Peace of Mind Organizing

My punctuality solution

11 July 2008

Being on time to client appointments has been a challenge for me. I blogged about this three months ago, at which time I vowed to make some changes to my morning routine, including implementing some checklists, so that I’d be on time instead of rushing like a mad woman in the morning.

I’m happy to say that, for the most part, my morning’s have become more calm and I’m arriving on time to clients’ homes. (Yesterday there was a road closure, which made me late, but I would have been on time!)

I did create some checklists, which have helped. I’ve been better about putting together the supplies I need for the next day’s client appointments the night before. And I have these great checklists so I can make sure I didn’t forget anything. And, of course, it helps that I have my new second home office which houses supplies that go to clients’ homes so I’m not searching for anything.

But the key to my punctuality success has been this: Each night, I figure out what time I need to leave in the morning to get to my client on time (and I pad that a little), then I work backwards and set times for when I need to leave to walk my dogs, when I need to go upstairs, when I need to get in the shower, and when I need to get up—always padding each step by about 15 minutes. That means I get up pretty darn early, but that’s okay, because I like to have plenty of time in the morning.

The end result is that I usually have 15 to 30 minutes to spare after I finish walking the dogs, which is a wonderful luxury and means my head and body aren’t speeding along as I walk out the door. It allows me to be more centered and more focused on my client.

It’s not rocket science and if I weren’t a morning person, it probably wouldn’t work. But it’s made a big difference in the quality of my mornings and in my ability to fulfill my clients’ expectations that I’ll be on time to their appointments!

My new home office space

7 July 2008

That stressful trip to IKEA was all about purchasing storage furniture for my new adjunct home office. I had an extra room in my house, adjacent to my home office, and I decided to create a second office out of it.

In the new office, I store supplies that I take into clients’ homes. (In my original office, everything is administrative and used in the office.) In addition, I fashioned the room into a virtual showroom of sorts, where I can use photos of what I’m done there as a way to help clients. I also store my yarn and knitting-related items in the new office—the yarn storage itself is a great example for my crafty clients. In addition, I give talks on organizing your knitting supplies, so I feel comfortable storing that material there.

I wish I had a before picture, but I didn’t take one. The room was originally a dining room. We have another dining room upstairs (our house was built as a two-family house), where we dine. I’ve been using the room to store stuff that goes to clients’ homes, but I didn’t have any storage furniture, so everything was in bins and boxes on the floor. That was both inefficient and unsightly.

Before I went to IKEA, my friend, Sally, helped me paint the room. (Sally also put the furniture together for me. What would I do without her?) We painted it in Restoration Hardware’s Silver Sage, to match my main home office. It’s a beautiful, peaceful color. We also painted the little hall between the two rooms, which really brought them together.

Here’s a photo of my cat, Joe, enjoying the IKEA boxes before they were unpacked, as well as the flattened seagrass baskets I bought at IKEA.

Once we put the furniture together, it was breeze to whip this room into shape. In the center of the room are the two Expedit bookcases I purchased from IKEA. I also bought 6-inch Capita legs for them, to bring the cases up to work-surface height.

Each has eight cubbies. One of the cases contains inventory of the Freedom Filer, Exit Strategies, and Time Timer products I sell, as well as “kits” of stuff I take to different types of appointments. It also has my Eyes of a Stranger needs assessment supplies. The other case (the far one in the first picture below), contains more random stuff, including a basket of organizing supplies I keep around to give to clients—stuff that other clients have passed on to me or that I’ve acquired in some other way. I also keep my catalogs there.

These cases hold supplies for clients

You an see the bank of Elfa drawers I use to store my yarn at the end of the Expedit shelves, in the little bay of the room.

In addition to the Expedit bookshelves, I also purchased an Effektiv cabinet, which has two lateral file drawers to hold empty hanging files as well as at least one pre-assembled Freedom Filer set. The frosted-glass-fronted cabinet stores my inventory of flattened canvas file boxes, a rotary paper cutter, and my knitting books, magazines and patterns.

Here’s another view:

I still need to replace the light fixture and move one of my cloth-covered bulletin boards (in fabric that complements the paint color) from my original home office into the adjunct one. It’ll go above the radiator.

The idea for the purchase and placement of the Expedit bookshelves came from my friend, Lara Thiel, who’s an interior designer. I know I never would have thought of it myself. And I love it!

Every day when I walk through this room to get to my office to work, I smile. There’s a place for everything. It appeals to my aesthetic sense. I’m actually enjoying putting things away. And I can’t tell you what an improvement it is over the mess it replaced. Ah, the joys of getting organized.

