It is inconvenient and annoying that our past interferes with our present.

We want to change — or maybe we've already changed — and the results of our past decisions follow us around like Pigpen's dust cloud in the old Peanuts comics.

I'm talking about things like debt, clutter, old contracts that still have time on them, and things you said yes to but have not yet completed. It's the backlog of tasks, projects, and other obligations that you have accumulated.

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One of the hard parts about getting stuff done is figuring out the right stuff to do.

But once you've figured out the right stuff to do — or at least one thing in particular — the other hard part is doing it.

If you're struggling with the second part, here are some things that you might try.

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It's ironic that, as I work with adolescents to prepare them for future education and their eventual career, they may well be headed for a field or profession that doesn't even exist right now.

Most of what I do for a living was beyond my imagination when I was thirteen, whether because technology had not yet made it possible or simply because of my own ignorance of the existing possibilities.

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For a knitter, I have a real shortage of knit hats.

It's not just that I don't have as many hats as I would like (or would like to give as gifts). It's that there are so many hats I would like to make — fabulous, intricate patterns that I see on sites like Ravelry and bookmark for later.

I could be frustrated by my lack of hats and my lack of progress toward the hats I want. But I realized early on in my knitting career that the whole fun of the hobby was knowing that there were always beautiful things I could be making and still more beautiful things to make. It would never end, and I would never be finished.

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It's always funny to hear personal finance experts try to avoid using the word budget.

"It's a spending plan!" As if a budget isn't a spending plan.

We humans are easy to fool, and we like being fooled. It's worth it if we get the results we're looking for with respect to what we're trying to accomplish.

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