Peace of Mind Organizing

Eye candy from Office Candy

28 March 2012

One of the exhibitors at last week’s NAPO conference was Office Candy, a company that distributes cut and fun office supplies. What’s not to love about that?

Office Candy is owned by two professional organizers, Laurie Noel Meek and Beth Shlater. These women love beautiful stuff and since they had a hard time finding pretty products for their clients, they decided to create a shop. I love folks who take matters into their own hands!

The result is one-stop shopping for cute things, like these Lilly Pulitzer highlighters (on sale this week).

I think they exemplify Office Candy’s tag line: Just because it’s practical, doesn’t mean it can’t be cute!

New York Times recognizes our industry

23 March 2012

I’m at the national conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers in Baltimore. I am enjoying myself so much, sinking in the knowledge and reveling in the camaraderie of my colleagues and friends. Bliss.

The New York Times took notice of our conference, too. Angela Wallace, NAPO national president was interviewed this week and the Q&A, entitled Keeping the Clutter Busters in Line with her appeared in yesterday’s edition. Here’s my favorite quote from the story:

In a secular culture, clutter may be the closest thing we have to original sin. Following this metaphor, the organizer is both clergy and personal savior.

The story is not only great publicity for NAPO and the professional organizing industry, but it provides a nice insight into how we work. If you’re not a professional organizer and are curious about us, give it a read!

ETA: Four days after the New York Times article, the Wall Street Journal published an article on digital hoarding. The article quoted my friends Kathy Trezise, president of the Institute for Challenging Disorganization and ICD’s past president, Kit Anderson.

A very special opportunity

19 March 2012

I’m really excited to be offering a special in-person workshop with my friend and Declutter Happy Hour partner, the fabulous life coach Shannon Wilkinson.

If you crave…

a simpler life,

lasting ease,

the freedom to do what you really want,

please join us for the three-hour workshop:

Create Freedom and Ease with Habits and Routines

With great routines in place, you get stuff done, often without even thinking about it. When you take care of things automatically, you’re free to focus your time and attention on what really matters.

Imagine if you could stop nagging yourself, beating yourself up for lacking willpower or trying to remember tasks that keep falling through the cracks.

It’s all really possible.

During the Create Freedom and Ease with Habits and Routines workshop, you’ll learn the three keys of habit creation and how to transform habits into simple, automatic routines. Plus you’ll easily let go of any resistance you might have (resistance you might not even know about) and uncover inspiration so you can create habits and routines that stick.

At the workshop, you’ll:

• explore the difference between habits and routines and how they can help you
• learn the three keys of habit creation
• overcome any internal resistance you might have to habits and routines
• gain helpful tools to create great habits
• discover which habits and routines will create ease and freedom for you
• get personalized help in creating habits and routines just right for you
• learn what to do when you backslide, despite your best efforts

The support doesn’t end there.

After the three-hour, in-person workshop, you’ll receive emailed tips and helpful reminders over the course of three weeks to support your new habits and routines. You’ll also be invited to a live call where you can get your questions answered and move through any stuck places you’ve encountered with your new habits and routines.

All this included with the price of the workshop!

jump to the details

Is Create Freedom and Ease with Habits and Routines for you?

Have you found yourself in any of these situations:

• Scrambling to get out of the house on time
• Wanting to exercise more, but not finding the time (or the motivation)
• Wishing there weren’t so many piles around the house
• Putting off unpleasant tasks

If so, you’ll want to be there! Even if you can’t yet imagine how habits and routines can help with these and many other common and not-so-common troubles, we’ll guide you every step of the way.

Who Are We?

Hi, we’re life coach Shannon Wilkinson and professional organizer Janine Adams. We’ve co-taught several courses, including Declutter Happy Hour, and together bring more than 15 years experience helping clients live their dreams.

Janine, a certified professional organizer, teaches habits and routines every day with her clients. She also created and teaches the online workshop, “Simplify Your Life with Habits + Routines” for the popular website Simplify101.com.

