Peace of Mind Organizing

Children of hoarders the focus of ABC's 20/20 tonight

5 August 2011

My friend, Geralin Thomas, CPO-CD®, who is one of the regularly featured organizers on A&E’s Hoarders tv show let me know that tonight on ABC’s 20/20 program, they’ll be doing an episode. on hoarding, with an emphasis on children of hoarders.

Here’s a preview:

I’m very interested to watch the program. Obviously, living with a parent who hoards must make for a very difficult (and unhealthy) childhood. But the long-term implication for the life of that child is staggering. I’ll be interested to see what the expert therapists and other guests who have experienced this, have to say.

ABC offers a Help for Hoarders resource page in conjunction with the story. I’m so pleased that the Institute for Challenging Disorganization is included.

Working with a professional organizer

3 August 2011

If you’re reading an organizing blog, chances are pretty good that you fall into one of three camps:

• You’re a professional organizer
• You’d like to work with a professional organizer
• You’re a fairly organized DIYer looking for ideas

This post is for those of you who fall into the second category. If you’d like to work with a professional organizer, I’d love to provide you with some advice to optimize that experience, should it come to pass.

Choosing an organizer

• Check out your choices thoroughly. You can find professional organizers at the website of National Association of Professional Organizers and the Institute for Challenging Disorganization. Choose some local organizers and read websites, look at testimonials and before and after pictures. Call any organizers you’re interested in who don’t have websites.
• Ask around. If you know folks who have worked with organizers, quiz them on their experience
• Know what you’re looking for. Do you want an organizer who tells you what to do (some people do)? Or one who involves you in the process of coming up with solutions?
• Trust your gut. If an organizer’s website or telephone manner resonate with you, that’s a good reason to pick her (or him).
• Don’t bargain shop. This is a field where fees are usually commensurate with training and experience. If you’re challenged by chronic disorganization, for example, you’d be wise to select an organizer with training and experience in working with chronically disorganized clients. And you may well pay more for that.

Working with an organizer

• Resist the temptation to clean up for your organizer. If your home is messy, you may feel embarrassed. Try to set that aside so that the organizer can see the natural state of your home in order to help you best. Mess and piles can provide clues.
• Be honest. Try not to anticipate what the organizer wants to hear. Instead, just answer all questions honestly, even if you’re a little embarrassed. Your organizer can help you best if you’re honest in everything you tell her.
• Be realistic. How long have you been dealing with disorder in your life? Probably quite some time. Unfortunately, organizers don’t have magic wands, so we can’t fix things instantly. Recognize that this is a process that might take awhile.
• Be prepared to learn new behaviors. If you’re dealing with a lot of clutter, the first step might be decluttering. But after that, you’re more than likely going to need to change your habits and create new routines to ensure that the clutter doesn’t come back. If you don’t change your behavior, the order that you and your organizer create might be temporary.
• Do your homework. If you and your organizer agree that you’ll do homework, try to accomplish it. If you don’t it’s usually not a big deal. But being honest and realistic about the prospect of what you can accomplish between appointments can help your organizer better plan the next session.
• Trust your gut (again). If you’re not clicking with your organizer, don’t be afraid to talk with her about it. This is intimate work and it’s essential that you have a trusting relationship and work well together. If you don’t feel it’s working with the organizer, perhaps the two of you can come up with a solution. If no solution is in sight, perhaps you can ask her for a referral.
• Keep your appointments. If you book an appointment with an organizer, try to keep that commitment. She’s set aside time for you and scheduled around that appointment. Last-minute cancellations can be costly for the organizer. And they’re costly for you, too, since you can’t get help if you don’t keep appointments.
• Expect backsliding. Most clients experience some backsliding, when life gets in the way and newly learned behaviors fall by the wayside. If you backslide, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed or your organizer isn’t effective. It just means you need to renew your efforts. Or perhaps tweak our systems.
• Be brave. It can be scary to let someone into your house for the first time in ages. It can also be scary to admit to your organizer that you haven’t done your homework or that you’ve not been able to maintain the order you created together. But organizers, by and large, are compassionate and non-judgmental people. Getting past the fear can help put you on the path to an orderly life.

When you hire a professional organizer, you’re making a time and financial commitment to getting organized. Often, you’re making an emotional commitment as well. That can be very powerful!

