Peace of Mind Organizing

Jeri's Organizing and Decluttering News: BOTW

18 June 2008

(That’s Blog of the Week.)

This week’s blog of the week is the fabulous product-driven blog by Bay Area PO, Jeri Dansky. Jeri is absolutely amazing at ferreting out different types of products in a category.

Jeri’s blog is always fun to scroll through. Even when I’m not particularly interested in a category she’s highlighting, the pictures are always great and I get good ideas. In my opinion, she’s helping professional organizers look brilliant to our clients because she helps us stay abreast of what’s out there. (Thanks, Jeri!)

Here’s an example of a post that makes me drool. It features five stylish filing cabinets.

But Jeri’s blog is about more than products. She offers a great perspective on paring down and on organizing. In this post, which I love, we get a peek inside her purse with an explanation of what she carries. I love it! And it makes me want to go clean out my purse.

The fact that Jeri keeps coming up with great ideas every day—and that she finds all these great products with fabulous pictures—makes me really admire this blog. Bravo!

You know it's time to focus on organizing...

16 June 2008

...when you can’t find stuff. The universe is putting me squarely in the shoes of my clients today. I’ve spend much of the day trying to find things. And so far, I’m having no luck!

Here’s what’s missing (and driving me nuts):

• My spare glasses
• My prescription sunglasses
• The kitchen scissors

These are all things that have designated places. And they’re not in their designated places, nor are anywhere else in the entire house, as far as I can tell.

This feels urgent today because I have an eye doctor appointment. I’m going to get the lenses replaced in my primary glasses, so I was hoping to wear the spare glasses while I’m without my primary glasses. And I need sunglasses, but am loathe to buy a new pair (at least I don’t want to buy new frames) when I already have some. But heck if I can find them. They’ve actually been missing since last fall…I keep waiting for them to surface.

My nerves are atingle as I get more and more irritated by this. While looking for old glasses to donate when I go to the eye doctor, I found some glasses through which I can still see well enough, so at least I won’t have to wait at the glasses place without being able to see well.

Since I’m looking in every nook and cranny of the house, I see much opportunity for organizing and decluttering—little messes that had become invisible. I’m hopeful I’ll find my missing items (I tried blaming Joe, our cat, but that didn’t seem right) soon and then I can focus on re-creating order around here!

Here's quite a list of blogs

13 June 2008

If you’re a blogophile and love reading about productivity and organizing, have I got a list for you. It’s The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs from College Degree.com, which offers online college degrees.

I came across the list via Psychology of Clutter, a blog by clinical psychologist Dr. Amy Ragan. Psychology of Clutter is included in the Top 100 list, which is broken down into the following categories:

• Most Popular
• Life Organizers
• Productivity in the Workplace
• Expert Advice
• Personal Growth
• Prioritizing/GTD [Getting Things Done]
• Personal Finance Hacks
• Miscellaneous

You’re going to love or hate this list, depending on how well you control yourself when you start blog surfing. It’s really quite a compilation of very interesting-looking sites, many of which I wasn’t familiar with.

Happy learning!

For you Sharpie lovers...

12 June 2008

...and you know who you are. I haven’t met an organizer yet who doesn’t love Sharpie permanent markers. The way they write on anything and don’t wipe off. It’s heaven.

The other day I was in Office Max and a display caught my eye. There it was. The Sharpie Pen.

People, this is a Sharpie that doesn’t bleed through the paper. A fine-point pen (and not “fine” as they usually define it…its point is slimmer than the Sharpie Ultra-Fine marker) that writes on anything and doesn’t bleed.

I used it this morning in my planner and there was no bleed through. Can you tell I’m excited by the absence of bleeding?

I went to the official Sharpie website to snag a photo of the Sharpie pen and didn’t find a single mention of this product. That puzzled me, since I own one. But I found the Sharpie pen at the Office Max website. And Staples has it too. Maybe the product is so new it hasn’t made it onto the Sharpie website.

But you know what I did find at the Sharpie website? Personalized Sharpie markers! Yes, for a fairly hefty fee, you can order Sharpie Fine markers with a personalized message in your choice of font and your choice of clip art. The choices of font and clip art are pretty limited. But still. Check this out:

How romantic!

Can you think of a more romantic way to propose to an organizer?

Lifehacker: Blog of the Week

11 June 2008

This week I have to extoll the virtues of Lifehacker. It’s a fabulous combination of high- and low-tech tips on enhancing productivity and customizing things to make them a little more to your liking.

