The floor was littered with huge piles of bark from my live edge charcuterie boards. My tools no longer hung in their homes on my tidy pegboard on the wall, but were instead scattered around the shop. Piles of extra cardboard boxes were stacked on my workbench, on my CNC table and every other flat surface I could find – even not-so-flat sur­faces like my lawnmower seat.

In a word, my shop was in disarray.

I headed out there in early January ready and eager to get started on orders for 2025. But when I opened the door and took one look around at the disaster before me, I made an abrupt turn and retreated back into the house for another cup of coffee instead.

Just the thought of cleaning up that mess gave me anxiety.

But I knew I couldn’t just hide from the problem forever, no matter how many cups of coffee I poured, so I decided that instead of tack­ling it all at once I would break it down into more manageable tasks – essentially the same strategy I use on my two daughters to get them to clean their bedrooms.

I’d start by sweeping the floor. Simple enough, right? Not only would it be an easy task checked off my to-do list, the rest of the clean­ing would be easier when I wasn’t tripping over old bark. I swept it all up into several piles and into a box to be burned later.

Then I got ambitious and decided to scrounge up every piece of unusable scrap of wood so it could be burned as well. This filled a cou­ple more boxes, and just like that another job was crossed off my list.

I burned the contents of the boxes and felt a surge of dopamine. I was getting things done!

Looking around the shop for more easy tasks, I found the box of metal wall racks I had bought almost a year earlier to get my wood off the workshop floor. I mounted them within an hour and had them loaded with wood soon after.

But then my productivity waned and I started to get sidetracked. I decided I needed to do a complete reorganization. My shop was never really well laid out, so with the wood out of the way I decided my next job should be to finally organize my tools and workbenches into a bet­ter “flow.”

But there was one problem – an antique bookshelf with three slid­ing glass doors was in the way of that flow, and it had been ever since I moved it into the space to refinish last March. So tidying was paused again while I spent nearly a week staining and refinishing the cabinet.

And now as I sit at my computer typing these words, I know I need to get the rest of the tidying done… but then again, I really should wait until the cabinet is out of the shop and in its final home in our kitchen.

I wouldn’t want to risk denting the new finish or getting it covered in dust, right? And the earliest I could get anyone to help me move it is a few weeks from now.

Oh well, I guess the shop will just have to remain a mess for another few days.

Now, where’s my coffee?