Peace of Mind Organizing

Creating a functional (and beautiful) bulletin board

5 May 2014

Long before Pinterest, pinup boards have been used in houses everywhere to keep important information close at hand and top of mind. These bulletin boards can be really useful for information and for inspiration, but it’s really easy for them to get messy and full of outdated items. When that happens, they lose their utility (and beauty).

Last month, I was a guest on the Springpad Show and at the top of the interview, Katin Miller, who was interviewing me via Google Hangouts, commented on the fabric-covered bulletin board in my office (which was behind me in the shot) and the fact that it’s neat and attractive. In order to have a successful bulletin board, I think you need three things:

• The items should all be visible
• Outdated items should be removed regularly
• The arrangement of the items should be pleasing to the eye

In the May 2014 issue of Martha Stewart Living (on newsstands now through May 16) is an article on pinup boards, called Show and Tell. It features several different types of pinup boards—used for information or inspiration—and, true to Martha Stewart form, they’re beautiful.

I was particularly struck by this little front hall board, which they call a “get-out-the-door organizer.” What I love about it is they’ve used a little nook, paired it with a shallow wall-mounted table (how cool is that?) and it used it for a calendar, pretty photo, and information and mail that’s going out the door (tucked behind a rod mounted to the frame of the board). There are also cup hooks for keys. This is a terrific landing/launch pad for the home.

Here’s another that blew me away, because I had no idea that magnetic wallpaper existed. What will they think of next? I love the bold graphic on this wallpaper, which really transforms the space. And magnets will stick to it!

And there’s this magnetic chalkboard, perfect for a kitchen. It’s a DIY project—they even offer a free tutorial so you can learn how to create your own magnetic chalkboard.

There are more boards, and more details, in the May issue of the magazine. Martha Stewart Living tends to do everything a bit more beautiful than I do (I’m a function-over-form kind of gal), but this article really inspired me.

Photos by Lucas Allen. Courtesy of Martha Stewart Living. Copyright © 2014. Used with permission, of course.

Worth repeating: Don't give your mom clutter

2 May 2014

Mother’s Day is in a week (and my mother’s birthday is today!), so I’ve been thinking about gift giving again. If you give your mom an experience, service or something consumable, you don’t have to worry about cluttering up her home. Here’s a post from a couple of years ago that I think is worth repeating. (I’ve updated it a little.)

Mother’s Day is just around the corner. Since moms tend to want to hang on to gifts their children give them, I urge you to consider giving her something that won’t become clutter.

Way back in 2007, in the very first edition of my monthly newsletter, I wrote about clutter-free gifts. I think the info bears repeating!

Clutter-Free Gift Giving

So many of my clients develop attachments to inanimate objects. Those attachments make it really hard for the client to part with the objects. And what happens? Clutter happens. I’ve found that clients who tend to get sentimental about stuff find it particularly difficult to part with gifts that have been given them.

This has certainly changed the way I think about gift giving. I personally believe that once I’ve given a gift, the recipient is free to do whatever he or she wants with it. My feelings won’t be hurt if the gift is given away or even thrown away. But I don’t want to clutter up anybody’s life. So I try to give gifts that won’t add to clutter. And I encourage you to think in the same way about gift giving, particularly if anyone on your gift list has a problem with clutter.

Here are some of my favorite ideas for clutter-free giving:

Fresh flowers. A beautiful arrangement of cut flowers livens up any room. After the flowers have died, they can be tossed guilt-free. I try to avoid including a vase with the gift—I’ve seen many a home cluttered by florists’ vases! An easy website for ordering flowers is 1-800-flowers. I’ve also used Proflowers with success. Sometimes I’ll call a local florist in the recipient’s town, if I know of a good one.

Pampering. If you have a friend who would enjoy a little pampering, consider a gift certificate for spa services. Many cities and even towns have day spas. A massage or facial (even for men!) might be something your gift recipient wouldn’t do for him or herself. To find a spa in your gift recipient’s community, try Spafinder.

Services. Give someone the gift of time by offering to perform some needed services for him or her. You could offer a few hours of babysitting, offer to shovel snow, rake leaves, walk dogs or even clean house. If you’re a gardener, offer to do some landscaping. If you’re good with computers, offer to set up a wireless network or make their computer more secure. These gifts are clutter-free and really very special. You can also give a gift certificate for organizing services if you’re sure that the recipient would love to work with a professional organizer.