Shannon, a certified life coach, helps her Perception Studios clients make shifts in beliefs and perceptions, especially unconscious ones, using humanistic neuro-linguistic psychology and hypnosis. Making life and behavior changes this way is easy, really sticks and helps new habits and routines feel natural, inspired and fun.

Because Janine lives in St. Louis and Shannon lives in Portland this is a unique opportunity to learn from them together, in person.

Praise for Shannon & Janine’s collaboration, Declutter Happy Hour:

Declutter Happy Hour was extremely helpful. The dynamic duo of Janine Adams, with her practical advice, and Shannon Wilkinson, who delves into the emotional issues of clutter, and the 30 minute decluttering sessions were fantastic. Thanks for your help.

Cathy Barash – Des Moines, Iowa

Workshop Details

Date: Thursday, April 19, 2012
Time: 9:30 am to 12:30 pm
Location: Commerce Bank, Kirkwood Branch, 300 North Kirkwood Rd., St. Louis, MO 63122

What’s included:

• Three-hour interactive, personal workshop with experts Janine Adams and Shannon Wilkinson
• A series of helpful reminders and inspiring tips via email for three weeks after the live workshop
• A one-hour live follow-up teleconference where you can get your questions answered and get coached with your routines and habits

All this for $85

Want to add in private, individual coaching?

Shannon is offering a 15% savings to workshop participants for coaching sessions the afternoon of the 19th. These in-person, one-hour sessions are available on a first-come first-served basis. Once those spaces are gone, participants may receive the special rate for a phone coaching session at a later date.

You can use your session for coaching on habits and routines, or another issue.

Single private sessions with Shannon are regularly $185. As a workshop participant, you’ll get a 15% discount, and pay just $160. Get the workshop and a session with Shannon

All this for $245

Questions?

I’m a little embarrassed about my situation, will I have to share it with everyone?

Of course not, there will be time for participants to share, but you never have to if you don’t want to. You just might discover that you aren’t the only person dealing with your situation too!

How does the follow-up call work?

You’ll receive a phone number and passcode that will allow you into the conference call. Before the call, we’ll send you an email asking you to send in any questions you have or where you could use some coaching with your habits and routines. We’ll be answering these first and then we’ll take questions and do coaching live with any remaining time. All workshop participants will receive an MP3 recording of the call.

 

Attend the Workshop for $85

Get the workshop and a session with Shannon
for $245

Professional Organizers Blog Carnival - I'm a star!

15 March 2012

Janet Barclay is a former professional organizer who now works as a virtual assistant, helping professional organizers. One of the many wonderful things she does is organize a Professional Organizers Blog Carnival where bloggers submit a post that fit a pre-selected theme.

In honor of National Procrastination Week, this month’s POBC theme is procrastination. I submitted a post I’d written Facing down the fears lurking in the clutter.

As it turn that was my tenth entry into the blog carnival over the years, so I’ve been added to the list of the Professional Organizers Blog Carnival Star Bloggers!.

If you like to read organizing blogs (and I’m guessing you might, since you’re reading this one), the blog carnival is a fantastic way to get exposed to bloggers you might not be familiar with.

Janet’s doing a real service to organizing bloggers by creating and administering the blog carnival. Thank you, Janet. I’m proud to be one of your stars!

Too many choices

12 March 2012

I’m buying an iPhone this week. Yay! I’m a fan of Apple products and love my iPod Touch (which is a now a senior citizen) almost as much as I love my iPad. I adore my MacBook. And I hate my cheap little Android phone. So this week I’m going to invest in an iPhone and I’m really excited about it.

The problem is that I’m spending an inordinate amount of time deciding which carrier to go with. If I’d decided to buy an iPhone just two years ago, I would have had no choice. It was only offered by AT&T. That’s how it was when I bought my iPad and so I didn’t have to even think about options, once I’d decided to make the purchase. Buying an iPad meant just deciding on Wifi + 3g versus Wifi only (I went with the 3G option) and what storage capacity to get (16 gigabytes).

