Better than a Life Coach

O.K. maybe that is an exaggeration, but I am loving my personal work motivator.









This little gadget helps me be more productive when doing tasks, especially the dreaded declutter duties. I just set it for a 5 or 10 minute countdown and it beeps when the time is up. I hit it twice more and it resets for the same amount of time. Why is this so great?

The first reason is that I can get so much done if I make it a contest of sorts. I do what I call the "5 minute Pick Up" I set my timer and rush around seeing how much I can clean one room in 5 minutes. When the timer beeps, it is time to move to the next room.

The second reason is this. Put me to a domestic task and I develop a different form of A.D.D. - I call it Domestic Attention Disorder or D.A.D. for short. I have a problem with procrastination and I also have a problem with digression. I put things off, but then when it is last minute pressure to do whatever it is, I get started and then get bogged down in the details.

Do you ever decide to clean out a desk drawer or closet and you lose yourself in the "shiny"? You know, a messy drawer and you start to pick, pick, pick through the clutter - A box of new pencils, KEEP. A post-it note pad, KEEP. Three wrinkled grundgy post-its that are no longer attached, TOSS. A mint out of its wrapper, HMMM-toss or eat?-TOSS. And then you see something shiny, maybe a button that was on a baby coat and you take a mental reunion moment that turns into more than a minute. Or the button belongs to a current coat so you decide to go sew it back on and you go into the laundry room to grab your sewing kit, but you see a shoe that goes in your son's closet so you put down the button and pick up the shoe to take to his room. You head to his room with the shoe, but then turn around to see if there is anything else that goes to his room. So you see a basket of clean clothes that you should fold first and you put down the shoe and start to fold the clothes, but decide they should go back in the dryer for a bit. You want to add a dryer sheet, but the box is empty, so you head to the kitchen to write "dryer sheets" on your grocery list and so you head to the kitchen and there isn't a pen next to the grocery list. So you go to get a pen, but the first two you try are dried up and don't write. You take the dead pens to the trash and notice a crayon mark on the trash can and put down the dead pens to go grab the kitchen cleanser ..... two hours later you have made 7 round trips through your house but still haven't finished the drawer and can't think of a thing you actually got done.

D.A.D. has struck once again.

Then I found this timer and I hang it around my neck and let it aurally zap me every five minutes to stay on task. So far, it has been really helpful. Maybe not as helpful as a life coach, but it is a lot cheaper! I got my Polder 898-95 Clock, Timer and Stopwatch at Amazon.com and it is the best $15.00 I have spent in a loooong time.