Peace of Mind Organizing

Oprah to the rescue

13 November 2008

In case you missed it, yesterday’s Oprah show was the debut of Oprah’s Clean Up Your Messy House Tour. Oprah is sending organizer Peter Walsh, of whom I’m an unabashed fan, around the country with a “clutter crew” of helpers (in VW Bugs) to help people get rid of clutter. (In this first episode, they were in New York City, knocking on doors of unsuspecting people.) Designer Candice Olson of Divine Design is also on hand to help with beautiful storage and design solutions.

I’m going to cut to the money-saving chase here (and then move on to some comments on the show): Oprah’s offering discounts! For 48 hours after the show (i.e. by 11:59 p.m. PST on Friday, November 14) you can get a free custom 20-page photo album from Snapfish. That means you’d need to select your photos and upload them today or tomorrow. If you can do that, you can have a nice gift or remembrance that otherwise you’d pay 30 bucks for. (You have to pay shipping.) Here’s the link from Oprah’s website.

And there’s more! The wonderful Container Store is in on the deal too. They’re offering a 20 percent discount to Oprah viewers with a special coupon, good for in-store, online and phone purchases. Here’s the link. This one expires at 11:59 p.m. CST on November 19.

There were things I loved about the show and things I wasn’t so crazy about.

First the love:

• Working on-one-on with these surprise clients, Peter Walsh demonstrated how quickly you can declutter a space when you focus on it.
• Both Peter and Oprah made the point that in these troubled times, we should concentrate on what we can control. And a peaceful, organized space is within our reach.
• Peter, through Oprah, is offering a six-month decluttering program with step-by-step solutions for getting organized. By joining up, you’re committing to spending 10 minutes a day decluttering. I love the power of 10 minutes a day!

Now the things I wasn’t crazy about:

• TV organizing always creates unrealistic expectations. The folks in New York with whom Peter worked were all able to make very quick decisions about keeping and parting with stuff. That’s certainly not the case with all of my clients.
• Decluttering is typically only temporary unless habits are changed. In the case of the single woman with the very messy apartment, I didn’t see anything that would lead me to believe that that client will be able to maintain her space. I’m sure working under normal circumstances Peter would have transferred skills. And maybe he did. But it wasn’t apparent on what aired on TV.
• There wasn’t a plug of any sort for working with a professional organizer. I would have loved to have heard NAPO or NSGCD mentioned.

I see that future Messy House Tour visits won’t be surprise. You can sign up for consideration for a future show (they’re looking for people in Washington, DC and Atlanta.

Powerful decluttering

12 November 2008

This morning I received the e-newsletter, called LiveCreative” of Christine Kane, the blogger, musician, and creativity consultant whose blog was my Blog of the Week a few months ago.

The theme of the newsletter was clearing clutter. Christine wrote about the power of letting go of the old flea-market furniture in her basement that she’d kept just in case her music career failed and she needed poor-person furniture again. She talked about how she cried when that furniture was taken away but that she recognized that the furniture in her basement served as a constant reminder that her financial success might be temporary. And that letting go of it she was acknowledging that she believed in her own success.

Sure enough, the CD she was recording at the time she was clearing out her basement (30 minutes at a time), sold five times more than any of her other CDs. Here’s one of the things she learned from the experience: “I have become a firm believer that we each need to pay attention to the energy of the stuff that surrounds us. We need to pay attention to what we are telling our subconscious minds when we hold on.”

I read that at about six this morning and it caused me to look over at the bookshelf crammed full of dog books that I have in my office. I do have two dogs, so the books aren’t irrelevant. But they are a vestige of my past life as a dog writer. It’s only been about a year since I gave up my last dog-writing gig: being the book-review columnist for Dog World magazine. A side effect of that job was a massive influx of dog books. I don’t read these books. I don’t need them. And I’ve become very good at donating them.

However, left on my shelf were the good ones. The ones by authors I respected. The ones that helped educate me on holistic health for my animals. The ones I referred to when my prior dogs, Kramer and Scout, were very ill.

I have another, smaller, bookshelf in my office. It’s full of organizing books. On the floor in front of it were more organizing books, relegated to the floor because there was no shelf space for them. Sitting there disrespected and causing my office to look cluttered.

So I set my timer for 10 minutes and I set out to clear a single shelf on the dog bookshelf to make room for organizing books. It was a little tough. “Maybe I’ll need these if Pip, Kirby, or Joe gets sick,” I thought to myself. But then the organizer in me reminded me, as I would remind a client, that the information is probably not the most up-to-date info that’s now available. Kramer and Scout passed away seven years afgo and I haven’t looked at these books.

In that ten minutes I made several large piles of books I was willing to let go. And then I thought about what I’d do with the books. Ordinarily I’d donate them. But this morning I’ve been thinking about ways to bring money in (my schedule’s not crammed with clients), so I divided them into categories and have decided to try to sell whole lots on craigslist. I figure it’s worth a shot and if no one bites, I’ll donate them. (Interested in a lot of 20 holistic dog-care books? Check out my craigslist ad. More lots to come.)

I’m feeling the exhilaration of letting go of my past. Of creating space for my present. And I highly recommend it.

After I finished reading Christine’s newsletter, I paid a visit to her blog and started clicking around. It’d been a little while since I explored there. I read some really wonderful entries. Here are a few favorites:

56 Things You Can Toss Now
9 Seemingly Logical Excuses for Clinging to Clutter
Gratitude Journals and Why They Work
How to Stop a Recession in Its Tracks
Defining Downtime: 6 Ways to Ramp Up Your Rejuvenation

This list would be longer if I had more time this morning to read! Thanks, Christine, for giving me a shot in the arm this morning. You can sign up here to received Christine’s newsletter, LiveCreative. And when you do, you’ll get a free song!

