I love the week before New Year’s. It is almost a lost week….Christmas is over, no one knows exactly what they, or anyone else for that matter, are doing. It is a great time to re-group, re-organize, get ready for the next year by tidying up the loose ends of the one you are barely still in.

It isn’t resolutions I begin making, but plans. How to do better at every area of my life. How to put more punch in it! Perhaps by freeing myself from some of the dis-organizational traps I have fallen prey to in the past.

I have found that either mint.com or quizzle.com are great for helping with finances and budgeting, and both are free!( Quizzle has the added bonus of giving you your credit score)

I have found a list-making tool called Teux Deux (teuxdeux.com)that really is visual and helpful to me. I haven’t found how to print it out yet, but it doesn’t require me to think much about the to-do’s because I can slide them around so easily…my feeling is, I either do them or I postpone them or they fall off the list because they didn’t matter….I don’t need all the A, B, C ratings, they just boggle my mind!

Anyway, I hope you have found some new things to start your year off in a functional, uncluttered way, so that you can maximize the time for fun! That’s what I am trying to do. Still three more days til New Years!

What happens to the year between Halloween and New years? It just all seems to slide together somehow. My to do list gets longer (I found a great free online place to keep one, by the way. Check out www.TeuxDeux.com, particularly if you are visual and right brained…so easy to move things, check them off, add new and add ’somedays’ that are not scheduled yet).
I seem to get lost in some kind of holiday fog that follows me wherever I go. Focusing is more difficult than ever. I go to the garage for the laundry and get lost in Christmas decoration thinking, go in the house with a box of ornaments and only remember in the morning I forgot to bring in the towels!