It's amazing how jobs pile up at this time of year - as the weather turns things you thought you had plenty of time to accomplish become more urgent. And there is always the fall chores that need doing to prepare for winter, if the weather cooperates.
My solution is to make lists of things that need doing - actual physical lists instead of the mental lists I usually work from. It helps to have more than one - I group things I can doing according to the weather, so basically I have an indoor and outdoor list.
The indoor list is probably the longest because it contains a lot of things that don't necessarily have to be done quickly, but as the weather changes. So any indoor painting that didn't happen during the summer, clean up and toss out projects, and the like get mixed in with more time sensitive projects like insulating suspected drafts and repair weatherstripping.
The outdoor list, is of course, the priority. The weather can be variable so there is a limited time frame as well as limited days of acceptable weather - you can't rake leaves on a windy day, they usually just blow somewhere else to be raked up. So the list gets divided into nice and not-so-nice days. And of course the days are also shorter - both in the absolute sense of available daylight hours and things like not being able to mow early in the day because of dew conditions.
So, it's best to not have a hard cast-in-stone agenda for the day but rather a bigger list of smaller jobs to pick from. It may not be as efficient as a do-it-in-order list, but it makes it much easier to check things off and to stay motivated.
Next for me, another cup of coffee.
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