Man, I gotta tell you, my life used to be a mess every time the Sun slid into Virgo. It wasn’t the stars making me a mess; it was me letting the wrong kind of focus take over. You know how it is. You get that itch to fix things, to polish them up, and then you just end up grinding everything to dust. That whole clean-up energy? Total trap sometimes.
I learned this the hard way last year. I was supposed to be chilling, maybe sorting out one or two things for the blog, but I somehow convinced myself the whole world depended on me finding a $3.18 error in my spreadsheet from 2021. Yeah, a spreadsheet. I locked myself in the office, skipped dinner with the family, and I hunted that missing change like it was buried treasure. I was zooming in on cells, comparing bank statements from three different banks, cross-referencing five different apps. It was insane. After 48 hours of pure, unadulterated focus, I was physically shaking. And the $3.18? Turns out it was a foreign transaction fee I’d already documented. I had a full-on meltdown, deleted the entire financial tracking system—hundreds of hours of work—and then just stared at the wall for four hours straight. My wife found me there, just sitting on the floor. I missed a massive client pitch the next day because I was basically incoherent.
That stupid, tiny disaster was the moment I realized this Virgo week thing wasn’t about what I should be doing; it was absolutely about what I needed to step away from. That was the start of this avoidance practice, and I’m going to walk you through how I set it up this time and how it saved my butt.
The Avoidance Blueprint: Killing the Urge
This year, I drew a line in the sand. I knew the familiar warning signs, those little devil whispers that lead to the $3.18 search party. I grabbed a stack of neon sticky notes and plastered the three big warnings right where I couldn’t miss them. I called it my “Anti-Perfection Practice.”
The Warning Signs I Committed to Avoiding:
- The Infinite Edit Loop (The 90% Fix)
- The Universal Flaw Finder (The Critical Scrutiny)
- The Project Pile-Up (The Simultaneous Tidy)
I started with the Infinite Edit Loop. Holy cow, this one used to kill me. I’d write an email, read it, change one word, read it again, change it back, delete the whole first paragraph, rewrite that, and on and on. Five minutes of writing turns into an hour of agonizing over commas. This week, I implemented the “Three-Read Rule.” I wrote the email, read it once for clarity, read it a second time for tone, and sent it on the third read. No matter what. I swear, the emails were probably a bit rougher, maybe a typo snuck in, but I was firing off communication like a madman. I cleared my inbox faster than ever. I had to physically slam the laptop shut after the third read just to stop my fingers from going back.
Next up was the Universal Flaw Finder. This is where the Virgo energy turns nasty, and I start picking apart everyone and everything. Usually, I’d be checking my kid’s homework for mistakes that haven’t even happened yet or sending passive-aggressive texts to my contractor about the grout in the bathroom. This time, when that critical voice started buzzing in my head—and trust me, it did, especially when my buddy showed me his new motorcycle that had a slightly scuffed handlebar tape—I stopped my mouth before the words got out. I had this little mental trick: every time I saw a flaw, I forced myself to list three things that were right about the situation instead. It was hard. I fought that instinct every single day. I told my buddy, “Man, the engine sounds great!” I didn’t mention the tape. It felt unnatural, like wearing shoes on the wrong feet, but I noticed people around me were just… happier. And I wasn’t spending my energy being a low-grade jerk.
The last one, and probably the biggest energy killer, was the Project Pile-Up. This is when I try to organize the entire house, my desktop files, my photo albums, and the retirement savings all in one Saturday. I dragged a massive whiteboard into the living room and chalked out one tiny zone for the week: The sock drawer. That was it. I got down on the floor, dumped all the socks out, matched them up, and folded them Marie Kondo style. Took 45 minutes. When I looked at the whiteboard, the urge was to erase “sock drawer” and write “garage” underneath. But I forced myself to just walk away and sit on the couch. That single, tiny win gave me a sense of order without paralyzing me. The rest of the house? Still a disaster. My desktop? Still a mess of files. But the socks were perfect. And I felt okay about it.
The Ugly Truth of Avoidance
The final thing I learned from all this practice: I accomplished less stuff, but I felt exponentially better. I mean, my week was technically less productive in the “fixing every detail” sense, but I didn’t lose three days of work over $3.18. I didn’t delete anything vital. I just focused the Virgo laser beam on one small, manageable target and let the rest of the garbage pile up. I realized the key warning sign for my Virgo week is effort without payoff. If I feel like I’m digging a hole just to fill it back up, I just turn around and walk in the other direction. It’s the only way to survive that energy burst without collapsing.
The ultimate avoidance rule? When you feel the need to perfect something, simplify it instead. It saved my week, my deadlines, and honestly, my sanity.
