Peace of Mind Organizing

When the mail gets scary

12 April 2010

Why do some people put off dealing with their mail? I think it’s because scary stuff can be lurking in there. And the longer it sits the scarier it becomes.

I’ve been there. There have been times in my life when I didn’t want to open a credit-card bill because I was afraid to see the balance or how much I’d been charged for interest. For people with financial struggles, there can be a real fear of bad news in the mail. One thing I’ve learned, though, is that not knowing the bad news doesn’t make it better. In fact, it usually makes it worse.

Remember when you used to get fun stuff in the mail? Like invitations? The internet has changed that, at least in my life. (I’m going to blame it on email, rather than my social life.) But even if it’s less fun, the mail still comes six days a week. And it creates clutter if it’s not dealt with.

So the antidote the scary pile of mail is facing it down on a daily basis. The truth is the truth, whether or not you know about it. So if there is bad news in there, it’s best to know about it and deal with it.

And you know what? There might be good news in your mail too. I’ve helped clients go through backlogs of unopened mail and found unexpected checks for example. And gift certificates. It happens.

When is clutter a problem?

9 April 2010

I gave a decluttering talk the other day and of the audience members asked, “But what if I get comfort from having all my stuff around me?” I told her it’s not a problem to be surrounded by her stuff — unless it is a problem. I asked her whether being surrounded by her stuff was affecting her ability to function. She said yes. So we talked a little about what happens when the cost of keeping stuff is higher than the cost of letting go of it.

That got me thinking about standards of clutter again. In my opinion, clutter isn’t a problem unless it’s a problem. For some people, any disarray causes distress. Those are folks who put stuff away, I hope. For people like me, the clutter typically has to get to a certain level before I do anything about it.

I had a guest post on Rubbermaid’s blog yesterday, which was a thrill for me. It was about something I talk about here all the time: the power of 30 minutes to declutter and organize. I included some before and after pictures, including one of my office that I probably ought to be ashamed of. (Go check it out.)

But I’m not ashamed because it’s just my standard of clutter that’s in question. I have a high tolerance for clutter, and that’s okay. You may have a low tolerance. And that’s okay too.

When mess reaches the level that it affects my functioning, I do something about it. And, as I talk about in the Rubbermaid post, I can do something about it quickly. So that’s working for me.

I urge you to think about your own clutter and how it’s affecting your life. If it’s making it hard for you to think or to function, take some action. Set your timer for 15 or 30 minutes and dig in. If you could use some support, download the free Quick Clutter Fix audio that my Declutter Happy Hour partner Shannon Wilkinson and I offer.

If you don’t have a clutter problem but know someone you think does, I urge you not to judge or even consider they have a problem unless it’s a problem for them. Remember, clutter is in the eye of the beholder.

DWM: My latest task-management passion

7 April 2010

If you’ve been reading my blog awhile (or if you’ve heard me speak), you know I’m crazy about Mark Forster and his time-management principles. One thing I love about him (besides that he thinks in unorthodox ways) is that he’s always dreaming up new ways to do things. It’s not that he’s just improving upon systems he’s invented in the past (though he does do that). Sometimes he just comes up with something completely different.

I’ve learned to trust him. And when he comes out with something new, even if I’m perfectly happy with his current system, I usually give it a try.

On February 1, he debuted a new system that he ended up calling DWM, which stands for Day-Week-Month. This time, rather than testing it extensively before publishing it, he went public with a very early iteration and asked his peeps to try it out and comment.

Always an early adopter with Mark’s stuff, I went for it. And I absolutely love it. It’s been about 10 weeks and the system is working great for me.

You can read the DWM instructions straight from the horse’s mouth, but I’ll try to give you the gist. Lots of folks in the discussion forum at Mark’s website have adapted this for use in an electronic format. I like using paper and pen for task management, so I’ll explain the paper version (which is how Mark presents it).