Do you have anything to add? I’d love to hear from POs or people who have worked with POs who would like to add to this list.

Thirty-One Organizing Utility Tote review -- and a giveaway!

1 August 2011

I’d been hearing good things about the bags, totes and accessories from Thirty-One , so when Thirty-One Independent Consultant, Jessica Wright, emailed me and offered to send me a bag to test and do a reader giveaway, I jumped at the chance.

Thirty One offers attractive, functional, and affordable bags and totes in fun patterns. Today, August 1, is the launch of their new fall catalog, so it seemed like a great day to blog about it.

I’d been looking for a good bag to take to client appointments. I’ve been in business six years, and I still haven’t streamlined what I take to each appointment. There are certain things I like to have on my person (rather than in the trunk of my car), but I didn’t have an attractive bag in which to carry everything. Truth be told, sometimes I’d enter a home with multiple bags, looking less than the picture of organization.

Jessica suggested the Organizing Utility Tote, and when I looked at the photo of the roomy tote with its exterior prockets, (which you can see on page 15 of the catalog), I decided to give it a try. When Jessica mentioned on the phone that a standard desktop file box can fit inside the tote to offer structure to the interior (or to carry files), I was excited to try it out.

I ordered the tote in the pattern Paparazzi Dot because I liked its monochromatic sophistication.

I loaded it up with supplies I typically like to have on hand for paper-related organizing. (I do a lot of paper-related organizing.) I often bring along my sample Action Box for handling mail, so I stuck that in the interior of the bag and added some generic grey file folders just to have on hand.

Here are top and side views of the loaded-up tote.

For today’s appointment, where we’ll be setting up a home office, I took out the sample Action Box and put in an empty desktop file box and filled it with my label maker and accessories, along with a few filing supplies and catalogs.

I love it!

There’s a flat center panel on one side of the tote, which is the area that would be personalized. I’m not a big personalization person, so mine’s blank. What’s great about that flat panel is that if I carry the bag on my shoulder, it lies flat against my side.

The bag itself is light weight, so even loaded up it doesn’t weigh a whole lot. I give it a thumbs up!

Jessica has a fun Facebook group in which she does giveaways and so forth. You might wan to join.

Here’s the giveaway part!

Jessica has offered a $25 gift certificate toward any Thirty-One product to one lucky reader of my blog. ($25 is what the Organizing Utility Tote costs!)

To enter, simply make a comment on this blog post. You can also receive additional entries by tweeting about the giveaway. Be sure and use @janinea in the tweet, so that I will see it. The contest ends at noon, central time, on Saturday, August 6. The winner will be notified on Sunday, August 7 and I’ll announce the winner here on the blog on August 8.

Bingo!

27 July 2011

When I saw Jacquelyn Kittredge’s e-bakery blog post about her social media bingo card I got really excited. I love the idea of turning those “I should” daily tasks (like keeping up with your social media) into a fun game.

So I created my own. While I emphasize social media and virtual income generation on my bingo card, I also have included other tasks that I wish I did more often, like entering Quickbooks data and entering Continuing Education Credits for my CPO recertification. I’ve put connecting with current and past clients up in there, too, which is something I don’t take the time to do as often as I might.

Here’s a photo of my bingo card. I printed the tasks out in a nice font on white paper and used scrapbook paper to create the pretty background 2- x 2-inch squares. (I affixed the white paper to the scrapbook paper using Glue Dots.) I purchased a 12- x 12-inch square magnetic bulletin board from the Container Store. And I just use magnets on the front of the squares to stick them to the board.

There are plenty of tasks to choose from.

Here’s my bingo card after a little effort. I ended up getting a triple bingo on this card!

Bingo!

Here’s how I play:

• When I do a task, I cover that square with a 1.5- x 2-inch Post-It® note.
• If I get the required number of tasks done in a row (four or five, depending on the row), I get bingo! And I feel very satisfied.
• If I got a bingo the day before, I rearrange the bingo spots randomly
• If I didn’t get bingo the day before, I remove the post-its but don’t rearrange the spots

So far, no more reward then the satisfaction of getting bingo is required.

