Announcing the Organizing Guides!
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I’m going to be offering some products (and that the learning curve for the technology side of that process was steep). I’m delighted to announce that first set of products, my Organizing Guides, are now available!
These concise pdfs hone in on specific topics that come up for many of my clients. The topics covered are:
- Saying Goodbye to the Stuff That’s Holding You Back
- Creating Systems to Keep You Organized
- Organizing your Craft Space
- How to Fall in Love with Your Mail Carrier All Over Again
- ADD-friendly Strategies to Handle Money Stuff
- Choosing a Time-Management System
- Janine’s Favorite Organizing Products
Each guide is three to six pages long. They sell for $9 each. If you buy the complete set of seven, you pay for six. Everyone who buys an Organizing Guide gets a free bonus: my recommended reading list of organizing books.
I’m really excited to be able to offer this new and affordable way to tap in to my expertise. It’s been a great way to combine my skills as an organizer with my skills as a writer (I worked as a freelance writer for ten years before becoming an organizer.)
Keep your eye on the Products page of my website. Next month, I’ll be debuting my e-course on handling the mail and the month after that my brand-new six-month phone coaching program.
You can go to my Organizing Guides page to learn more about all seven guides (and buy them!).
Small irritations
Sometimes the tiniest things keep us from doing things we want to do or think we should be doing. If we can identify those things and modify them, we can get more done.
I was thinking about this as I contemplated my knitting. One of the projects I’m working on is this cool bag, the Garter Stripe Square Bag. (The pattern is in Japanese, but you can find it in English on Ravelry.)
This bag was created (and photographed) by LKolarik on Ravelry.
To make this bag, you knit 22 striped squares, seam them together in a particular way, sew the sides of the bag, create handles and throw the whole thing into the washing machine to felt it. The knitting part is easy, the construction perhaps a tiny bit complicated. But overall, it’s a very cool result for minimal effort. Good, mindless knitting.
I started knitting the striped squares on my favorite knitting needles, Harmony interchangeable circular needles from Knit Picks. I love the Harmony needles because they’re smooth and light and just feel great. (I’m not crazy about the way they look, but I’ve gotten past that.)
But as I researched this project more on Ravelry, I saw that other people had knit it on double-pointed needles (DPNs), picking up stitches on the side of finished squares to minimize the seaming. (If you’re not a knitter, the takeaway is that I thought I’d try different needles.)
So I bought some bamboo DPNs at my local yarn shop. They’re perfectly serviceable needles, but they don’t have the smooth finish of the Harmony. (I could have purchased Harmony DPNs, but they’re only available mail order and I didn’t want to wait.)
When I started to knit a square with these new needles, it was less pleasant. There was a certain drag to the needles, making the knitting more laborious. There was some friction in the combination of the wool and the bamboo that felt yucky. I would do just a couple of rows before putting the square down.
Eventually I decided to give up on the DPNs and go back to the Harmony needles. Now I’m buzzing along on my squares.
The lesson here? It took me awhile to figure out the reason I was resisting knitting that bag was that I hated the way the needles felt. They transformed the knitting experience from something enjoyable into something irritating.
This happens all the time in life. Maybe you’d be more inclined to put a certain item away if it were stored in a more accessible place. Maybe you’d handle your mail every day if you had a clear, designated space in which to do it. Maybe you’d put your laundry away promptly if the drawers weren’t so full of clothes.
Think about an order-related task you’re resisting. Is there some small change you could make that would make doing it easier? Some little irritation you can identify that you could remove or modify? One little change can make a big difference.
Are you an entrepreneur in St. Louis?
If you own your own business and you’d like to see it grow, I encourage you to join me at a special one-day workshop on September 13 called Growing Your Business with Confidence.
Elizabeth Hagen, a successful professional organizer who lives in Sioux Falls, S.D., is presenting information that will help entrepreneurs grow their business (regardless of what type of business it is). The workshop is cosponsored by the St. Louis chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers.