Clutter-free subscriptions. Giving a magazine subscription is a nice year-long gift, but many people let magazines pile up. Instead, consider giving a subscription to a services like Netflix or Blockbuster Total Access, which sends rental DVDs right to your recipient’s home. If your mom is at all tech-savvy, she can stream movies and TV from Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video
If your gift recipient likes to listen to the spoken word, a subscription to Audible might be just right.

Edibles. Give something perishable to eat and you know it won’t linger in your gift recipient’s home. You can make homemade goodies, or send a gift package from a place like Wolferman’s, which sells English muffins and specialty breads, or Harry & David for fruit or other editbles. In 2006 Food and Wine published a terrific article on giving edible gifts.

A side benefit to giving an intangible gift is that you don’t have to go out shopping! Let your fingers do the shopping online. And give yourself (and your gift recipient) the peace of mind of not adding clutter to a cluttered world.

Do you need some help getting active?

29 April 2014

We all know, intellectually, how important it is to be active, rather than sedentary. I did a quick Google search and found my way to the Johns Hopkins website, where I found these risk factors for cardiovascular disease and other conditions associated with inactivity:

• greater risk of developing high blood pressure

• greater likelihood of developing coronary heart disease

• anxiety and depression.

• possible increased risk of certain cancers.

Why, then, is so it so hard for us (and by us, I mean me) to take the time to exercise?

I’ve been very busy with clients and so going to the gym has fallen by the wayside in the last month or so. While my work at least usually has a physical component to it, it’s not enough. I bought a Fitbit Flex recently to monitor my steps, hoping I’d learn that I actually do get a lot of exercise without going to the gym. I was hoping for 10,000 steps a day and learned that I actually get between 6000 and 7000 on an average day. Not bad, but not a substitute for the gym!

But I have new hope!! I was absolutely thrilled when my friend and life coach, Shannon Wilkinson announced her new Change Artistry: Get Active program. It’s a group coaching program “for people who want to get more active (and have fun while doing it).”

This isn’t some sort of bootcamp. And it isn’t (just) about accountability. This is about shifting the way you feel about exercising. Shannon is amazingly skilled at helping you make unconscious shifts. I know this because she’s been helping me do that for years. From her website:

Being active and feeling fit comes from clearing out the unhelpful stuff inside, so you can do what works for you, your body, your lifestyle.

That sounds so perfect for me. I’m really excited.

The program consists of four weekly group coaching calls, starting May 15. There will be opportunities for individual coaching on your individual challenges during the calls.

If you’re like me and have trouble prioritizing exercise over other commitments even though you know it’s important to do so, this program could be a game changer.

The cost is $200 through Thursday. On Friday, May 2, it goes up to $250. (Still a bargain, in my opinion.)

Won’t you join me? Sign up here.

Take enjoyment from your surroundings

25 April 2014

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking my dog, Kirby, on a beautiful spring morning. He stopped to sniff some flowers and I glanced down. This is what I saw in my neighbor’s yard.

A patch of grass in the shape of a heart. I felt like I’d been sent a little message of love from Mother Nature.

It got me thinking about how easy it would have been to have missed that little day brightener. And how many great things in my surroundings I’m probably not noticing by staying in my head all the time, or simply being non-observant.

I also started thinking about how I can bring little, inexpensive things into my home to enjoy. Cut flowers in a vase. A pretty souvenir of a fun time. A lovely picture on a bulletin board.

I’m not talking about cluttering up my home. Just bringing in small delights. I’m not a gardener, but this holds true for my outdoor environment as well.

Thank you, Mother Nature, for that message of love. And for opening my eyes to helping me notice and enjoy my surroundings more.

National Drug Take-Back Day is this Saturday

22 April 2014

Almost everybody has old prescription drugs cluttering up their bathrooms and other spaces. The trouble is, it’s hard to dispose of them responsibly.

On Saturday, though, it’s easy. A couple of times a year, the Drug Enforcement Administration, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, sponsors the National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, where consumers can drop off their old medications for proper disposal.

