Man, October 2019. That was a weird time. My life had just become this massive pile of unfinished business and half-started projects. I was burnt out, totally spinning my wheels. I’d try to tackle the big stuff, like that massive presentation I needed to put together, but I’d end up staring at my screen for three hours, refreshing the same two news sites, and then deciding to alphabetize my spice rack instead. You know how it is. It was brutal.
I needed a clean break, a simple focus. I was scrolling around, looking for any stupid excuse to start fresh, and somehow I landed on this cheesy horoscope stuff. “Virgo Monthly Horoscope October 2019: What Should You Focus On Now?” Usually, I just laugh at that stuff, but this time I thought, “What the heck.” The article was all fluffy nonsense, talking about “clearing the air” and “grounding your routines.” But it gave me a simple idea: clear the small stuff first.
The Setup: October’s Small Wars
My big problem wasn’t the big things, it was the hundreds of little threads dangling everywhere. Like, I had three gym memberships I hadn’t used in months. I had subscriptions to software I’d forgotten I even signed up for. My email inbox? A disaster. It was noise, constant noise, and it was draining my power before I even got to the real work.
So, I decided October 2019 would be the month I just killed all the noise. I didn’t care about the big presentation yet. I didn’t care about starting that big side-hustle. I just cared about making my environment silent. I literally got a cheap whiteboard, hung it up, and wrote one big thing: Focus is Killing the Leaks.
I started with the finances, which was a nightmare. I printed out my bank statements for the last six months and just dumped them on the floor. My wife walked in and thought I’d lost it. She was like, “Why are you looking at a six-dollar charge from a coffee shop three months ago?” I told her, “It’s not about the six dollars. It’s about the automatic transaction that I didn’t control.”
This process took me nearly a week just to track down every recurring charge. It was like hunting tiny, annoying squirrels in a huge forest. I wrote down every single one I could find, and I didn’t stop until the list felt complete. I decided anything under twenty-five bucks a month had to be justified or killed.
- Killed: That music streaming service I forgot I had.
- Killed: The second 加速器 subscription because I forgot I had the first one.
- Killed: Three different newsletters that charged a small monthly fee. I just needed one.
- Kept (Justified): The decent coffee subscription. You can’t kill the good coffee. That’s mandatory for survival.
That initial week, I was grumpy. I was arguing with customer service reps, trying to remember old passwords, and getting mad at myself for being so sloppy. My focus felt worse, not better. I was doing all this stupid admin work instead of the real work. I seriously considered tossing the whole whiteboard out.
The Realization: The Quiet That Followed
I finally wrapped up all the financial killing by October 18th. I had saved maybe sixty bucks a month, which felt kind of small for all that effort. But then something happened. I started doing the same thing with my phone and my desk. I unsubscribed from maybe a hundred email lists. I deleted every app I hadn’t used in two weeks. I threw away three huge garbage bags of random papers and junk from my office corner that I’d been avoiding for years.
The total savings wasn’t the point anymore. The point was the space. My desk felt huge. My phone was quiet. When I opened my bank statement, it was clean. The anxiety, that background hum of “I’m wasting money” or “I need to check that thing,” just dropped out. It was shocking how much mental energy those tiny, little leaks had been sucking out of me.
I finally sat down to work on that massive presentation I’d been dreading. It was October 24th, and I had ten days left before the deadline. Usually, I’d panic and procrastinate. But this time, there was nothing else to do. There was no little thing pulling my attention away. No reminder notification popping up. I just sat down and typed. I finished the core of the presentation in three days, something I’d put off for two months.
It was a total game-changer, and it was all because a silly horoscope made me focus on cutting the little things instead of attacking the giant problem head-on. By taking care of the background noise in October 2019, I actually freed up the room for the real focus later on. It taught me that what you need to focus on isn’t the biggest task, but the thing that’s making you too tired to even look at the biggest task. That rough, messy project was the best thing I did that year, even if it only involved arguing with my own bank statement.
