Challenged by Time Awareness

There are times when I get to the end of the day and wonder how it got away from me. I expected in retirement to have a better sense of time. In my job I had a challenging time with time as I would get wrapped up in projects and with people and I could no longer gauge what an eight-hour workday looked like. I started working on that once I knew I was going to retire as I had to find a way to delegate more so that my team was cross-trained. In addition, it had been decided by one of the owners that they would not expect the new HR person to have all of the same skill set as me so it would be better if he/she could focus only on HR. I started to only work eight hours per day to see how much fell by the wayside and if it was important enough to train someone on. It was. Fortunately, my immediate staff (customer service, shipping, administration, and an HR assistant) were willing and capable!

Today was one of the retirement days that simply got away from me. We were so intent on our projects that we lost all sense of time. We only have each other to delegate to at this point. Which translates into I delegate physical chores to Joe, and he delegates organizational, financial, and esthetic chores to me.

Joe and I began hanging our collection of art throughout the house after breakfast at around 9:00am. Next thing we knew it was 2:00pm and we still had three bedrooms and two bathrooms to finish.

After a quick lunch break, we finished the rest of the house around 4:00pm. I decided it was time to organize my new desk and credenza. Last year when we were packing up our house to move to Minnesota we had office supplies in three different boxes. Joe packed the supplies from his office, I packed most of the supplies from my office and then at the very end we had a box of office items that we used daily.

When I was thinking about how to organize all of the office supplies we have on hand, we have purchased enough over the years to run a company for a year, I felt overwhelmed. Then I saw these neat organizers that come in assorted sizes that can be used in bathrooms, garages, offices, and anywhere else you might want to organize. A few years back I watched a time management series that talked about everything having a home. I did it in my office and discovered it was a huge time saver. So, using the ‘everything has a home’ philosophy, I worked until 7:15 pm on organizing office supplies. At least my office supplies. I think Joe may have some tucked away in one of his unpacked boxes in his “man cave.”

My organized desk drawer

I have mentioned before that I like our neighborhood’s forest feel. I took photos from the front window (faces the street) and from the dining room which faces out of one side of the house.

Front window.

Dining Room window

One last photo for you to check out. I took a quick break from office supply organizing for a glass of water, maybe gone two minutes, and came back to this:

Alto takes over.