Peace of Mind Organizing

Got a storage unit? An organizer can help

13 August 2013

I was recently interviewed for an article on the Sparefoot.com blog. (Sparefoot is a website that helps people find storage units.)

The article, Seven Reasons You Might Need a Professional Organizer, outlines under what circumstances a PO might be helpful to folks who have storage units.

I have to admit I’m not a big fan of storage units in general. They can be an expensive way to delay decisions. But they can also be very useful as a temporary solution to a problem.

This article does a nice job of reminding folks how a professional organizer can be helpful—both in a storage unit and in a home or office. I was pleased to be included!

Do you resist routines?

9 August 2013

I know that for a certain number of people, the word “routine” conjures up bad feelings. Used as an adjective, it can mean non-special, ordinary, even boring.

Think about it as a noun, though. Does the idea of having a routines—a group of habits you do one right after the other—seem boring or constraining? I hear that from people sometimes. But in my view, routines are the opposite. They’re almost magical because they make my life so much easier.

We all have routines, whether we know it or not. The example I always like to use is the shower. When you take a shower, you probably do the same things every time, in the same order. (Wash hair, wash body, was face, whatever.) I bet you’ve had the experience where you weren’t sure if you washed your hair, because you weren’t even conscious of doing it.

Wouldn’t it be great if other aspects of your life, those things you struggle with accomplishing on a daily basis, were that automatic? That is the power of a great routine.

Recently I blogged about my evening work routine, which keeps me on top of things and helps me jump right into my work in the morning. But I have lots of personal routines that help make my life run smoothly and help keep my house from looking like a disaster. If you’re new here, you may not realize that I’m a naturally messy person. My habits and routines keep me productive and they help me keep my house in order.

If you resist routines, I want to invite you to try to open up to them. And if you want help doing so, please consider signing up for my online workshop, Simplify Your Life with Habits + Routines which starts next week. It’s being offered by Simplify 101 and provides great guidance in the form of the written (and recorded) lessons and in personal interaction with me and other class members through the workshop’s online forums.

If you’d like your life to be a little easier, habits and routines can help. And if you’d like some help creating great habits and routines (and letting go of some less-than-great ones), this workshop might be just the ticket!

Worth repeating: Clear space, clear head

7 August 2013

I’m always amazed at what a big difference a little focused effort at decluttering, tidying, and organizing can make. I blogged about that last October.

Over the past week, I let my office get a little out of control. Getting ready to travel for a long weekend, I had stopped clearing my desk off each night. My early-morning pre-flight preparations made things worse. And when I got home from the trip on Monday afternoon, I worried about catching up with email, not cleaning things up.

By yesterday, I was actively avoiding my office. After a day away from home, I chose to work at my dining room table rather than take my laptop to my desk.

So this morning, the first thing I did when I took my computer down to my office was to set a timer and start cleaning it up. (Well, the first thing I did was take a couple of damning before pictures, see below.)

I spent 30 minutes on my desk and even got it dusted. I put stuff away, threw stuff away, looked things up that were written on random pieces of paper and really got things straight. I felt much, much better.

Then I focused on the floor of my office. After only 15 minutes of effort (and a couple of minutes vacuuming), things were back in shape.

The psychological benefit of that 45 minutes of work is amazing. Suddenly, I was eager to create a to-do list for the day and tackle it, rather than just feeling overwhelmed. I was even eager to go a little deeper into the straightening-process and do some filing and rethink some storage.

Yesterday, I had trouble thinking of a blog post. Today, I have three, because I found two written on the notepads I went through as I cleaned my desk. (So for once in my life, I may have a backlog!)

Since everybody loves before and after photos, I offer a couple of pairs.

Here’s my desk before I started cleaning it up.

And here it is after only 30 minutes of effort.

Here’s the floor of my office, looking ugly.

And here it is after 15 minutes of picking up, plus a couple of minutes of vacuuming.

If your desk is a mess and your mind feels cluttered, I strongly recommend taking just a few minutes to create some order. I think you’ll find it reaps huge dividends and will make you more productive.

A program for getting a handle on your email

5 August 2013

Several weeks ago, I subscribed to Revive Your Inbox a free, 21-day program to help you get a handle on your email.

I subscribed out of curiosity. I’m happy with the email system I use to get my inbox to zero every weekday. I found that the principles behind Revive Your Inbox are really sound. They boil down to:

• Move items you want to keep out of your inbox into a single folder and rely on the search mechanism to find what you want
• Take action to minimize the email you receive

Here’s how it works. Each day for 21 days you receive an email from Revive Your Inbox with a tip or an action to take to tame your inbox forever. The email itself captures just a taste of the info. Click a button for further information.

Each day has a focus. Everything’s clearly written with specific examples and actions to take for various types of email clients.

If you use gmail or Outlook, Revive Your Inbox will be very helpful. I use Apple’s Mail program which has fewer tools available.

Revive Your Inbox comes from Baydin, the people who created Boomerang and also The Email Game. There’s no advertising, though those products are recommended.

If you want help getting a handle on your inbox, this is definitely worth checking out!

