I have never been quite sure why, but Fall has always felt like the beginning of the year to me. Perhaps its because I was born in September. Or maybe it has to do with the start of the new school year. My Jewish family and friends would say that it is the beginning of the new year, of course it feels that way. Whatever the cause, I always feel a strong psychological need to clean things up and start out fresh (the psychologist in me loves to understand the “why”).
I did some of that clean up physically on Saturday. Pressure cleaning the deck in my screened porch is a task that has waited long to be done. Getting the cat and dog hair out from under the deck and cleaning the algae off the boards was a large project and a satisfying one to complete. As I ate my breakfast on that porch this morning and watched the cats enjoy their critter searches, I had the satisfaction of the newly freshened environment.
Some of the free time in the last two weekends has been devoted to planting my fall vegetable garden. Living in Central Florida gives me benefit of three distinct planting seasons and I was extremely pleased to get the final tomato and pepper, broccoli and cabbage, lettuce and spinach starts into the ground and hydroponic towers. Our usually mild Fall weather should give us another harvest before needing to protect tender plants.
I have begun a few new projects at work, as well. I had delayed creating demo and training videos for our products until I could obtain a good microphone and create a “mini sound studio” to improve the quality of the recordings. Now that I have that equipment, I am excited about diving into the project. Now I just need to figure a way to sweep the cob webs from the brain and get moving on writing the scripts. Any of our customers who have ideas about which topics they would like to see covered first are welcome to give their input. Inspiration from outside is always helpful in getting the thought processes moving.
In fact, I will be doing a survey of our customers on electronic prescribing in the next couple of weeks. Getting input from our customers will guide our decisions about how to proceed. And I just gave our web programmer some tasks to do for a few changes on our web site. That too will provide us with some needed information.
Now I think I just need a couple of clean notebooks and a new pen so I can get started….
How do you motivate yourself to begin new projects? Is there a time of year or are there other external factors that move you in that direction? Talking about changes and input, what topics would you like to see us cover here in SOS-at-large? It has been one year since I started writing this blog and your thoughts and comments would be very welcome!
