I make it no secret that I have OCD, or obsessive-compulsive disorder for those of you who really don’t know. I’m anal about how I fold my clothes, how I wash my clothes, how I put things in the food cupboard, how I hang my clothes in my closet, how clean toilet seats are, and how I eat my food. But when it comes to getting things done, I just can’t do it for the life of me.

Finding Time

Since I’ve come to Cleveland I’ve had a hard time seperating my “fun” time with my “get shit done” time. I attribute this to gradually finding a life. Alright, it wasn’t so gradual. The very first night I was in Cleveland, Ness took me to the Interbelt in Akron to meet Gay Boy Aaron. I assure you, that’s what he goes by and he’s not offended by this. I’m not used to all the drinking that I’ve been doing. I’m in no way saying that I drink in excess, because I don’t. I haven’t been drunk since I’ve been in Cleveland. But staying up late, drinking and dancing, makes me want to sleep more than I should. The good news: I don’t wake up with hangovers.

I never really had this kind of life before. Balancing and adjusting my personal and business life to my new found extrovert-ism has been difficult to say the least. When I was younger I didn’t have much of a personal life, but I had a business life. My business life being a student and an employee. My personal life was mostly hanging out with my friends from work after our shifts had ended. No problem there. Besides, I wasn’t starting out on my own, trying to build something from scratch. I just had to show up and do my job, which I was trained to do. I’ve never had any experience starting, running, and maintaining my own business.

The great news here: I’ve finally admitted that I’ve had a problem. The even better news: I have time to focus on my problem and try to solve it. Now the question is, where do I begin?

I’m an excellent student, and if you were to go through my old notebooks, you’d see how organized I can be if I set my mind to things and have time to work out a system. I was very anal about my notebooks. I take that back…I was extremely anal about my notebooks. In fact, I’d have two sets of notebooks; one for taking notes in class, the other to make a final copy of those notes. Yes, I spent extra time to re-copy my notes. Sometimes I’d even type up my notes after I had already copied them into my semi-final notebook. I admit, I took this too far, but I realized that if I stopped doing that, I’d freak out. (That’s the OCD part of me.)

My plan of action

Now that I’ve realized that I have a problem and I’ve admitted it, I’m ready to try and fix it. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if there’s a 12-step support group that I can go to. I’m not even sure if there are institutions that I can go to. In any case, even if there were, I wouldn’t go to support groups because I would forget. I forget a lot.

I’m going to take a few days and figure out how to organize my life. However, I’m open to suggestions. Anyone have any books, websites, etc.? I’ve been taking a look at Dave Seah’s Printable CEO stuff and a lot of it would work well for me, but I think I might have to modify it some bit to make it work really well.

I’m still developing my plan of action. I’ve been doing a lot of research on productivity to figure out what would best fit me and my lifestyle. Look for more posts relating to my unorganized life as I try to organize it.