My guest post on Serenity for the Self-Employed

11 November 2008

Two weeks ago, I made Serenity for the Self-Employed my Blog of the Week since the blog owner, Heather Boerner, was starting a 30-day organizing challenge. Heather then invited me to do a blog post on the mistakes people make when they’re trying to get organized.

I’ve not actually posted on that topic here, so please, if you’re interested, visit Serenity for the Self-Employed and check out my post!

Thanks for the opportunity, Heather!

Happy anniversary!

10 November 2008

Two years ago today, I wrote my first post on this blog. The topic was “What is organized?”

I started the blog at the suggestion of my talented web designer, Nora Brown. At first, I had a little trouble getting into the swing of it. That first November I posted only six entries. But that was more than I posted in any single month in all of 2007. when I posted only 30 entries all year.

That changed on March 18, 2008 when I decided to try writing every weekday. That was an excellent experiment. I found that by including posting in my blog in my daily routine, it became easier. Also, I felt less pressure to turn out something profound, since it would be replaced the next day. Since that day eight months ago, I’ve written 147 posts (counting today).

A happy result is that my readership has gone way up. I’m proud of the number of readers I have who subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog (click the link at the very top of this page if you’d like to subscribe). Blogging has become a fun part of my daily life and not a chore at all.

I’m not going to promise you that I’ll write something profound every day, but I’m comfortable promising that most weeks you’ll see a new post if you check every week day.

Thanks for reading!

A fun and low-cost way to get organized for the holidays

7 November 2008

If you want to avoid being stressed out by the holidays, now is the time to start planning for them. (Okay, planning for them before now would have been even more helpful, but let’s work with what we have.) As I posted yesterday I encourage you to simplify as much as possible. Streamline the holidays and make it easy on yourself.

If you’re someone for whom doing it up at the holidays is important (or even if you want to streamline this year), yet you tend to get stressed out about it, I have a great suggestion for you:

It’s the Get Organized for the Holidays online workshop offered by my friend Aby Garvey of simplify 101. It starts November 11 and runs through December 26. If you sign up now, you can get started on pre-workshop assignments.

If you love the notion of being thoroughly organized this holiday season, with binders and forms and customized plans, this is a low-cost and fun way to achieve it. The workshop is only $24. And you can combine it with her Clear Out the Holiday Clutter workshop that starts December 26 and runs for three weeks and get a discount. Both workshops for only $34. It’s a steal. And a wonderful gift to give yourself.

Streamlining the holidays

6 November 2008

The election’s behind us and now it’s time to focus on the next big thing: the holidays.

Personally, I’m minimalist when it comes to the December holidays. No decorating. Very little gift buying. Yet I still feel a bit of stress, primarily over my holiday cards. As I’ve posted about before, I send out several hundred cards, each with a personalized note. So it takes awhile. And I’d better get started. There are a number of steps to this project:

• Decide what card to send (I usually do two: one business, one personal)
• Finalize the recipient list
• Consolidate the addresses into Mac Address Book (a one-time, if time-consuming project)
• Order cards
• Print out labels
• Inventory stamps to see if more need to be purchased
• Purchase stamps if necessary
• Write a newsletter for personal cards
• Order paper to print newsletter on
• Print newsletter
• Put labels on envelopes
• Write notes in each card
• Mail cards

This little project is a great example of breaking down projects into tasks. Putting “work on holiday cards” on my to-do list isn’t as effective as writing down a specific task. What I need to do is sit down with my calendar and write a deadline for each task (I’m all about the deadlines). I’ll do that by working backwards: selecting a deadline by which I must mail all the cards. Something tells me that the deadline for the first task of deciding about cards will be just around the corner!

One thing I might consider is ways to streamline the project. The steps above are very familiar; I do them every year. But maybe I need to do something completely different. Perhaps I’ll use only one card, rather than two. Perhaps I’ll consider sending electronic greetings instead (I seriously doubt that). Maybe I’ll make a decision to cut back on the number of cards I send and set some sort of criteria for staying on my card list. By doing that, I would save money and effort. But I’d also reach out to fewer people.

My point is this: it’s always a good idea to think about doing things differently. In these tough economic times, streamlining what we do for the holidays might a lot of sense. And anything that reduces stress is a plus. So, based on this little exploration, I’m adding a new task to the very top of my task list for the holiday card project:

• Explore other options/alternatives for holiday cards.

Tomorrow I’ll write more about organizing for the holidays.

Your Life. Organized: Blog of the Week

5 November 2008

This week I’m featuring Your Life. Organized, the blog of Monica Ricci, a professional organizer in Atlanta. Monica’s an organizer with a national presence. You night know her from her appearances on the HGTV show Mission Organization. She’s Organizing Advisor to Office Depot and also works with Beazer Homes. She’s the author of Organizer Your Office in No Time.

One reason she’s so well-known to professional organizers is that every year she does a bang-up job of moderating the “Ask the Organizer” panel at the national NAPO conference. She also gave a tremendous closing key note at the Washington, DC regional NAPO conference I attended in early March this year.

Monica has her finger on the pulse of what’s going on in organizing. One of my favorite features of her blog is the “Check-Out Line”, in which she does product reviews. They’re always honest and experience-based. She also writes some really insightful posts, like this one on evaluating the value of your stuff (expensive or not).

Your Life. Organized won the “best organizing blog or website” award at the Third Annual Los Angeles Organizing Awards on February 1, 2008. (Here’s a fun video of the gala awards ceremony.)

If you’re not already checking out Monica’s blog on a regular basis, I urge you to give it a look!