Now, with the iPhone, I have to decide which carrier, which plan, what storage capacity and what color (black or white). I’m having such a hard time with the carrier question that I’m tempted to delay the purchase.

That made me think about the fascinating article last August in the New York Times Magazine called Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue, which talked about how difficult it is for consumers who are offered a wide variety of options.

My husband is in the market for a new personal computer. He’s a Windows guy. He was going to buy a computer almost three months ago but was paralyzed by all the options. I contrasted that to when I bought my most recent MacBook last fall and all I had to choose from was size (I went with 13”), Pro vs. Air (I went with Pro) and upper or lower tier of speed and capacity (I went with upper).

I purchased my MacBook with maybe a total of 30 minutes of contemplation. My husband spent hours on his PC purchase and still hasn’t bought one. (And at least one of those mind-numbing hours I was trying to help him. It was agony.)

My point here? Even a purchase like a new iPhone (which for me is extremely exciting) is turning into a bit of an exercise in frustration, with feelings of anxiety and insecurity arising, simply because there are so many options to consider.

It’s a good point to remember when I work with clients, many of whom spend much of their time with me making decisions. I need to keep the options clear and try not to throw too many options at them at once.

So excited for the NAPO conference!

5 March 2012

I admit it. I’m a conference junkie. Since I became an organizer in 2005, I’ve attended every conference of the my two main professional groups, the National Association of Professional Organizers and the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (now Institute for Challenging Disorganization), plus three NAPO regional conferences, the Professional Organizers in Canada conference in Toronto last year and the Australasian Association of Professional Organisers conference in Brisbane, Australia, in 2009 (where I spoke).

For me, it never gets old. In two weeks, I’ll be attending the 2012 NAPO conference in Baltimore and I’m as excited as ever. Here are some of things I’m looking forward to:

• I’ll be part of the prestigious Ask the Organizers panel (Part II) on Thursday morning, which is very exciting. I can hardly believe it.

• I’ll get to see the many friends I’ve made over the years of going to these conferences. It’s a little like what I imagine summer camp was like for kids (never really went myself).

• I’ll inevitably meet some fantastic organizers I haven’t met before and make some new friends.

• At the Expo, I’ll get the inside scoop on the newest organizing products and trends and I’ll get to hang out with my friends at the Rubbermaid booth and at the ICD booth.

• I’m taking the pre-conference session, Wardrobe Styling for Every Woman, For Every Day & Every Way, with Scott Roewer and Geralin Thomas. These fashionable folks will be chock full of amazing info, I just know it. I’ve been fortunate enough to have Geralin advise me on wardrobe for several years now (if you see me and think I look good, it’s because of her) and I can’t wait for this session. They’ll be bringing it. If you’re going to the conference and haven’t signed up for it, I encourage you to give it some serious thought. Here’s the promo video.

If you’re going to be at the NAPO conference, please leave a comment!

Watch me this weekend on Hoarding: Buried Alive

2 March 2012

I had the privilege to work as the lead organizer on an episode of the TLC cable documentary series, Hoarding: Buried Alive. The episode I worked on, whose title is “Unbelievable” will air this Sunday, March 4, at 9 pm eastern/8 pm central. (It’ll air again two hours later.)

The way Hoarding: Buried Alive differentiates itself from its competitor, A&E’s Hoarders is that it allows the client to work with a professional organizer for a month or so after the before shots and interviews are filmed. There’s one clean out day to give the process a jump start (that is filmed). And then work progresses without cameras for a month. After that time, the film crew comes back for the after shots.

Three fabulous St. Louis organizers, Karel Worley, Shannon Tamme and Diana Luetkemeyer volunteered to help. They were there for the initial clean out and filming and each one came back with me once during the intervening month. They were incredibly helpful and professional.

I’m excited to watch the episode because the client, Brad, was a delight to work with. I’m interested to see how the process will be portrayed. I wish Brad every happiness in the world.