Once, I was the landscaper for a cemetery in New Orleans. I wanted to plant some posies in the middle of it. Big John, the good old boy who ran the operation said, “Bubba, you can’t do that. Them purty little flowers will grow over the dead line. We’ll just have to dig ‘cm up.” The “dead line” was the delineation of where the landscaping (preplanning) ended and the graves (the object of the business) started.
Change “deadlines” to “finish lines.” Why attach a negative concept to the very things we want to get done? Everyone loves to cross the finish line. When I ran marathons, I wouldn’t have been so enthused about punishing my body, if I was reaching for a deadline. The more we make work into a game, the more we enjoy it. The more we enjoy it, the less likely we are to clutter it up.

Now that we’ve gotten some clarity on what we have to do and what we want to do, we can start to make some decisions. Chances are, we’ve been rolling along, letting life happen to us, instead of taking charge of our lives. We hate to make decisions. We’re afraid that when we commit to something that we’ll be wrong and pay some sort of dire consequences. As psychiatrists tell us, we are vague about exactly what the consequences will be. What we don’t take into account is that we are already paying far more serious consequences by inaction. We exhibit disorganized behaviors that sabotage our efforts to live fulfilled lives, professionally and personally. Before we can begin to make decisions, we need to take an inventory and decide what we want to decide.
Our daily decisions are not part of some psychic permanent record. Santa Claus or God is not keeping score, tallying whether we’ve been wrong or right. People change their minds all the time. Before we can change our minds, we have to make them up. No decision is irrevocable. No decision is perfect. We act as if our world would collapse if we took a stand and made a mistake. It won’t and we will. Chances are, we will make far more right decisions than wrong ones. We already have. But, in our beautiful, negative, self-limiting ways, we have chosen to remember the wrong ones.