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Do you ever have days… or weeks and months… when everything seems to be taking you one step backward?
You sit back and watch one thing in your life set in motion an unstoppable momentum of action - in the wrong direction.
You may notice that it happens quite regularly.
But why you may ask, while weeping, wailing and moaning.
Almost every time this happens, it can be traced back to one action not taken.
I had a particularly gruesome event happen just this morning and it was all over one small thing that I neglected to do and should have seen coming a mile away.
We have chickens. I wash the eggs in a big plastic bowl. I dump the water outside.
I washed the eggs and instead of carrying the bowl directly outside, I set it on top of the stairs to take the next time I went down (do you see what's coming next?)
It wouldn't be so bad if I actually took the bowl down, but I walked right by it when I did go downstairs.
My cats, unfortunately weren't so oblivious. They where playing, knocked something else over that shouldn't have been there, and you guessed it, the whole thing went cascading down my stairs.
I don't know about you, but having chicken crap water cascading down my basement stairs was not a shining moment for me.
To add insult to injury, I had a stack of magazines at the bottom of the stairs that I had painstakenly sorted through. It was sitting there because I had dumped them out of the plastic grocery box they were in that is supposed to be used for shopping. I hadn't put them away but needed the box to go shopping - hence the dumped magazines.
And one more thing. My husband, trying to be helpful, tells me he will mop it up, I can then wash the stairs. So he mops it up and proceeds to dry the stairs down with one of our bathroom towels. A burgundy bathroom towel that I can't even Javex. A guy thing?
Could this have been avoided?
Of course!
Had I merely taken the d#$% bowl of water down and dumped it as I should have, there would have been no situation.
Had I done my BOOST Circuit (my housework system) instead of "pecking" at my housework, there would have been nothing on top of the stairs to knock the bowl over with.
Had I finished putting the magazines away as I should have, they would not have been there to get ruined.
See what I mean?
Sometimes it's that one small thing that can make us or break us. And we usually know it when we do it, or not.
The good news is that I now have sparkling clean, clutter free stairs. Wouldn't it have been better to have just done that in the first place, minus the chicken water?
If you get that nagging voice in your head when you are doing something that has the potential to cause you problems, like I certainly did when I put the bowl there, listen to it and do it right the first time.
Watch for the next article in our series - Using Systems to Shine.
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