Peace of Mind Organizing

Worth repeating: The value of joining a NAPO chapter

13 March 2023

I spent the morning at the monthly meeting of the St. Louis chapter of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals. It was so enjoyable and valuable that I decided to re-run an updated version of this post, which I originally wrote in 2016. If you’re a professional organizer and you don’t already belong to your local NAPO chapter, I encourage you to join!

If you’re a professional organizer, I hope you’re lucky enough to live where there’s a local chapter of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals. And if you do live near one, I hope you’ve joined it! (If you don’t live near one, you can join NAPO’s Virtual Chapter, which is also great. I’m a member of that chapter too!)

When I started Peace of Mind Organizing® in 2005, the first thing I did was join NAPO. The second thing would have been to join NAPO-St. Louis, except it didn’t yet exist. Thanks to the hard work of others, the chapter was established in 2006 and I was lucky enough to be a founding board member.

Through the last 17 years I’ve remained involved with the chapter, serving on the board for the first six years of its existence, then taking three years off before joining the board again for another four-year stint. I took two years off and am just finishing up another two-year term on the board. That’s 12 years of volunteer board service; clearly I’m invested in the chapter.

Why do I devote so much time and energy to the chapter? Because it gives so much back to me. Here are a few of the benefits of chapter membership:

1. Camaraderie. For new and veteran organizers alike, the opportunity to spend time with like-minded people sharing advice and experiences is invaluable.
2. Leadership experience. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be as good at leading my organizing teams if I hadn’t had the experience of being president of the chapter from 2008-2010. (And again from 2015-2016.) It helped form the kind of leader I’ve become.
3. Education. NAPO-St. Louis meets in person nine times a year and virtually twice a year. The chapter’s programs are really valuable. We use both outside speakers and have programs presented by chapter members—there’s an amazing wealth of knowledge among our membership! The chapter also makes conference recordings available to its members as a membership benefit. (I’m certain this is a common chapter benefit.)
4. Visibility. All chapter members are listed on the NAPO-St. Louis website, giving them another exposure to prospective clients.
5. Referrals. When chapter members receive inquiries from clients they might not be right for, they’ll sometimes send them to me. And vice versa.
6. Client resources. We have 13 Business Partner members of NAPO-St. Louis and I refer clients to them all the time. I can also look for resource recommendations from fellow members of the chapter on our online forum. The chapter makes me a better resource for my clients.
7. Business development. These days I focus my business on organizing teams. All my team members, employees and independent contractors alike, are NAPO-St. Louis members. I’ve made it a requirement, because I want to use independent contractors who have shown a dedication to their businesses by joining NAPO national and NAPO-St. Louis. I can assure my clients that all my team members abide by NAPO’s Code of Ethics.

I honestly don’t know where my business would be without NAPO-St. Louis, but I’m pretty sure it would not have grown like it has. If you’re a PO or an aspiring PO I urge you to get involved with your chapter. It will reap huge dividends!

If you’re a member of a NAPO chapter, please feel free to comment on what you get out of your chapter!

My aspiration for 2023

6 March 2023

I saw on meme on Facebook late last year that spoke to me. I copied down the words onto a Post-it Note® and put it on my bulletin board. I thought I’d share that note with you today:

So far I’m not doing a great job of having less to do but I’m trying! In the meantime, I’m keeping these words top of mind as an aspiration. I hope by end of the year, it will be true!

KC Davis's 5 Things Tidying Method

2 March 2023

I just became of this terrific video by KC Davis that I think will be useful to people who are overwhelmed by clutter and don’t know where to start.

Here are some of the things I love about the method illustrated in this video, in which KC Davis suggests focusing on only five things (one at a time) to gain control of a room and create some visual peace:

• It makes creating order in a cluttered space feel doable
• It embraces imperfection
• It helps people figure out a place to begin, which is often the hardest part

If this leaves you wanting more, here’s a link to KC’s YouTube Channel, where she has a few videos (she has more than 13,000 subscribers). For more videos, check out her TikTok channel, where she has a million and a half subscribers! I don’t do TikTok, so that might be why I’m late to the game here.

I also wanted to share a link to her Struggle Care website, where you can find information about her Struggle Care podcast, her book, How to Keep House While Drowning and her online course.

Struggle Care’s tagline is, “When everyday care tasks are a struggle.” If you’re living with depression or finding it difficult to take care of your home, I encourage you to check out KC’s offerings in whatever format you prefer. (She has a TedX talk on her website, if that’s what you like.) She treats this topic with kindness and compassion.

