Peace of Mind Organizing

My must-read blogs

20 March 2008

In 2008, as part of my new dedication to getting a handle on my time, I’ve been trying to read more blogs. That may sound counterintuitive…blog reading can be a huge time suck.

But I’ve intentionally been making an effort to read terrific productivity-related blogs on a regular basis, at a set time during the day, so that I can keep up with developments that will help make me more productive. I also read great organizing tips and learn things that I can pass on to my clients and blog readers.

An example: Jott.com, which I blogged about here, which allows me to send email or text messages to myself or others on my list by talking into the phone. It’s a great tool for staying productive when I’m driving between appointments.

Here’s a list of the blogs I try to read on a daily basis. Some offer productivity tips, some organizing tips, others are just fun to read:

Lifehacker
Unclutterer
Creative Organizing
Get Everything Done
Jeri’s Organizing and Decluttering News
Apartment Therapy
Real Simple’s Simply Stated Home & Organizing
Your Life. Organized.

If you haven’t read these yet, do check them out!

Priority management

19 March 2008

On the You Can Have What You Want podcast I mentioned in yesterday’s post, host Michael Neill and guest Steven Pressfield mentioned something that keeps coming to mind this week.

Time management isn’t about managing time. It’s about managing priorities. We all have the same amount of time in a day to deal with. How we use it is an indication of our priorities.

If you’re not accomplishing as much in a day as you’d like, take stock of how you’re actually spending your day. Are you at least getting the important stuff—the stuff that reflects your values and goals—done? If not, time to examine your priorities in relation to how you spend your time.

These aren’t earth-shattering revelations, I understand. But sometimes it’s important to take a step back and take stock of how things are going. Personally, I have some catching up—and some priority management—to do. (Mark Forster, whose Do It Tomorrow time-management system I’m in the process of implementing, calls it “going through the audit procedure.”)

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been so busy with clients I’ve not had as much desk time as usual, so I’m falling behind on tasks. The great satisfaction I’ve been feeling over really accomplishing what I set out to do has been starting to evaporate.

Time to hunker in, see what’s going awry, and manage my priorities. While I have a lot that I need and want to get done, I can say with all honesty that right now, taking a little time to relax is a high priority!

The tyranny of the blog

18 March 2008

I love having a blog. The freedom to write whatever I want is wonderful. (Way, way back in the day I had a column in PetLife magazine in which I could write whatever I wanted. It was exhilarating.)

But that freedom is a two-edged sword. With little structure surrounding what to write, and no deadlines, it can be very difficult to (1) take the time to post to my blog and (2) come up with something remotely meaningful to write.

Yesterday, I was listening to the podcast of success coach and author Michael Neill’s radio show on Hay House Radio called You Can Have What You Want. (That’s also the title of his first book, whose link you can click on at right.) Anyway, the episode I was listening to yesterday was called The War of Art and the guest was the author of the well-known book by that name, Steven Pressfield.

The interview was full of gems, but the one that’s sticking out to me today was the notion that daily writing is easier than weekly writing. Michael said he used to send out daily tips, then changed the frequency to weekly. After he did that, he said, the writing of the tips became much more difficult.

That speaks to the power of routine and habits, something that is so important for creating and maintaining order.

Since I’ve been having difficulty making the time to come up with the content and write this blog, I’m going to try an experiment. For the next week, I’m going to post here daily. Perhaps I’ll even start a chain in Don’t Break the Chain for it. If it works well for a week, perhaps I’ll try another week (never mind that the next two weeks are really busy for me, in terms of client load).

Watch this space to see if my experiment is a success!

Do It Tomorrow really works

22 February 2008

As I’ve written here before, I decided on January 1 that 2008 would be the year that I take control of my time-management issues. That day, I selected probably a half dozen time management books from my shelf, each one espousing a different philosophy. I thought I’d make a commitment to a single system and really try to adhere to it for a month or so.

In glancing through the books, the one that I decided on was the one I’d most recently used, the Do It Tomorrow system espoused by Mark Forster in his book Do It Tomorrow and Other Secrets of Time Management. I had started using it in late 2006, but, like many things, fell off the bandwagon in 2007. I blogged about the system back in November ’06.