If you’re an organizer (or an aspiring one), you can join NAPO St. Louis that evening for our bimonthly meeting; Elizabeth will be the guest speaker.
The workshop (and chapter meeting) will be held at the Brentwood Community Center, 2505 S. Brentwood Blvd., from 9 to 4 on Monday, September 13. If you sign up on or before August 20, the fee is $97. After that, the fee goes up to $129.
I hope to see you there!
Fear of the unknown
I’ve had to learn a new skill set. And I didn’t make it easy on myself.
I decided to sell downloadable products of my own creation on my website. By the end of the month, I hope, I’ll have organizing guides and an e-course for sale in a new Products section of this website. (And I’ll be offering a new coaching program.)
Creating the content was not the hard part for me. I have the organizing knowledge, and I made my living as a freelance writer for ten years prior to becoming an organizer. The content was fine. (I did have to learn to make and edit videos for the e-course, but that was fun.) It was the technical side of selling stuff on my website that was making me tear my hair out.
To accomplish this e-commerce, I needed a shopping cart service and an autoresponder, which automatically sends out emails to people who sign up. And I needed the two to talk to each other.
We had both these for Declutter Happy Hour, but my DHH partner, Shannon Wilkinson, did all the technical work on that. I was clueless.
I could have hired someone to do it for me, but I wanted to learn this technical stuff, because I hope to develop future products. So I started learning about shopping carts and autoresponders. These sites seem to have their own language — I couldn’t even understand the features and benefits they were trying to sell me when I was selecting the services.
I ended up choosing the same services we used for DHH (E-junkie for the shopping cart and AWeber for the autoresponder). That way, I could ask Shannon for help. So I had to learn how to use each service and then I had to learn how to get them working together.
I found myself procrastinating like crazy on this. When I tried to work on it, I’d feel kind of dense, which I hate. I felt a little bit helpless, too. I couldn’t find the right understandable resources. So instead of diving in, I’d dip my toe in the water, find it really cold, and retreat.
The timing of my procrastination turned out to be fortuitious, because the aforementioned Shannon Wilkinson offered a telecourse with tech guru Wendy Cholbi called Love Your List all about using AWeber and getting past the negative feelings that using AWeber can sometimes bring up. (That class is over now, but it’s available as a home-study course.)
So the fog started to clear and I started to understand the AWeber part of the equation and get my questions answered. And I started to learn the E-junkie part and was able to add my products. Then I just had to tackle the E-junkie/AWeber integration. With Shannon’s help, I figured it out.
And, finally, we’re getting to the point of this long post. I discovered that once I understood what I was doing, I actually looked forward to doing the work. I looked forward to doing it, in fact. I actually sort of enjoyed this tech stuff. I felt empowered. And thrilled that I was making progress on getting these products up for sale. (Soon, soon.)
So why was I procrastinating so much? I think it was the fear of the unknown. I was afraid to find out what I didn’t know. Or afraid that I’d put all this work into it and then end up deciding I just couldn’t do it myself. Or afraid that once I learned how to do it, it would such a giant pain in the butt my life would be miserable.
Those are all pretty irrational fears, really. But they can be so powerful. And it’s all under the radar; I didn’t really realize that’s why I was procrastinating. If I had, I might have been able to rationalize them away. Or I might have booked an appointment with Shannon, because personal fear taming is the exact thing she does.
So what lessons have I learned? I hope that next time I’m procrastinating on something that makes me feel stupid or helpless that I’ll remember that once I get past that hump, I might even enjoy it. And that there’s little benefit to putting off the work needed to get past the hump.
I hope I’ll look back on this and remember how empowered I felt by learning something so foreign to me. And I’ll get on with the process of learning, rather than retreating in frustration.
Fear of the unknown. It’s powerful stuff. But getting past that fear is even more powerful.
Most of the links above are affiliate links, which means I get a cut of the sale if you click one of the links and end up purchasing something. I’m setting up an affiliate program for my new products. If you’re interested in being a part of it, please contact me.