Missouri sales tax holiday weekend

2 August 2013

Here in Missouri, there’s no state sales tax this weekend on certain back-to-school purchases. That includes:

• clothing (individual articles up to $100)
• school supplies (purchases up to $50)
• software (up to $350)
• computers (up to $3500)
• computer peripherals (up to $3500)

The holiday starts today and goes through Sunday. For more information and definitions of those categories, see the state of Missouri’s website.

Missourians are not the only folks exempt from sales tax this weekend. According to this article on DailyFinance.com, 11 other states are having sales-tax holidays this weekend. They are:

• Alabama
• Arkansas
• Florida
• Iowa
• Louisiana
• New Mexico
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Virginia

Seven other states will hold tax holiday weekends on a different weekend. This article on cultofmac.com offers a handy chart with links to each state’s information. (Each state has its own rules about what is exempt and what dollar limits apply.)

In five states (Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, Montana and Oregon), every day is a sales tax holiday—they don’t charge a state sales tax.

Worth repeating: Beauty vs. function

31 July 2013

I first published this post in September of 2009, and I stand behind my contention that functional trumps beautiful!

I live near a heavily trafficked thoroughfare in St. Louis that has a big median down the middle. A couple of years ago, volunteers from the neighborhood decided to beautify the street by planting large decorative plants in the median. It looks lovely.

Unfortunately, it’s unsafe. I regularly turn left from that street onto another. When I’m waiting to make that turn, the large plants on the median block my view of oncoming traffic. It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. I curse it on a regular basis.

It got me to thinking about beauty versus function, something that I encounter in organizing all the time. People want their spaces to look nice. To many people, looking nice is a big part of being organized. But in their pursuit of aesthetics, people sometimes ignore functionality.

Case in point: say you have a series of pretty binders. You decide to store a certain category of papers in one of the binders which rests on a high shelf with other pretty binders. They look lovely. But in order to file into these binders (or get anything out of them), you have to reach up, remove it from the shelf, open it, find the appropriate section, open the rings, and add (or remove) the papers. (Oh and let’s not get into the hassle of either punching holes in the paper or using a sheet protector…can you tell I’m not a big fan of filing into binders?)

Because it takes so many steps to put something away in that lovely binder, stored attractively with its mates, you don’t do it. You set the papers down into a pile of papers to be filed later. Later never comes. The pile grows, starts feeling overwhelming, and you have an unsightly pile of papers. And a filing chore ahead of you that you dread.

Those binders might look pretty, but if you’re not filing into them they’re not functional.

So what would I recommend instead? For papers, an easy-to-use filing system (I love the Freedom Filer) in an accessible filing cabinet or box.

Functional doesn’t have to be ugly, by any means. But when you’re designing a storage or organizing system, I urge you to pay as much, if not more, attention to how it works as you to do how it looks. That’s a key factor in creating a successful system.

Edited to add: A couple of months after I wrote this, the city of St. Louis repainted the lane lines at this intersection so that the left turn lane is farther left than it used to be. This allows people waiting to make a left turn to see oncoming traffic. They figured out a solution to have both beauty and function at that intersection. Bravo!

Small change, big impact

30 July 2013

My husband and I have lived in our home for 22 years. (Well, four of those 22 years we lived in New York City, so I guess it’s 18 years.)

One of the big frustrations in the house for all those years was the master-bedroom closet had sliding doors. These were oversize sliding doors—in other words, each one was more than half as wide as the closet.

The result? The middle of the closet was essentially unusable space. To make matters worse, when we first moved in, we had a closet company revamp the closet, which was a vast improvement from the rod and shelf that was there. But the new design divided the closet into thirds. So the middle third of the closet was a no-man’s land. That didn’t mean we didn’t store anything there, of course. It just meant we couldn’t easily access what we stored there.

Ever since we moved back to the house from New York twelve years ago, I’d been lobbying to remove those doors and replace them with a curtain. My husband resisted, because he didn’t want our cat going into the closet and leaving cat hair in there. That was a valid concern—Joe liked to scamper into that closet whenever possible.

When Joe passed away in February, I started my lobbying efforts again. About a week ago, we had our handyman remove the closet doors and install a curtain rod above the closet. In advance, I’d purchased these curtain panels from Bed Bath and Beyond.

This past weekend, I set to work decluttering the closet. Oh my goodness, what a difference it’s made to have access to the middle of the closet! It was very easy for me (and even my husband) to donate the clothes we didn’t even know were living there. We also donated some pillows that we’d stored there. And now we have some elbow room in that closet.

I wish I had more dramatic photos, but here are a couple of before and afters.

Lower part before:

Lower part after:

Upper part before:

Upper part after:

Removing those doors and replacing them with the curtains allowed us to:

• Declutter easily
• Store some of my husband’s short- and long-sleeved t-shirts that were in an overcrowded drawer (that’s what’s in those plastic bins)
• Move my jackets off the rod meant for long hanging items and into the middle section
• Make using the closet easy, rather than an exercise in frustration

It was a small, relatively easy shift to make. And it will remove a daily annoyance. How’s that for a payoff?