My crazy Eames Lounge (knock-off) restoration! It's been stalled and in pieces for a month now. The wood is finished, but I got hung up when it was time to shop for upholstery and clean up the hardware.

"I will have something ordered by the end of the weekend."

"I will polish the chair base tonight."

. . . That was easy :)

Ugh. Painting my large living room ceiling, which, it turns out, will need two coats of paint!

@Scubachisteve and @cobalt blue - you should send me your pics when you get started and I'll post them! :) Rebecca@apartmenttherapy.com!

I have this bin of papers under my desk that I've carried around for the last five years and I just can't face. The other night my dinner plans fell through and it was too hot to go outside so I decided to tackle it. I took everything out and organized them into little piles - some of which was very easy to throw away, and some forgotten treasures I can now use - (including the envelope of cash I somehow lost in there) - at the end of the evening I just put the stuff I still didn't know what to do with back in the bin and called it a night. Still not totally dealt with, but it's a start! Thanks @faywolf!

THANK YOU FOR THIS. My #1 Daunting Task: Continuing the (seemingly) never-ending packing up of our apartment to move... More and more boxes get packed and yet the rooms don't look that much different! Starting/continuing...NOW.

I NEED to finally get off my ass and go through my photo files,pick, edit and get them properly printed, framed and shot for sale. Oh AND build a proper website/gallery/shop too. My husband gets mad at me saying I'm missing out for not doing this NOW. He's right.

Yep. And if, for some reason you can't bring yourself to begin, you need to call a professional to do it, or just rid of the whole darn thing. We're dealing with this right now. My husband has saved three apartments' worth of bills, paperwork, etc. He logically knows that he no longer needs much of this stuff anymore, but he's paralyzed at the thought of going through it. We've called an organizer to help him get over the inertia. I recently freecycled a framing project that had been sitting around for FOUR years. Um, yeah, clearly I didn't love it that much.

Sometimes tackling a big project makes you realize that you have too much of something. I just decided that ALL our bedding needed to be laundered, and in doing so, realized that we had more than we needed. Donation time!

The key is not thinking that everything needs to be done immediately, but that a project is a matter of steps that can be accomplished over time.

I don't find the ubiquitous 'just start' tip helpful at all, at all. Attempting to work on a project in fits & starts is paralyzing for me & only leads to added frustration. If I can't reserve a block of time ample to finish a project I simply CANNOT start it. Try & imagine what my project list looks like *sigh*

OT: Fay is adorable, has the voice of an angel & all that, but could someone please tell me what an 'actor-person' is? Nevermind 'songmaker'. Is this some new politically correct abomination? or...? This has bugged me since her first tip. (note: i have zero tolerance for pc terminology - my mailman is female - harumphhh!)

Yes! I would love to see something about how to get over that initial inertia though. My fiance has ADD and as a consequence he has a really hard time starting tasks. Sometimes in order to start something he just needs me to sit with him and tell him what to do first, or even simply give emotional support. A tip on ways to get started would be appreciated.

...pull out four suitcases from under bed -> open each suitcase and take out things we need for a trip in two weeks -> clean the cases we're going to take with us -> pack all winter clothes etc etc in the other cases -> clean under the bed -> put suitcases back before husband comes home and insists on helping (aka pointing out items I don't need). Is today the day?

Just what I needed to push me to do the dishes!

I just started cleaning off my iMac. Bought 2 new 3TB drives (however it is taking waaayyyy longer to upload stuff). But while that is doing its thing I have been using Automator to rename all my old photo files which I have saved. I would like to scan the old photos I have sitting in boxes in my office. My goal was to have it done by the summer but it turns out I don't have the right scanner and I cannot conscious spending all that money to send them out to be digitally scanned. So my Just Start is my iMac and I am feeling pretty good.

SkippingDaisies said "just rid of the whole darn thing" and some things that I can't start have been sitting around for quite literally, YEARS. That feels like an admission of a serious personality flaw!

With my upcoming move (yet again) I am really just tossing major amounts of stuff - project hopefuls that never got anywhere, clothes that went unloved and unworn, etc. Stuff I have looked at in many apartments over a long span of time. I refuse to torture myself with guilt about "getting to it" anymore -- I've learned a lesson the stuff had to offer while it sat and sat and now it has served at least some purpose and can be released. It sounds odd, but it is working for me right now.

This is always always always the best advice. Thanks for the reminder!

Me and my friend help eachother to start and finish difficult tasks by just doin' them together: I spend a day at her place helping out ("No, you can easily throw it out if you didn't need this the last three years") and then she spends a day at my place for support ("That's lovely, you SHOULD frame it! Continue while I buy a frame"). Even in an evening per person you can get so much done! And, one of the best things about this solution (and about this one-minute-advice) is to see that lots of people have the same pile of tasks waiting...