Take a page-per-day calendar or planner. Enter any new tasks on the page for one month from today. Any tasks you work on but don’t complete, cross off the list and enter one week from today. Circulate throughout all the pages, doing tasks, crossing them off when completed and and crossing them off and reentering them a week hence when not completed. After you’ve done this a week, you’ll likely have tasks you’ve written on today’s date. If you don’t do the tasks that are written today’s date, they expire.

It’s very simple, but it feels very weird at first. It’s hard to write something down on a page a month from now that you know you need to do tomorrow. But once you get used to that, and if you really use the system and keep circulating through all the open pages (which will be up to 31), it works really well.

Here are some of the things I love about it:

• The threat of expiration spurs me into action. If I know I won’t have time to work on tasks tomorrow, I look ahead and make sure I get stuff due to expire tomorrow done today.

• Knowing I have 30 (or 7) days to do something speaks to my inner procrastinator and makes it easier to write it down.

• The directive to write further actions on tasks I’ve started just a week away makes sure I keep up my momentum.

• Having a month to think about doing something gives me time to evaluate whether I really want to do it.

• My DWM task diary is compact.

• I’m typically only looking at a few tasks on a single page, rather than one overwhelmingly long list.

• It allows me to use the Quo Vadis Notor which I love. I already had the pretty robin’s-egg blue pebbled cover from when I was using the Notor for Mark’s Do It Tomorrow system. So I ordered a 2010 refill and I have my lovely little task diary back.

Even if the system sounds a little wacky, I encourage you to head over to Mark’s website and read his explanation of it. (It’s free!) Explore the site while you’re there!

Handling the mail: the survey results

5 April 2010

A couple of weeks ago, I put together a poll on how folks deal with the daily onslaught of postal mail. The results are in and I think they’re kind of interesting.

I received 42 responses. 17 of those (or 40 percent) said they handled their mail every day. This made my eyebrows shoot up, but then I remembered that a good proportion of my readers are professional organizers. We’d expect organizers to process their mail daily.

Twelve respondents (29 percent) said that they look at it daily, but let it pile up. This seems very common to me, and something I see a lot in my clients. Five people (12 percent) said they let it pile up and look it at it once a week.

Four folks take a head-in-the sand approach and don’t look it at all until they’re trying to find something. None of the respondents said they leave it for someone else to deal with. And four answered other and left comments. Two of them said they let it accumulate at the post office, then pick it up once, twice or three times a week and deal with it then. (That strikes me as a very tidy solution, particularly if there are recycling bins at the post office and most of the stuff doesn’t even make it in to the home.)

If you handle your mail every day, I say bravo! To my way of thinking that’s the way to stay on top of things. It’s not a requirement, however. Looking at it on a weekly basis can be just fine, particularly in this day and age when so much of our urgent communication arrives electronically.

The trouble with looking at it each day but letting it pile up is that (a) that gets messy; and (b) you run the risk mail that wasn’t urgent when you first glanced at it becoming urgent by the time you get back to it. And if you let it pile up a long time, things can get kind of scary, particularly if you use the bills that come in the mail as a reminder to pay them.

If your lack of a system to handle your mail is a problem, perhaps you should give some thought to how you’d like things to be with regard to your mail. Then think about what’s stopping you from making that happen.

If you decide it’s time to do something about it, pick a system and make a good-faith effort to stick with it for a month or so. At that point, tweak it if need be. If the mail feels like a problem to you, I bet you’ll be pleased by your efforts to do something about it.

Spring decluttering

2 April 2010

Spring has hit St. Louis. It’s been in the 80s this week. The fruit trees and redbuds are starting to flower. Daffodils are out. It’s fabulous.

I know for many people, the advent of spring makes them want to clean. They don’t call it Spring Cleaning for nothing. Me, I never want to clean. I hate cleaning. But spring weather does make me want to create order. Rather than cleaning, spring makes me want to declutter some storage spaces and put stuff away. (When I glance around my home I see evidence of my tendency to leave stuff out if I don’t know exactly where it should live.)