There are a lot of Mac-related hacks, which I love (not that I actually ever implement them, but it makes me feel very smart to know about them). There’s Windows-related stuff, too, which I just ignore. In fact, I scroll through most of the high-tech stuff—though occasionally I find some nuggets useful to non-computer-hacker me.

For me, the best part is the low-tech stuff, like this great post on the Top Ten Office-Supply Hacks. It contains alternative uses for lots of common office supplies. (Like putting a piece of Scotch tape on a file folder tab before affixing a label, to make it easy to remove the label and reuse the file folder. Genius!)

Content is added frequently (and I mean frequently…there must be at least a dozen posts a day), so there’s always something new to check out. In fact, if I miss a couple of days of checking Lifehacker I start to feel a little overwhelmed.

I can almost guarantee if you pay a visit, you’ll find something valuable in the first three screens of content. Give it a try!

Keeping going

10 June 2008

Yesterday I blogged about overcoming the reluctance to get started on a task, citing Mark Forster’s tip on fooling your reactive mind. Today, I’d like to share some of Forster’s advice about keeping going on tasks once you’ve started.

Forster recommends working in timed bursts. Not dissimilar to the notion of setting a timer for 15 minutes, which I recommend all the time, Forster recommends building a sequence of longer timed bursts as you overcome the initial resistance to the task.

So, for example, if your task were to write a newsletter article, you would set a timer and write for five minutes, take a two-minute break, go back to writing for ten minutes, take another break, go back to the task for 15 minutes, and so on until you’ve reached a period of time that’s optimal for you to work without a break.

Forster says that by focusing on the task for a specific period of time, you get more done. “If you work on something for three bursts of 20 minutes,” he writes in Do It Tomorrow, “you are likely to get more done than if you do an hour’s untimed work on it.”

He makes another important point, which I find really useful. It’s important to stop as soon as your timer goes off, indicating it’s time for a break. Don’t keep going until you reach the end of a paragraph. If you’re writing, stop in mid-sentence.

This is because the mind craves completion. If you stop in mid-sentence, you’ll be itching to get back to the task after your break, whereas if you work to a logical stopping point, you might have to overcome resistance once again. I’ve done this and it works.

Forster also recommends always setting a finishing time for your work day. He says to “stop dead” when that time arrives. If you know you’re ending at a certain time, you’ll get more done, as you work toward that deadline. I have to admit I don’t do this, but I think I’m going to give it a try!

Getting started

9 June 2008

Do you ever have items on your to-do list that just loom there? You know you need to do them, you think about doing them, but you just can’t get going on them?

Sometimes, you just need to get started and once you overcome the resistance and do the task, it turns out that it’s not so bad. This happens to me all the time. I build up tasks in my mind, thinking they’re going to take forever, then they take no time at all.

Certainly, this is true of many organizing tasks. But it’s also true of other things, even housecleaning.

I hate cleaning house, particularly vacuuming. And my least favorite vacuuming project is our front stairs, which have a carpeted runner. I use a small, noisy hand vac on these stairs and never want to do the job. You can imagine how awful these stairs usually look, since the carpeted runner is burgundy and our ever-shedding cat, Joe, is orange.

Anyway, Mark Forster has a great little trick for getting started on tasks you don’t want to do. In his book Do It Tomorrow, he talks about how we have a rational part of our brain and a reactive part of our brain. It’s the reactive brain that stops us from doing stuff we don’t want to do. He says that our reactive brain is unable to detect when the rational brain is lying to it. So we can calm our reactive brain by fooling it—and then we can actually get started on tasks.

Here’s how it works. I’ll use vacuuming my stairs as an example.

I’ll say to myself, “I’m not really going to vacuum the stairs now, I’m just going to get out the vacuum.” That’s enough to calm down the reactive brain. The rational brain knows that the stairs are dirty and really must be vacuumed. It knows that it takes less than 10 minutes to vacuum them and they look really nice once they’re clean. So once the reactive brain has been tricked into submission by the phrase, “I’m not going to vacuum the stairs,” the rational brain takes over and just does it.

I know it sounds a little out there, but I’ve used this trick many times. Give it a try!

This is just one of Forster’s tips for overcoming resistance. Do It Tomorrow is full of this kind of revolutionary information that can really enhance your productivity. I heartily recommend it. You can get a taste of his ideas on his blog, Get Everything Done.