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In-Between Week Is the Perfect Time to Do Some Life Cleanup
There’s a weird energy to the last week of the year. Everything is slowed down, but it doesn’t always feel cozy or festive. The warm glow of late December is fading, not yet replaced by the harsh, goal-powered glare of early January.
Typically, this may be the time when you start turning your thoughts to what you can accomplish in the year ahead. But this year — when just being a functional human is already an impressive achievement, and anything more is downright Herculean — piling your plate with future to-dos might not seem that appealing.
Instead, try adopting Shani Silver’s strategy for “in-between week,” as she calls it, and give yourself the psychic relief of starting the year without any nagging holdovers. “During a rare span of downtime when my calendar looks as clear and sprawling as the uncharted arctic,” Silver writes, “I’d rather tackle solutions to real, current, small-scale problems that have nothing to do with my personal growth.”
That list of weird things around the house that need doing, the pile of “deal with it laters” — now is the perfect time to handle those things. There is a YouTube tutorial for every fix-it, creative, or organizational project that needs to happen, and no work or social plans around to impede your progress. Picking a discrete project that can be…