Creating a vision

30 June 2008

Whenever I start working with a client, we talk about the vision they have for the space. I’m not talking about specifics like furniture placement. I want to know what the client is hoping to experience in the room, the feeling that she wants to get from the space. I ask the client to close her eyes and really feel it.

Then, when we’re working on decluttering, sometimes I evoke that vision. If the client has elected to hang on to something that I don’t feel would contribute to the vision, I’ll ask: “Does keeping that item support your vision for this space?” Often that will lead to a change of heart about keeping the item. For most of my clients, letting go of a lot of stuff is really important to creating order in their homes.

I recently used this process on myself. On Friday, while I was waiting at the auto mechanic’s shop, I started a to-do list for the weekend. It was grim. Here’s that list verbatim:

Tidy and vacuum and dust upstairs
Clean kitchen floor
Sort out closets in the main office
Put away stuff into new furniture

Now, I do like sorting, but that list, short as it was, made me dread the weekend.

So I changed it to:

Vision: Bright, clean, clutter-free upstairs
Strategies:

• Put stuff away
• Vacuum
• Dust
• Wash kitchen and bathroom floors
• Vacuum stairs

Vision: Neat and organized home offices
Strategies:

• Break up and dispose of boxes
• Empty all other trash
• Get B. to help me move furniture
• Fill cubbies in Expedit
• Put stuff away in cabinet
• Clear out and reorganize cubbies in white bookshelf
• Move scanner to copier stand
• Finish shredding

(For background, we live in a two-family home. Our main living space is on the second floor, including the living room and kitchen. My offices, my husband’s pastry kitchen and the guest room are on the first floor.)

Somehow, making those tasks support a vision made them much more palatable. I didn’t get all the tasks done, but I came close. And I managed to do some knitting, watch the first disk of the wonderful 1999 TV series Freaks and Geeks and read a book this weekend.

I encourage you to give it a try. When you’re thinking about transforming a space in your home, whether it be through decluttering, organizing, or decorating, create a vision for the space and really feel the feelings within you that you want the space to evoke. Then, when you’re faced with decision, or just tasks, use your vision to guide you.

I hate breaking the chain!

27 June 2008

Yesterday was a big day because my awesome and awe-inspiring friend, Sally, came over to help me put together the IKEA furniture I purchased last week. (“Help me” being a euphemism for actually doing all the work.) It took all afternoon and once I clean up the mess and put everything away, I’ll post pictures.

In any case, it took a little longer than the time we had budgeted, so after Sally left, there was a scramble to get to a date we had at a friend’s house.

My point: I didn’t clear off my desk yesterday before ending the work day. The reason is that end of the work day didn’t involve my desk. But still, it was a shock to arrive at my desk this morning and see some clutter on it. The worse part is that it was very little clutter—it would have literally taken about 60 seconds or less to put everything away.

I’d been working since January 5 to create the habit of clearing my desk at the end of each day. I use the website Don’t Break the Chain to help me.

Now, I also broke the blog-writing chain yesterday but that doesn’t bother me as much. I’ve come to the realization that I really need to write my blog post in the morning, before walking my dogs, or it becomes a bit of a hardship. (I have a separate chain to motivate me to blog five days a week.)

The clean-desk chain was going along so well. This was just the third break since January 5. So here’s how my clean-desk chain looks so far for 2008:

Every red box is a day I cleared my desk at the end of the day.

I’m looking forward to building up the chain of red again. It’s incredibly motivating for me. If you have a habit you’d like to instill, I encourage you to try it!

Decisions

21 June 2008

Many of my clients have a difficult time making decisions. That’s not too surprising, since most of my clients are dealing with clutter issues and clutter is all about delayed decisions.

Sometimes they agonize over what seems like a clear choice to me. I think it boils down to confidence in their ability to make the right choice, as well as an understanding that the consequences (most often) aren’t dire. If they had more confidence about decision making and better perspective on the importance of the decision, they’d be more decisive.

I got a first-hand taste of this on my expedition to IKEA, the European home-furnishings store which has a plethora of attractive, low-cost, assemble-yourself furniture. Unfortunately, we don’t have an IKEA in St. Louis. The closest one is in Chicago (where they have two!). So I got up early and drove nearly five hours to IKEA. I knew one piece of furniture I wanted (actually, two of the same cubby bookshelf, Expedit) but I still had a storage problem I hadn’t solved. I was hoping for inspiration while shopping.

