A FUTURE LIST Can Lift the Pressure

Are you noticing every little thing that is wrong with your house?  Is that running list of frustrations draining your energy?  

If you tend to notice all the things that could be improved in your spaces, but don’t have the time, energy, budget, or the logistics of the stay-at-home order has put a big kink in any plans, then try this.

Create a FUTURE LIST.  

• Open to a blank sheet of paper in your journal, planner, or find a new notebook (where you can keep track of house projects).
• Label the page Future List.
• List all of the projects/to-dos that you have been noticing.  
• Add to the list when you notice more things that need fixing or improving.

If you are making this list and you start to feel some anxiety creep in, that is understandable.  It very well might be a long list!  Take a moment to notice how you are feeling and then remind yourself that this list is a future list.  You are not meant to deal with it NOW.  The purpose of the list is to open up the brain space that was taken up as you continually reminded yourself of the projects you need to do.

And creating the list might be enough for you.  That act allowed you to lift some of the frustration and shift out of noticing/improving/negative/overwhelmed mode.

If you find yourself still feeling restless or motivated to make changes, then you can try using the list to create some movement on those items.  You could star the projects on the list that need to be put on a 5-10 year plan.  Those are the big or “nice to have done” things, but really aren’t reasonable or necessary to work on right now.  Then you can highlight the items that can get attention in this next year.  From your 1 year list, you can pinpoint the projects that are reasonable to accomplish in 3 months, and from that list you can narrow it dow to the projects for this month and then this week.

A Future List is a helpful tool in allowing you to notice and dream about how you want your spaces to function and feel, while lightening up the pressure telling you it all needs to happen right now. And clearing some of the frustration and clogged brain-space too many projects can create, is something essential to our mental health during this stay-at-home time.

Sending you hope and light as you move through your days.