Tiny time-saving tech tip
How’s that for alliteration?
If you’re on Twitter, you know the importance of URL shorteners. They’re websites that take a long website address (URL) and shorten them. In Twitter they’re important because messages are limited to 140 characters. But they’re also handy in emails, because sometimes long URLs take up more than one line, rendering them unclickable in some email programs.
There are lots of URL shorteners. The one most familiar is probably tinyurl.com.
I picked up a tip that’s saved me lots of time that I want to share today. My favorite URL shortener is bit.ly and here’s why. If I’m at a website I want to share, let’s say it’s my July 1 post on this blog:
http://www.peaceofmindorganizing.com/blog/great-resources-for-those-with-lifelong-disorganization
and I want to shorten it, all I have to do is put the letters “bit.ly/” in front of the address in the URL window. Like this:
bit.ly/http://www.peaceofmindorganizing.com/blog/great-resources-for-those-with-lifelong-disorganization
When I hit enter, I’m automatically taken to bit.ly’s website and a shortened URL is displayed. In this case, it’s
http://bit.ly/cIHDSy
One click to copy it and I’m done!
I suppose it’s possible that other URL shorteners do this, but I’ve been so satisfied with bit.ly that I haven’t tried. (And bit.ly itself is five characters shorter than tinyurl.com)
Great resources for those with lifelong disorganization
Today I start my two-year term as Marketing Director for the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization. So it seems fitting that I would devote a little space to raising awareness about this terrific group.
As you can see from the Credentials, I’ve received a great deal of education from the NSGCD. I received my CPO-CD® credential through the group’s rigorous, 20-month certification program; I’ve earned both their Level II specialist certificates and eight out of ten of their Level I certificates of study. And I continue to learn from them: I’ve taken over 90 teleclasses in the last five years and that number keeps growing.
It’s an amazing resource for professional organizers and related professionals to help their disorganized clients.
But NSGCD isn’t just about helping professional organizers and related professionals. It also offers services to the chronically disorganized public. Are you chronically disorganized? You might be if you meet these criteria:
- You have a past history of disorganization and your to get organized have failed
- Your disorganization has negative impact on your quality of life
- You have an expectation of remaining disorganized in the future
If that resonates with you, hop on over to the NSGCD’s website and check out their resources.
If you’re dealing with a lot of clutter, you can download a copy of the Clutter-Hoarding Scale to give you an idea of where you stand; download free fact sheets on a variety of issues related to disorganization; find a professional organizer who specializes in working with chronically disorganized clients.
I’m so proud to be a part of this group and honored to appointed to its board of directors. It has done so much for me personally and professionally and I’m delighted to give back.
Creating the impossible
Do you have a dream? Something you’re passionate about but you don’t think you can ever achieve? Michael Neill wants to help you achieve that goal next month.
Michael is a prominent life coach I admire. I loved his book, You Can Have What You Want: Proven Strategies for Inner and Outer Success
I admire Michael so much that I took a coaching workshop with him in New York a few years ago. It was terrific.
Michael is starting a 30-day program tomorrow called Creating the Impossible. From July 1 to 30, participants will work on achieving a goal they’ve set for the program — one that they think they have a less than 50-50 chance of being able to achieve.
The program includes a workbook, a 35-minute audio and daily audio messages from Michael, and group action days, where you work on your project and link to other group members via telebridge or chat room throughout the day. There’s also a forum for participants that Michael will actively participate in.
I’m intrigued. The program is $99 or free to members of Michael’s Solutions Cafe, a membership program that costs $179 a year. What strikes me as particularly effective is putting myself in the mindset that I can achieve the impossible in a month. Just thinking I can do it is a huge step in the right direction.
I’m thinking that less than $100 doesn’t seem a high price to pay for achieving the impossible.
Please note: Because I’m such a fan of Michael’s, I’m one of his affiliates. The links to him are affiliate links — if you click on them and purchase something, I get a commission.