If only I could have taken someone along. My confidence in my home-decor decisions can falter. As I walked through IKEA—and if you’ve ever been there, you know it’s a giant maze you’re forced to walk through so you see everything on display—I experienced sensory overload. There were so many options and I had to keep my eye open for the right storage solution for my second home office. I found it agonizing.

I finally reached the home-office area and thought I’d found what I needed. Phew. But my stress levels spiked as I realized there were at least dozen more choices I had to make just for this storage solution. It didn’t help that there was a screaming child in the same area. And loud music over the PA system. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears as I made choices about what components I wanted, what finish, what legs, what drawer pulls…it made me want to tear my hair out.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s the Effektiv unit. I had room for only a single unit…mine basically looks like the unit on the left, except with two file drawers, rather than one file drawer and a pair of drawers:

Once I found Effektiv and made all those decisions—they carried the illusion of importance, because I couldn’t easily return the items if I chose poorly— I started to feel at peace.

At peace, but also exhausted and hungry. The big decisions were behind me and now I had to choose accessories. Luckily for me, my friend, Sally, was home and answering her phone on the first ring. She helped me decide what length legs I needed for my Expedit (I’m going to use it on its side, as a work surface) and affirmed some of my accessory decisions.

When I got to the very end of my shopping ordeal (by this time I felt like I was in the fourth circle of hell) I found IKEA was out of the very last item on my list, the frosted glass doors for the cabinet I was purchasing.

Suddenly I was faced with another set of decisions. Do I get the cabinet doors with the etched floral design or wood doors instead of glass? Or I do I get the shiny beige doors? Do I drive to the other Chicago IKEA to get the doors I prefer? Or do I order them and have them shipped? I don’t know what I would have done without Sally. Thanks to her wise counsel and willingness to call the online store (mysteriously, the IKEA staff couldn’t tell me what it would cost to ship the doors), I came to the sensible decision to head home and purchase the doors online and have them shipped.

I made many, many decisions yesterday, which is what my clients have to do whenever we have a decluttering session. (I sure hope our decluttering sessions are less stressful than a trip to IKEA!) I always give my clients props for all the effort behind those decisions. But after yesterday, my admire them even more.

Once I get my office set up, I’ll post about it. Can’t wait to show off the furniture!

The week of barely being home

19 June 2008

I’ve devoted an extraordinary amount of time this week to my vision. I spent all day Monday looking for my old glasses before my eye appointment (and I never found them). Between Monday and today, I’ve been to the eyeglass place three times. I got new glasses (progressive trifocals…I’m officially middle aged), as well as new prescription sunglasses. I’m on my second pair of regular glasses. I love Lenscrafters 30-day satisfaction guarantee. I think these will actually work out well. I must say, it’s nice to see well again!!

Anyway, I’ve barely been at home all week and tomorrow I’m making a quick trip to IKEA in the Chicago suburbs—4.5 hours from here—to buy some furnishings for my new second home office.

The main thing I’m after is two of these:

Expedit

Heaven knows I’ll buy a few accessories while I’m there as well.

I’ll blog with great enthusiasm about my office once it’s furnished and organized. I can’t imagine I won’t come up with some insights to share while I’m at IKEA, or at least while I’m spending 9 hours in the car tomorrow.

Since I hope to leave at 7 am tomorrow, I don’t expect I’ll post to my blog. But perhaps I will over the weekend.

You know it's time to focus on organizing...

16 June 2008

...when you can’t find stuff. The universe is putting me squarely in the shoes of my clients today. I’ve spend much of the day trying to find things. And so far, I’m having no luck!

Here’s what’s missing (and driving me nuts):

• My spare glasses
• My prescription sunglasses
• The kitchen scissors

These are all things that have designated places. And they’re not in their designated places, nor are anywhere else in the entire house, as far as I can tell.

This feels urgent today because I have an eye doctor appointment. I’m going to get the lenses replaced in my primary glasses, so I was hoping to wear the spare glasses while I’m without my primary glasses. And I need sunglasses, but am loathe to buy a new pair (at least I don’t want to buy new frames) when I already have some. But heck if I can find them. They’ve actually been missing since last fall…I keep waiting for them to surface.

My nerves are atingle as I get more and more irritated by this. While looking for old glasses to donate when I go to the eye doctor, I found some glasses through which I can still see well enough, so at least I won’t have to wait at the glasses place without being able to see well.

Since I’m looking in every nook and cranny of the house, I see much opportunity for organizing and decluttering—little messes that had become invisible. I’m hopeful I’ll find my missing items (I tried blaming Joe, our cat, but that didn’t seem right) soon and then I can focus on re-creating order around here!