Is This You?

Read this checklist and see how many of the following questions are a "yes" for you.

Yes or no:

• Does clutter prevent you from living the life you want to live?
• Do you struggle to stay on top of the papers that come into your home, such as the mail, papers from your kids, papers from work, etc.?
• Do you have trouble being prompt or managing time?
• Do you have trouble managing money?
• If you are in charge of food preparation for your family, does the planning/shopping/preparing of all that food often feel like an overwhelming or monumental task, one that makes you weary just to think about it?
• Are problems with paper, money, time, or clutter preventing you from achieving your other goals in life?
• Do you spend a lot of time trying to find things that have been misplaced?
• Do you avoid having people over because of the mess in your home?
• Do you frequently miss important events or deadlines, whether because of something you lost or forgot, because of procrastination, because you underestimated how long it would take, or because you didn't properly break the task down into doable pieces?
• Do you have trouble calculating time, for example estimating how long it will take to perform a certain task or to get out of the house to an appointment?
• Do you have great ideas—but often have trouble seeing them through?
• Do you get "lost" for hours at a time in tasks you love doing, such as reading or writing or cooking or painting?
• Are you better at starting things than finishing them?
• Do people praise your "potential" more than your accomplishments?
• Do you feel overwhelmed by sounds/smells/busyness/conversation/etc. that are around you? For example, do you have trouble shopping in a store where the music is too loud?
• Do you begin each day determined that this is the day you'll finally get a handle on things?
• Do you jump into certain things too fully with too much enthusiasm and then burn out before they are done?
• Do you find yourself frequently apologizing for not returning calls/sending thank-you notes/giving gifts/etc. in a timely manner?
• Do you seem to spend more time than the average person "in your head", i.e., daydreaming, being creative, imagining things, self-talking, etc.? Similarly, have you often been called an "airhead" or a "space cadet", either now or when you were younger?
• Do you frequently realize that you can't remember what you were just in the middle of doing, for example, when you walk into a room you can't remember why you went in there, or in the middle of a shower you can't remember where you are in the shampoo/conditioner/soap process?
• Do the people in your life, especially a spouse or children, frequently indicate frustration with how poorly you manage life tasks such as organization, cleaning, or time management?
• Do friends or family members frequently tell you that you need more "self discipline"?
• At the end of the day, do you consistently lament all the things you didn't get done that day, things you really intended to do but didn't have time to get to?
• Do you look at other people who cope better/live better/are more organized/are more punctual and wonder how they do it?
• Is your life out of control?

Now that you've read these questions, you may already know where I'm going with this. If not, you may be in for a big surprise. In my next post, I'll tell you what all of these yeses might mean for you. In fact, what I have to tell you could change your life!

I'm not trying to be overly-dramatic—nor being mean by making you wait. My intention is to stir your interest and maybe even give you time to run this list of questions by other people you know before you find out what I'm up to. Come back next week to find out what this is all about.