Thank you for the post. It couldn't have come at a better time. I was a day late in getting a client/friend a game plan for an eOrganizing project for her home office. I just sent her the plan and now I can move onto the other projects I've been putting off.

Fay *is* adorable...such a crush.

Ha ha! This is so TRUE! I just found a post I wrote in an online forum in 2005 about these second hand chairs I found, and how I was going to slipcover them. I put it off and put it off because it seemed so complicated, and...sewing, ugh! But I finally got fed up and started them last Thursday. Guess what? I got both sets of slipcovers done by Friday evening! All this time, it was just my brain telling me it wasn't easy enough. Okay, it wasn't easy, but I am no expert at sewing, and it wasn't actually that hard at all. It was no more difficult than setting a sleeve in a garment.

great idea. we procrastinated painting over the horrible sponge paint job in our old townhouse kitchen (mint, rose, gold sage green horror)...it will take soooooooooooooo long to go ot the store and buy paint, etc...turned out the previous owners had left white paint in the outside storage and it took 2 hours and made us feel 1000x better. just start.

This showed up on the day an organizer is coming...back....to continue to help me on projects. Today's work:

1) Set up a better...Ok...and ACTUAL system for dealing with paper, with clear parameters on what to keep and for how long AND where the heck to keep it.

2) Reconfigure, at least on paper, the rooms in my new apt. In preparation for which I'm getting off this computer and making a list of What Works and Epic Fail for each room to help us do what can be physically done today, and write down the plan/map for me when she's not here

BLUE-EYES - if you're still here, I can tell you that as an undiagnosed but probably ADD person, I find it hard to figure out WHERE to start. So I often write projects that are bugging me on slips of paper and put them in a "job jar" to pull out when I have a block of time to work. No matter what the project, even 15 minutes is enough to get more done than I initially thought. Most of the time, I'll do this in relays if I have a big block of time to spend. I work 15", and then NOT work 15". I read, make tea, get on FB or AT...and when the timer goes off, I go back to work for 15".

This way I don't get carried away, burn out, and then do nothing on anything for a long time

I just did the entire "January Cure" (minus framing a piece of art) in 1.5 days! I realized two things: 1). I'm getting old and really could use a nap and coffee to recover 2). I wish I had done this sooner!

Refinancing has become more difficult to do in my state and I wanted to make sure that the person doing the appraisal could see a clutter-free, organized and welcoming home. This can be a challenge with a toddler and hectic work schedules...which is where the 1.5 days comes in! My family and I recycled, donated, organized, cleaned, fixed all the small stuff that we had been meaning to take care of, added flowers and even cooked several meals so we could relax a bit!

The appraiser showed up this morning and it turns out that our state now mandates photos be taken of every room in the home in order to determine value before a refinance can go through! We had no idea! All I could think when the appraiser pulled out her camera was: "Thank God I bought all those flowers!"

Now to frame some art!

So timely! This past weekend, finally, after a year and a half of moving in, my living room was in good enough shape (plaster fixed on all walls and ceiling, paint stripped off wood window frames and baseboard and all areas newly repainted) to finally uncover and move my furniture more or less to their proper corners and walls. I can't believe I had everything parked in the center of the room for so long! So now now I've got the entire surface of my 5 foot long credenza covered with stacks of papers/bills/ /unopened mail/documents/junk I've got to go through. Now THAT is daunting.

What I'm trying to visualize is that feeling of satisfaction and relief that I know I'm gonna have when every last document is either shredded/recycled or filed away.

Fay is really cute, and I am always happy to see the video again. But new content is also a good thing, especially after December was all recycled.

It seems to be easy, just start. Right now my home is totally a mess, and everytime I want to start with a project I feel overwhelmed and I don't conclude anything. The boxes and various stuff are always there, waintg for me.

One thing I try to remember: NOTHING is unimportant. When I start to prioritize I start at the top of the list and it is just too much to take on. The things at the bottom of the list never get started. Look for a stale corner and start there; it could be a drawer or a countertop. With me, the first time I thought of this was a shelf full of dusty DVDs. Since they were out of the way and other things were more important, they'd been there for several years. Then one night I decided that even though they were "unimportant" they bothered me every single time I glanced at that shelf. Same thing, if you're having company and setting things up, leaving the "little" "easy" things to last can put you in a bind. NOTHING is unimportant. It will all be very important at the last minute ... I'm not guru. I don't follow my own rules half the time but when I remember them, everything is better!