DAY 11 (52 Days)

ONE SMALL STEP FOR OUR FILING CABINET, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR GTD! It's hard to put a value you on progress, so let's just say that having our new part-time employee is PRICELESS! Although it may not seem like a lot to the untrained eye this one organized drawer in a huge filing cabinet means A LOT to us. Running the ministry for the past 5 years with just 2 employees has meant that we race from event-to-event with no extra time to tend to the "small things" like sorting and organizing our map drawer. It has meant that only the most urgent items get attention while piles of tasks stack higher and higher week after week. In time, small things become large mountains that seem impossible to scale. But things are changing over here at GTD Headquarters. Mountains are moving. We have a brilliant new employee named Jessica and she is way overqualified to be just a map drawer organizer. But she has come in and humbled herself to undertake menial tasks that may not seem that big to the outside world, but mean the world to us. In fact, we weren't even prepared to bring on a new employee. With no training, no step-by-step game plan, no "map" of how to get from point A to point B, Jessica has come in and had to become a problem solver. We basically hand her a problem (a stack of maps 3 feet high) and ask her to solve it... with nothing more than a vague picture of what we want the solution to be ("We want to get rid of the outdated maps and keep the relevant maps in an organized system for easy future use. Ok, go!"). Well, she is just 20 hours into her new part-time job and she is already lightening the load for Laurie and I in a big way. To some it's just a drawer full of maps. To us, it's the beginning of a return to organizational excellence. And it feels real good! Great job Jessica! I know that you can learn Spanish and Chinese in about 30 minutes and name every country on a world map and spell them all correctly, but thanks for coming in and doing menial things in meaningful ways! It's making a bigger difference than you may ever know. We look forward to the next 6 weeks with you =).

Before picture: Piles to be organized

Before picture: More piles to be organized

---