So in early January I jumped back on the Do It Tomorrow bandwagon. And you know what? It’s working! I’ve never been more in control of my time, despite the fact that both January and February were busy for me in terms of client hours. Since I started my business, I’ve had a hard time balancing the increasing client hours with all that needed to be done to support and grow my business. But so far, in 2008, I’m not feeling the stress of that imbalance.

How do I love about Do It Tomorrow? Let me count the ways:

• It gives me control of my day, since I handle incoming tasks on the following day. For once, I’m not letting my plans for the day get waylaid by interruptions.

• It gives me a sense of accomplishment when I actually get everything on my task list done (which I do many days).

• It’s helped me create a realistic expectation of how many tasks I can actually accomplish in a day, particularly on the days I have client appointments.

• It gives me tricks to get started on tasks I’m not crazy about doing (though, suprisingly enough, I haven’t had to trick myself much…I’m loving the tasks).

• It helps me keep my desk and office uncluttered because incoming paper has a specific place to go (in my “tomorrow” basket, moving to my “today” basket each morning).

• It allows me to schedule tasks, so they actually get done, rather than languishing on an ever-growing (and overwhelming) master task list.

• It’s helped those Where does the day go? days become a thing of the past.

If you’re interested in learning more about the basic tenets of DIT, check out that November ’06 blog post. Or, go to Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done blog and read the first chapter of Do It Tomorrow. There’s also a DIT yahoogroup, where people exchange messages about using the system. There’s also a link to a podcast interview with Forster.

I wish the book were a little easier to get ahold of. It’s published in England and is shipped from there. If you’re inclined to buy it and check it out, I can assure you it’s worth the wait.

A peek inside the client's mind

18 February 2008

When I visit the home of a client for the first time, I’m often struck by the trust that’s been placed in me. For some of my clients, I’m the first visitor they’ve welcomed into their homes in some time. The clutter has kept them from being able to open the door to people. I’ve always felt honored by that trust and recognized how vulnerable clients must feel. I ask them not to clean up the house prior to my visit—I want to see things as usually they are, in order to best help them.

Now I’m getting a taste of what my clients feel like as they open their doors to me. I’ve begun to offer training and coaching to people just getting started in the organizing profession. One of those services is role-playing. Tomorrow, for the first time, I’m welcoming a trainee to come in and assess my kitchen.

I’m happy to say that I’m able to welcome guests into my home. But, truth be told, I usually clean up a little before I open the door. And I trust that most people aren’t there to look in every drawer and examine at the details of my organizing systems (or lack thereof).

I’ve made no secret of the fact that all my life I’ve struggled with clutter or, more precisely, mess. I have a difficult time putting things away. And now that I’m spending my days helping other people deal with clutter pretty much the last thing I want to do when I get home is deal with my own.

So it’s taking all my power not to clean up and declutter prior to my wonderful trainee coming in to assess my kitchen. Believe me, there’s plenty to assess in my kitchen and I’m very excited about the ideas my trainee will come up with. But I do feel vulnerable and a little bit nervous (after all, I’m supposed to be the knowledgeable one!).

I think this will be a valuable experience for me (and, I hope, for my trainee). Not only will I get some great ideas for my kitchen, I’ll walk away with a better idea of what’s going through my clients’ minds when they open the door to me.

At the risk of being redundant

11 February 2008

I just have to write once again about the joys of my clean-desktop lifestyle.

Just a few moments ago, I was drinking a latte while eating a pumpkin muffie from Panera Bread and reading Unclutterer.

Then a potential disaster struck: I inadvertently tipped over my latte. It was still in its paper cup with the sippy-cup type lid, so I didn’t lose too much latte, thank goodness. But I was able to grab my napkin and wipe up my desk and nothing was ruined. Two months ago, the desktop would have been covered in paper (which wouldn’t have stopped me from drinking a latte) and when the spill occurred, I would have been trying frantically to save the paper. I doubt I would have had a cloth napkin handy. (I brought that from the kitchen when I put my muffie on a plate.) It would have been a sopping, day-ruining mess.

Yet another reason why I love the fact that I’m able to clean my desk off every evening.

Some press

8 February 2008

I was please to be included in an article on organizing that appeared in St. Louis Spaces, a quarterly glossy publication that is distributed with and published by the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s alternative weekly paper.

Check it out: St. Louis Spaces.