Peace of Mind Organizing

I can see clearly now

5 March 2007

I had my Honda CR-V washed the other day. I know that doesn’t sound remarkable, but it’s a fairly big deal for me. I hate paying to have my car washed and I hate washing it myself. So usually I just don’t worry about it. But we’d had snow and ice in St. Louis, which meant there was a lot of salt on the roads. My dark blue car was looking grey. And since I advertise my business on my car, it seemed prudent to get it washed.

So I paid almost $30 to have my car washed inside and out. I expected to enjoy having a nice clean car. I didn’t expect to have an epiphany.

Until my car was washed, I hadn’t realized that I basically wasn’t able to see the road, except for the area cleared by the wipers, front and back. I didn’t realize how obscured the side mirrors were by the salty film on the windows and mirrors. Once the windows were cleaned, it was as if blinders had been taken off. I could see everything, crystal clear. It was fabulous and freeing. And it made me feel safer.

Then it struck me that this is exactly what freeing one’s life of clutter is like. Clutter builds up gradually without your even noticing. But once the clutter is gone, you realize how much space it had taken up and how it had obscured your vision of your future, past and present.

When my desk is messy, I can only focus on the thing on the top of the pile, the thing I need to focus on at that moment. Even when I clean my desk but leave the periphery of my office cluttered, I’m limiting myself. I focus just on my desk and the work that’s closest at hand and rarely think about the big picture. But when my whole office is clean, that’s when I do my strategic planning, my brainstorming. That’s when I feel free. And when I feel safe.

From now on when I drag my feet about cleaning up my office I’ll think about the contrast between driving my car behind a filthy windshield and driving a sparkling clean one. Decluttering my office, or my house, or any other space helps me take the blinders off and see what I need to see. It helps me accomplish the bigger, more important things in my life, not just the urgent ones.

When good things happen to good people

13 February 2007

Last Thursday I spent about 15 hours in the car for a very good reason. I drove to Morrison, Tennessee, about an hour past Nashville, with my dear friend, Sally. We went there to pick up her dream dog, an eight-week-old puppy named Seamus Clarence Amos . The little darling’s father was a Great Pyrenees and his mother a Border Collie. He’s not some designer dog (a Border Pyr? a Great Collie?). He’s the very happy result of a guy who has two dogs he’s not brainy enough to neuter.

In any case, Sally’s been looking for this very cross since her beloved Otis died almost a year ago. (Otis, too, was a Great Pyr/Border Collie cross, the result of an accidental breeding). Sally found out about Seamus Clarence Amos on Petfinder.com, where I found my Pip.

Just look at this little guy, with Sally at his foster parents’ house:

Notice Amos's adorable littermate on the far left.

And here he is in his new home:

Living in the lap of luxury

Sally is as ga-ga over dogs as anyone I know. (Perhaps more than anyone I know.) She’s been pining for a puppy every since she lost her beloved Hildy in October. She’s managed to be patient, waiting until the right dog came along. And boy did he. The woman is over-the-moon in love with this puppy, and for good reason. He’s sweet, smart, cute as all get out. Just wonderful.

It’s so nice when good things happen to good people. I can’t wait to watch this little guy grow up.

The cobbler’s children…

25 January 2007

I’m having a very busy month, between client appointments and travel. I had two four-day weekends away in a row (one to Phoenix for the P.F. Chang’s Rock & Roll Half-Marathon, the next to New York City for Michael Neill ’s Coaching Mastery workshop) and the days before and after each trip were filled by client sessions.

I’ve been spending my days helping my clients create order, which I love doing. Meanwhile, my own house seems to be devolving into chaos. Between the rapidly piling up mail (I can’t seem to get caught up), and the laundry that’s not getting done, my home looks like it could use the help of a professional organizer.

I think one of the perils of this profession is the feeling that I need to have a perfect home—one that I’d welcome a client into at the drop of a hat—or else I’m some sort of fraud. I know that’s not true. I tell my clients that they shouldn’t set up overly high standards for themselves and their homes. I also know that one of the things I bring to my clients is a vast well of experience in dealing with organizational issues in my own life.

But that doesn’t necessarily keep me from feeling some despair when I look around here. Until I went to the coaching seminar last weekend, I was kicking myself for not being motivated to do something about it. I’d come home tired from helping people in their homes and not want to dig into my own stuff (big surprise). But now I recognize it’s a simple question of time management and self care. At the coaching seminar, I had the opportunity to be coached by a variety of people and work on some of these issues. In the two days since I’ve been home, I’ve tackled the dirty clothes and made a big dent in the accumulated paperwork (and worked two full days of client appointments). I still have a messy desk to deal with, but I hope and trust that will be taken care of today.

I know that I can’t work all my waking hours. I need relaxation time in the evenings (I like to knit and watch TV and all of a sudden there’s great TV on again!). So I’m going to allow myself to work in 15-minute blocks of time until things are under control. I have Sunday off, so I can finish what remains. Then I’ll remind myself that 15 minutes at a time is all I need to maintain that control.

In other words, instead of beating myself up, I’m going to take the advice I give to my clients: do a little at a time, be kind to myself, and don’t strive for perfection. As an organizer, I don’t need to set an example by having a home that’s company-ready at any given moment. Instead, I just need do the best I can and focus on achieving my organizing goals while taking care of myself. That’s an example I’m happy to set.