So this weekend, I’m going to to do spring decluttering. I’m going to weed out the closets and cubbies in my business’s offices. (And I’ll probably do some cleaning while I’m in there.) I have a closet in the home office upstairs that I’ll clean out as well. By weeding out my closets, I’ll make room for the stuff that’s been out in the open in recent weeks. I’m eagerly anticipating a more orderly home!

If spring decluttering resonates with you and you’d like a little support for that, you might consider enrolling in Declutter Happy Hour, the 28-day e-course that I offer with life coach Shannon Wilkinson. By the end of April, you could make a lot of progress in creating a clutter-free home!

Hoarding: Buried Alive

29 March 2010

Hot on the heels of the popularity of A&E TV’s Hoarders documentary TV series (the network’s top-rated show), the cable network TLC is producing its own documentary series on hoarding, called Hoarding: Buried Alive.

The two shows have marked similarities. Each features a pair of real-life individuals who hoard (to varying degrees). Each sends in experts (usually a therapist and a professional organizer) to help the hoarder. Each treats the clients with respect. Each shows before and afters and each emphasizes the psychology behind the disorder.

And each is riveting television, as far as I’m concerned. The big difference between the two shows is that A&E’s Hoarders brings in a crew consisting of a therapist, organizer (or organizing team) and junk haulers and works for about three days to clear the home. I know from talking to the producers that they require the clients to be facing some sort of crisis. As I’ve blogged here before, that’s my biggest complaint about the show. The fact that the client is facing eviction, losing custody of child, or some other crisis means that he or she may not be ready to make a change. That might make for good TV, but I find it heart wrenching to watch.

TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive, by contrast, allows the client to work with the professionals over time. TV cameras capture the initial meetings. Then they go away and come back weeks later to tape the progress. To me, this creates a much more realistic impression of the decluttering process in working in severely cluttered situations. And even with weeks to work with the professionals, the show has shown that progress can be glacial.

One thing I love about both shows is that feature fantastic professional organizers who ask great questions and give a realistic impression of what working with a PO can be like. (To see some examples, check out my friend Geralin Thomas’s YouTube page, which features snippets of her work on Hoarders.)

I enjoy watching both shows and am glad that TLC’s series started just as the A&E series ended the first-run shows of the second season. I still get my weekly fix!

What Jack Bauer has taught me

24 March 2010

I love watching 24 every Monday night. I’ve been watching it for years. In almost every episode, our hero Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) tries to accomplish something and is foiled. He must then tell someone important, like the President of the United States, something that (s)he doesn’t want to hear. (For the past two seasons, the president is a woman.)

Often there will an exchange that goes something like this:

POTUS: Jack, were you able to capture the terrorists and stop the nuclear warheads from entering Manhattan?

JACK: No, Madame President, the terrorists got away and the warheads are headed toward Manhattan as we speak.

(The above is only an example, this season we’re dealing nuclear rods, not warheads.)

When I hear these exchanges, I think about how brave Jack is to tell the president exactly what she doesn’t want to hear. I’m impressed by how direct he is (because, after all, there’s no time to waste).

During the commercial breaks, sometimes I think about how I can follow that example in my life.

For years, I’ve had a very hard time telling people what they don’t want to hear. (In the excellent book, Organizing for Your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone, I discovered that I’m a Harmonizer—boy did that make sense.) When I was younger, I was known to fudge the truth a little, just to take the edge off of what I had to say.

But since I’ve become older and wiser and a business owner working one-on-one with clients, I’ve learned that no good can come from this. While people might not like hearing the full-on truth, they appreciate hearing it now rather than later.

Truth, honesty, transparency, authenticity: these things have become more and more important as I’ve aged. I’ve found that being direct with clients and prospective clients helps manage expectations and makes them happier, not the less happy.

One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve adopted Jack Bauer’s direct approach to answering questions is that people hardly ever react as badly as I thought they would.

Speaking the direct truth doesn’t have to mean that I’m ever rude or mean. I can give a direct answer that’s phrased to blunt the pain. Diplomacy is important, particularly in my work as an organizer. And so is honesty.