moving house as project management

Yesterday a friend was over and she saw my 20-point Thinks To Do list for the living room and wondered what it was. I explained it was the pre-move to-do list. Not the moving list, just the preparing-to-move list.

“…have you ever considered project management?” she wondered. :) (Later she said, “Seriously. All it lacked was timelines and assigned roles & responsibilities, and I could have put it in Microsoft Project.”)

Anyway, despite the project management levels of lists lying around I’m feeling entirely unsuccessful in getting anything done.

This is not an accurate reflection of reality, mind you. The reason my friend was visiting was because I had a giant pile of 3-5 year old clothes to give her, which reflected approximately a third of the infant-to-5y/o clothes I have washed, sorted and folded. I have two overflowing laundry baskets of the same sitting in the living room, waiting for me to figure out how to get them to the charity shops. As a whole, they represent a *significant* amount of the stuff from the shed. Mostly Christmas stuff, gardening stuff, and things that belong to this house are left in there.

I’ve actually cleared out everything except the two boxes of books written by me (augh) under Young Indiana’s bed, which was one of the to-do items on lists I haven’t even posted on a wall yet, because they constitute Upstairs Work and I’m dealing with Downstairs Work.

Downstairs, 70% of the CDs have gone off to libraries and used bookstores, along with a dozen or so graphic novels, which are turning out to be harder to cull than I imagined. A lot of them seem to fall under “I want to re-read this before I decide if I’m gonna ditch it.” (I did get rid of one of my SEVEN COMPLETE SETS of the original ElfQuest, by giving them to the same friend who took the clothes & who had never read ElfQuest! I’m going to give another set to my nephew, but they have to move too, so it’d just be mean to give it to them before they do.) The laundry room, save for the toy box and camera equipment, Has Been Sorted. The toys requires grandparental intervention, so we can ditch stuff without Young Indiana standing by, and the camera stuff…just requires doing it.

I’ve arranged with my friendly neighborhood bookstore to collect boxes appropriate for books. I did a rough count of the books, which, horrifyingly, added up to probably in the region of 12-1500 books. And that’s with me being ruthless for years. (A third of those are graphic novels and gaming material, which is not precisely spoken in our defense, since it means there are still 800-1000 or so BOOKS. 200 of which are copies of BOOKS I WROTE. #dies)

I…can’t think of anything else I’ve actually accomplished, at this point. And all of the above doesn’t seem like much, because I’m Not Writing. I’m like clockwork. I worked really hard the first 3 months of the year and have had about 6 weeks off now and, as generally happens, I am now beginning to feel that I am getting NOTHING DONE AT ALL because I’m not writing. So I may go out in the crappy weather and write something, anything, tonight, just to be working on something, and maybe tomorrow I’ll feel like the moving work I’ve done is some kind of accomplishment.

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