post before and after photos.

My minor goal for January is to track my discresionary spending. Over the last year we've gotten very good about keeping track of our finances, but now that we're tracking them well, we want to start shifting more of the money to savings and paying down debt. To accomplish this, we're going to track our cash usage in more detail to figure out where we can cut back (Starbuck's and McDonald's are both on that list.)

My Charity for this month is The Arthritis Foundation. How this works is, that at the end of the month, if I've reached my goal, I will donate $10 to this charity. If I fail to meet my goal, I donate that $10 to a charity of your chosing. Post your choices in comments. (Note: I will not donate to groups I find morally repugnant, but ones I disagree with for political or personal reasons are fair game. That's why I'm letting you chose.)

I'm going to set two goals each month, an larger goal that requires fixed blocks of time to complete, and a smaller goal that reqires some sort of simple tracking.
For the larger goal, I will set aside 15 minutes, 5 days a week to work. For that 15 minutes, I'll set a timer. When the timer goes off, I'm done for the day. This will prevent both burn-out, and getting involved in the project to the exclusion of my "regular" chores. One day each week, I'll set aside 2-3 hours to work on the project. This will give me time to finish larger aspects of the project. I'll take one day off per week completely. Agian, this is to prevent burn-out.
To meet the smaller goal, I'll keep a small notebook with me to record my progress, I'll post that information here as I go.

I need your help with this project. Please help me remain accountable. If I haven't posted in a few days, bug me about it. If you have suggestions for improvements, projects, etc, let me know. If you're participating too, let me know that as well.

I'll put up details for January's project. I'll set it to post at Midnight. Happy New Year.

I've got an idea for the new year. It's going to be ambitious, and I'm going to need your help. There are things I need to get better at in my life, and like any habit, good or bad, it takes time to make them, and time to break them. I'm going to set a challenge for myself each month. Post it here on the first, and then post my progress throughout the month. On the last day of the month, I'll do a summary. Did I reach my goal and will I stick with it in the future? I'll be asking for encouragement, and if you're willing and interested, perhaps you can participate along with me.

These are a few of my initial ideas:
Finance: Record all of my discretionary spending for the month. (Snacks, movies, dining out, etc.) Goal: reduce spending to a fixed amount per week.
Health: Record everything I eat for the month. Goal: Reduce (or eliminate) snacking.
Health: Record my exercize for a month (perhaps get a pedometer). Goal: Consistantly get a minimum 20 minutes of exercize 5 days a week.
Organization: Organize and pare down my collections (CDs, Photos, Files) Goal: reduce space needed.

I'm open to suggestions for what to work on (they don't all have to be big, important plans).

The final aspect of accountability for this is that each month, I will set aside a sum of money (probably $10-20) which, at the end of the month will go to a charity chosen by you, if I don't reach my goal, or one chosen by me if I do.