Ellen the Organizer [1] came over today and we had a good long gabble and figured out what to do next to get me back on track. We figured out where my bottlenecks are: Work, dishes and laundry.

Work: I work too much. I've been worried about money. And I'm overwhelmed and it's easier for me to just dive in and do something I'm good at (writing) than look around the house and give up. Which leads to...

Dishes: Not having the dishes done throughout the day means I have a hard time getting dinner prepped at night and breakfast prepped in the morning. So before I do anything in the morning, if the kitchen isn't clean enough to function I have to take care of that first, and then get breakfast assembled ready to cook, before I open up the house and sit down to read email. You have no idea how hard this is going to be for me.

Laundry: My main concern with laundry is to make sure John has clean clothes without him having to wash them when he comes home from work. His commute means he is away from home nearly 12 hours a day, poor thing, and I don't want him to have to stay up half the night doing laundry. The bottleneck is getting stuff folded and put away. He often has clean laundry, he just doesn't know it.

This dovetails with his long-established habits, which are to get dressed and undressed in our spare bedroom, which also becomes piled with his stuff and makes me crazy. So we're moving his clothes into the spare bedroom, which has plenty of empty drawers, and I'm going to start doing his clothes separately so he always knows which basket is his in case I don't get things put away promptly enough.

We decided this is plenty for now. I'll keep this thread updated as I work on these three things.