At the start of 2023, I grabbed my dusty planner – ya know, that one buried under coffee stains – and flipped to January. My desk looked like a paper tornado hit it. Pens everywhere, sticky notes plastered like wallpaper, half-empty water cups multiplying like rabbits. Typical Virgo chaos, but I wanted change. So I dumped everything into a cardboard box. Like, literally swept it all in with my arm. Felt weird seeing clean wood again.
Next, I hunted down three highlighters: pink for urgent stuff, yellow for maybe-later things, blue for personal growth crap. Every Sunday night, I’d sit with my crappy $2 planner and color-code tasks. Meetings? Pink. Learning Excel shortcuts? Blue. That report due Friday? Blinding pink. Took weeks to stop overloading each day like a burrito stuffed till it ripped.
Then came the email monster. My inbox had 4,732 unread messages. No joke. So I created three folders: NOW, LATER, and NEVER (mostly spam). Spent two whole lunch breaks archiving crap. Set a rule: check email only at 10am, 1pm, and 4pm. Phone notifications? Turned ’em all off except texts from my boss. Felt naked for a week without that constant buzzing in my pocket.
Biggest game-changer though? The “no” experiment. When Brenda from accounting asked me to organize the holiday potluck – I said nah. When my manager tossed me extra data analysis – I pointed at my pink-highlighted tasks and went “can this wait till Thursday?”. Felt like I’d kicked a puppy the first time, but Brenda found another sucker and my manager actually apologized.
By June, weird things happened. I left work at 5:15pm twice a week. My plants stopped dying because I remembered to water ’em. That certification course I’d put off for years? Finished it during blue-highlight time slots. Got a surprise 8% raise in October – boss said I was “weirdly more focused but less stressed.”
Now my planner’s beat-up but functional. Boxed up my desk again last week – took five minutes this time. Still suck at saying no sometimes, but now I’ve got yellow highlighter reminders screaming “PROTECT YOUR TIME YOU DUMB VIRGO” every Monday. Might frame that January “before” desk photo as a warning.