I’ve just been doing this for a little while, but it’s provided a fun way to get some stuff done. I’m amazed at how motivated I am by getting a bingo. I guess I’m a child at heart.

I realize that to make this a true bingo card I need to add a row of tasks. I didn’t have room on this particular board, so I didn’t. But soon I think I’ll replace the BINGO row with five more tasks and increase the degree of difficulty a bit.

Thank you, Jacquelyn, for the great inspiration! You can also check out the bingo card created by Maryann Devine of Smarts and Culture. Maybe it’s a trend that will sweep the nation!

ETA: Check out my Bingo update and my Bingo anniversary posts, which detail some of the improvements I made to my Bingo board since writing this blog post. Also, I got so excited about bingo that I created an Organizing Guide about it. The five-page Guide gives instructions on creating a board, guidance on ways to use the concept, and rules I created for using it. See my Organizing Guides page for information on purchasing it.

Organized travel documents

25 July 2011

I went on a week-long trip to visit my parents in mid-July. It involved air travel, car rental, and hotel stay (my parents live in a small condo, so I don’t stay with them).

I’m not a nervous traveler, but I definitely like to have my ducks in a row. So I was delighted when Smead sent me a two-pack of their Travel Organizer to try out and consider blogging about. This is a three-sectioned document holder, and each section has an index tab. There’s a pocket in the front with velcro closure for receipts (or it could be used for boarding passes). A tab that comes from the back over the front keeps papers from falling out.

I customized my Travel Organizer for this trip with my handy Brother P-Touch label maker. To make it prettier and easier to spot in my bag, I used berry pink labels with white writing. I labeled the whole folder for the trip, then put labels on each tab for plane, car, and hotel.

Here’s a photo of my customized travel organizer:

I customized the organizer for my trip.

Talk about having my ducks in a row! I was able to find just what I needed quickly and easily. I had a safe place to stash my receipts so my wallet didn’t get clogged. I haven’t yet entered my receipts in to Quickbooks (this week, I promise!) so they’re all in a safe place awaiting entry.

I foresee changing the trip label and using the Travel Organizer for each trip I take. Being able to create three separate sections and access them easily is a step above the colored poly slash folder I’ve been using for years when I travel.

Hoarding on NPR

20 July 2011

In the past week, two public radio programs had episodes focusing on hoarding.

You can read transcripts of the stories on the respective show’s websites.

The Diane Rehm Show’s episode on hoarding aired on July 13. The Diane Rehm Show airs out of Washington, D.C.

Here and Now had an episode on hoarding on July 19. Here and Now is broadcast from Boston.

As a professional organizer who works with clients on the full spectrum of the “clutter-hoarding scale”: I like the attention that the media have given to hoarding. It’s a serious, complicated problem that deserves serious attention. Since I’ve been onvacation, I haven’t actually had a chance to listen to the shows, but I have high hopes the topics have received the usual serious, respectful NPR coverage.

ETA: My bad! Here and Now is a program from Public Radio International, though it’s produced at an NPR station. Both NPR and PRI create thought-provoking, quality programming, in my opinion.

ICD's newly revised Clutter-Hoarding Scale is out

11 July 2011

In 2004, the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization (now the Institute for Challenging Disorganization) issued the landmark Clutter Hoarding Scale, an assessment tool that identified five different levels of cluttering and hoarding. It can be used for organizers (or clients) who want to get an objective view of the state of a home. As conditions improve, it can also serve as a measuring tool.

The scale ranged from Level I, a sort of ordinary level of imperfection, to Level 5, a full-blown virtually uninhabitable hoarder’s home. The document recommends that at Level 3, specialized, collaborative help is needed.

On the television hoarding shows like, A&E’s Hoarders, you’ll occasionally hear someone refer to a Level 5. This is where that came from.

I’m really excited to report that the ICD has issued a newly revised Clutter-Hoarding Scale. This one also has five levels, and has added a Personal Protective Equipment category to indicate what sort of precautionary equipment a professional (or anyone) should use when working in each level. The larger format allows for expanded explanatory text.

In addition, the new Clutter-Hoarding Scale incorporates the use of color (the original had only black-and-white text), adding alert colors for each level.

Interested in taking a look for yourself? The ICD Clutter-Hoarding Scale is available as a free download. Simply go to the CHS page on the ICD website to download.