That day is Saturday!

Click here to find a collection site near you.

The first Drug Take-Back Day took place in 2011. According to the event’s website, in that time 1700 tons of unneeded or expired medications have been collected and properly disposed of through this program. That’s amazing. Can you contribute to that number this weekend?

My advice to bloggers

15 April 2014

Yesterday at our monthly NAPO-St. Louis meeting, I was on a panel called Blogging for Your Organizing Business. The other panelists were blogger extraordinaire, Aby Garvey of simplify 101 and online marketing expert Ken Tucker of Changescape Web.

The format was Q&A from the audience and there were loads of great questions. Before going in, I pondered some of the points I hoped to make. So here’s my advice to organizers who blog or want to blog:

• Stick to your commitment. An infrequently or sporadically updated blog may not reflect well on you. I think we look more organized and reliable if we set a regular schedule and stick to it.

• Keep your eyes open for blog posts. There’s blog fodder everywhere. (I turned a visit to my dentist into a blog post a couple of weeks ago.) You just have to learn to recognize it.

• Take notes. Keep a list of blog post ideas so that you never have to stare down a blank screen thinking, “What am I going to blog about today.” (I keep a list in Springpad, so it’s with me wherever I go.

• Make it personal, but keep it professional. I want people to get to know me through my blog and to regard me as an organizing expert. So I write in the first person and am not afraid to reveal my own organizing challenges. However, I keep politics and religion out of my blog and I never trash talk anyone.

• Let it be easy. I’m lucky because I’m a writer. (I made my living as a freelance writer for ten years before starting Peace of Mind Organizing.) But I still sometimes make blog writing more difficult than it needs to be. If you write from your heart about things you care about, it shouldn’t have to be hard.

Aby and Ken added other excellent points, like be clear on why you’re blogging, know the purpose of each individual post, and make sure you’re using words in your posts that you want search engines to pay attention to.

I know that this blog has helped me grow my business. It’s allowed clients and prospective clients to get to know me, it’s helped me stay at the top of google searches, and it’s led to great opportunities, like being a member of the Rubbermaid Professional Organizer Squad . If you’re looking to blog, I say go for it. But if you make the commitment, please try to keep it.

Storing the food-storage containers

11 April 2014

Yesterday I had the opportunity to help a client declutter her somewhat vast and varied supply of food-storage containers. Different shapes, different sizes, different brands. We emptied all the containers and lids out of the cupboards and drawers and put them on the dining-room table. I set about sorting them so I could match up tops and bottoms so she could see what she had. There ended up being some tops without bottoms (and vice versa) and the client ended up letting go of a lot of containers, which was great.

While I was doing sorting the containers, I kept thinking how glad I am that my friend and colleague Aby Garvey convinced me to store my food-storage containers with the lid on. Because I match the lid and the bottom as soon as I take them out of the dishwasher (and there rarely more than three at a time in the dishwasher, so it’s easy), I never have to search for one or the other and I never have extra lids or extra containers.

Here’s a picture of my containers after Aby helped me with them:

This makes me happy.

Aby was part of my team yesterday, and after the session, she and I, being the organizing nerds that we are, talked for quite awhile about how people typically object to storing food containers with the lids on. The objection is that storing them that way will take up too much space. (That’s what I said when she suggested it to me. in fact.) But when you store them with the lids on, it makes them so much easier to use. I think it’s worth any sacrifice of space you have to make.

As Aby pointed out people have a tendency to prioritize maximizing space over accessibility, when it comes food-storage containers. But that can be a mistake. If you can’t easily match lids and bottoms, you might be tempted to go out and buy more containers. The collection expands. Loose lids can slip out of sight and become annoying. Accessibility vanishes.

If you’re frustrated by the way you store your food-storage containers, I urge you to pull them all out, put the lids on, and see if you can put them all back with the lids on. If you can’t, consider paring them down to a number you can store that way. (Aby wisely says that, unless you’re someone who freezes food, if you have a really large number of these containers, something might be going bad in the back of your fridge.)

If your situation is such that you need to nest your containers, I urge you to have a set of containers from the same maker, so that you can more easily match lids and bottoms. Personally, I love the Rubbermaid’s Easy Find Lids collection.