Worth repeating: Decluttering my {knitting} WIPs

24 February 2023

I wrote this post 3.5 years ago, but I can still feel the thrill of letting go of knitting projects I didn’t want to finish and either reclaiming or giving away the yarn. Have I finished the projects I intended to finish? I don’t know! Time for another WIP decluttering session.

In knitting, WIP stands for Work-In-Progress. In my knitting reality, almost all my WIPS are actually stalled and/or abandoned projects. They languish in (mostly hand knit) bags in my knitting area creating clutter and a little bit of stress. That area was like a graveyard for knitting dreams.

But then I came across the book Untangled: A step-by-step guide to joy and success for the modern yarn lover by Shelley Brander. Untangled and its chapter The WIP-It Challenge inspired me to go through and declutter all those bags.

It took the better part of a Sunday and it was so liberating! Here’s how I did it.

I gathered up all those bags. Here’s a photo of them—I had no idea there were so many.

I ended up taking them to the dining room table and where the light was good, I went through them one by one. I started a little spreadsheet of each project, what yarns and needles it called for, the progress I’d made and what I wanted to do with it.

In all, I counted 15 WIPs. I took five of them off the needles and unraveled the yarn. That felt so good because that beautiful yarn got a new life, instead of being cooped up in a bag. I have a ball winder, so I had some very satisfying time winding all that yarn into neat balls. (See the picture below of the yarn I reclaimed in this project.) One of the abandoned projects was a toy I’d started making as a baby gift five years ago. I’d knit the component parts but before seaming them together, I realized that it wasn’t cute enough to give to the baby. I put it away thinking I’d finish it some day, I guess. Instead, I threw away all but the body and gave the body to my standard poodle, Bix, who thinks it’s a great toy.

Here’s a photo of Bix with the toy. He doesn’t care that it’s a reject. (In case you’re wondering, the finished toy was supposed to be Yoda.)

Here’s the reclaimed yarn! The photo doesn’t include the yarn that doesn’t thrill me, which I’d set aside to give to friends.

Of the remaining WIPs, four were fingerless gloves or mittens, with one finished. (There was also a pair of yoga socks with one completed.) I decided to hang on to those and finish them. There was a hat whose yarn I purchased to make a gift. I unraveled it and will start again. And there was a sweater whose yarn and pattern I had bought but had not actually starting knitting. I had completely forgotten about it (it’s very cool). So I’m going to evaluate the pattern and see if there was a reason I walked away from it.

One of the projects, was so close to being completed. It just had a tiny bit of seaming left to do. It was a striped cowl that I literally worked on for years. But when it didn’t end up as expected during construction, I walked away from it. But in the weeks after the big declutter, I actually finished it and now I have a cozy-warm cowl I can wear.

This process was absolutely rejuvenating. Not only did I get rid of a bunch of unsightly clutter, I let go of projects that were weighing me down, even if I didn’t realize it. I liberated yarn and needles to use in other projects. And I got excited about knitting again.

The day after this exercise, my co-host Shannon Wilkinson and I recorded an episode of our podcast, Getting to Good Enough, called Restarting that was all about this little adventure. If you’re interested in any more details of the knitting-project decluttering and its implications, please give it a listen!

Organizers: Check out the free Business Simplicity Summit next month!

15 February 2023

If you’re professional organizer or other small business owner, I encourage you to check out the Business Simplicity Summit being organized by Molly Winters, The Connection Copywriter. I’ve worked with Molly—she’s a terrific writer and wonderful business person. She’s put together a slate of nine speakers who will talk on topics around building simplicity into your business. I just registered!

One of the speakers, Geralin Thomas, is one of my dearest friends and absolutely full of wisdom. She alone is a reason to sign up for this free online summit! In addition to Geralin, my friend Anne Blummer of Institute for Professional Organizers, is speaking, as is Molly herself. And there are six other experts speaking on topics ranging from Simplified Ways to Add Revenue Streams to Your Small Business to Simplified Self Care.

You don’t have to be a professional organizer to attend. All are welcome!

Here are the details:

The Business Simplicity Summit™
March 2nd & 3rd, 2023
Times throughout the day beginning at 8 am PST
Online via Zoom
FREE Event
Register Here

I'm a "Storage Doctor" in new Secrets of Getting Organized magazine!

7 February 2023

Once again, I am thrilled to be a part of the new (early spring 2023) issue of Secrets of Getting Organized magazine from Better Homes & Gardens! I am always happy to be interviewed for this magazine and so pleased to be one of the regular organizing experts the editors reach out to.

Back when I wrote about pets for magazines, I bought and read magazines all the time. But nowadays, I get most of my information online. So getting the new issue of Secrets of Getting Organized magazine in the mail is always a treat. It’s advertising-free, beautifully photographed, and full of great advice from professional organizers. (There’s an article in this issue about someone who transformed their garage into a guest house that really floated my boat!) In this issue, I’m quoted in the Storage Doctor: Clutter Cleanse section on bathrooms in the front of the magazine. It starts on page 4.

The magazine is on sale now at newsstands, grocery stores, big box stores, etc. It will remain available until March 16, 2023.

Here’s the cover so you can easily spot it on the newsstand.

Worth repeating (again): Trying out the KonMari method

2 February 2023

Marie Kondo is back in the news after revealing that she’s less focused on keeping a perfectly tidy home now that she’s the mother of three small kids. I applaud that: our priorities (and organizing systems) change and it’s okay to say so. Since I was thinking about her, I thought I’d dust off this 2015 blog post about the time I tried out her method to declutter my clothes.

In a blog post earlier this week, I reviewed The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo. In this short book—an international bestseller—the author details her KonMari method for decluttering and organizing.

As I wrote in my review there were aspects of the agreed with and aspects I didn’t agree with. But reading the book did make me want to give her methodology a try. The book does a great job of sparking action.

I decided to try out the KonMari method on my clothing. That’s the category that she recommends starting with because it tends to be the easiest category of items to part with. So, as instructed, I gathered up clothing from various storage areas in my house. I keep almost all my clothes in my bedroom, but there were some items in the guest bedroom closet, including out-of-season clothes and some that weren’t fitting when I moved them there.

I emptied all my drawers and shelves and piled everything on the bed. Marie would have had me pile everything on the floor. But in my bedroom, there’s more bed space than floor space. Plus, I didn’t have to bend over to reach the items on my bed. Here’s how my bed looked with all the clothes on it.

I started with the clothes from the guest room closet, because they were the ones I’d worn least recently (per Marie’s instructions). As I touched each item, I asked myself her trademark question, “Does this spark joy?”

I found the question to be very powerful. It’s different from, “How recently have I worn this?” or “Does this look good on me?” There were items in there I had once loved and probably still looked good on me, but they no longer sparked joy. They went right into the donate bag.

I used the app iDonatedIt to keep track of my donations as I put the items in the bag. It was very easy and gave me a little boost as I watched my tax deduction rise. Here’s a photo of the donations:

The whole process took me about 90 minutes (not counting the donation drop off) and when I was finished, I had donated more than half my clothes. What was left easily fit in the drawers and shelves in my bedroom (no more guest room closet for me!) with room to spare. There were items that had been stored in the guest room I’d completely forgotten about and some of them sparked joy. Now I have easy access to them.

I feel absolutely no pangs or worries that I’ll miss any of the items I donated. It’s clear that I still have an abundant amount of clothes. I love that they’re more mindfully stored now.

As an aside, I’ve been using Marie’s folding method for shirts for years. She suggested folding items so that they can be stored vertically, like files. I hadn’t used that method on pants, but today I tried it. So far, I like it quite a lot!

I know how to declutter, obviously. Did using the KonMari method make a difference? It did provide a couple of real advantages:

• The book (and my promise to blog about trying it out) got me to actually take a look at these clothes and bring them together in one spot.
• Working on all my clothes at the same time gave me a sense of completion.
• The question “Does it spark joy?” was very effective at getting me to let go of items without regret.

Of course, the book addresses more than clothing. A couple of days ago, the book inspired me to dispose of a bookshelf full of seminar notes—the handouts that used to be distributed at the conferences I attended (they’re now distributed electronically). That was a little harder; they represented more to me, I think. But I acknowledged that I literally had not looked at any of them after the conference and they were just taking up space. It felt really good to let those go and I have The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up to thank for it.

I’m still not sure of the practicality of the book’s premise that one should always sort by category not by location—it’s great if you can do it in one session, but what happens if multiple sessions are necessary? it seems to me that you wouldn’t be able to find anything until the process is finished.

Maybe I’ll find out. There are still plenty of areas I can practice on in my own home. In any case, I think I’ll be using the “Does it spark joy?” question with at least some of my clients (giving Marie credit, of course). Perhaps I’ll post more here as I continue on this journey.