The perfect purse

10 January 2007

I don’t know how men do without a purse. How can they possibly take everything they need along with them? You never hear them complaining about it, though. Perhaps they have a different perception of what they need to have with them at all times. Hmmm. Maybe I should take a page from their book and try just carrying a wallet and cell phone.

I could try that. But I’m not going to. Because I’ve found The Perfect Purse. The Perfect Purse is different for every woman. My requirements for the perfect purse change fairly often. But right now I need a purse that will hold my wallet, Palm, cell phone, iPod, and keys handily and readily. It needs to be big enough to hold my task diary (thank you Mark Forster). And it can’t be a black hole that things get lost in—built-in organizational pockets are a must. It has to stay on my shoulder. And, finally, it has to do all this without being bulky. Oh, it should look really good too.

I thought I found it in a Tommy Hilfiger “suede” purse I saw at TJMaxx. I didn’t buy it because it was damaged and regretted that decision so as I got home when my friend, Sally, who can do anything, suggested how I could repair it. When I went back the next day, the purse was gone. So I went on a fruitless quest to all the TJMaxx stores in the area. I ended up buying it on eBay. And guess what? It was too bulky. And, frankly, it had sort of an odd smell.

Then I found The Perfect Purse at J.Jill. It was even on sale. To sweeten the deal further, I bought it with a gift card given to me by my wonderful friends John and Rich. It’s real suede (Tommy’s was ultraseude), a dark moss color, sort of a hobo bag with pockets on either end. This picture doesn’t do it justice:

It’s beautiful. It fits all my requirements. It has just enough interior pockets (on one side: a pocket for my Palm and one for my iPod; on the other side, a zipper pocket). It has those fabulous exterior pockets, perfect for my cell phone and keys. And I like the image it projects: casual, comfortable, but with some elegance. People compliment it wherever I go. How close to perfection is that?

Where does the day go?

2 January 2007

Today was the one day this week where I planned to get a lot of stuff done. I have client appointments each day the rest of the week and while they’re just half-day appointments, I find it’s hard to be ultra-productive the second half of the day. I had big plans for getting so much accomplished in the broad expanse of time available today.

I don’t know what happened. Here it is almost the end of the day and two of the major things on my list aren’t done. I did get my book reviews in (I’m the book review columnist for Dog World magazine). I did do some client and prospective client phone follow up. I opened all the mail that came in while I was away for the holidays. I had a lovely chat with an old friend in England. I walked each of my dogs plus I walked to the home of Kirby’s best friend, Riley, to bring him to our house to play. And then I walked him home and played with his new kitten.

And now I have to call it a day so I can go to my knitting group. I realize that if I were really worried about not getting my office cleaned up and not getting a writing project finished I wouldn’t go to my knitting group. Or I wouldn’t have taken time out for my dogs. But those things aren’t negotiable.

I guess it’s all about expectations. Following Mark Forster’s “Do It Tomorrow” philosophy (I blogged about it here) I really want to create “will do” lists with tasks that I actually accomplish each day. I’m discovering that it takes some skill to know how much can get finished in a day. I must work on honing that skill.

As I face a very busy month with clients, I really need to get a handle on time management. It’s one of my biggest goals for the year. I want to busy and sane at the same time. I’ll keep you posted!

A pro-clutter movement?

21 December 2006

According to an article by Penelope Green in today’s New York Times, there’s an anti-anticlutter movement afoot. That movement, according to the article, urges people to say yes to mess and embrace their disorder. A new book due out in a couple of weeks called, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits to Disorder—How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place, by David H. Freedman and Eric Abrahamson, is intriguing. The book examines the benefits to messiness and the hidden cost of order.

I get that. I know that there are people who will never have a neat-as-a-pin desk or home at all times, even if they think they want it. Heck, I’m one of those people. We’re better off relaxing our standards a bit so as not to set ourselves up for failure. We should remind ourselves that it’s perfectly okay to be messy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t seek order in our lives. It doesn’t mean we have to live surrounded by physical clutter if leads to mental clutter and makes us feel out of control.

I wonder whether the authors have ever seen a debilitatingly messy home, one in which rooms had little paths winding through them or were not accessible at all. Those homes are heartbreaking. I can’t be convinced there’s any benefit to living like that. So while a little mess can be okay, and an obsession with order can, for some people be an exercise in frustration, there’s certainly room for healthy improvement in most messy people’s lives.

I’m looking forward to reading this book and perhaps using what I learn from it to help my clients not strive for rooms right out of Martha Stewart Living or Real Simple. After I’ve read it, I’ll blog about it here again.

Confessions of a couch potato

17 December 2006

I got up early and walked eight miles yesterday morning. I realize that doesn’t sound like something you’d hear from a self-described couch potato. Really, truly all I ever want to do is sit on my butt, watch TV (or DVDs or, especially, TV series on DVDs) and knit. If I won the lottery, I’d probably check into a five-star hotel and do just that for a week.

But since I’ve passed 40, I’ve grown up enough to realize the importance of exercise. I’m blessed with great genes and I’ve never had to exercise in order to keep my weight down. In the absence of vanity as a motivation, it took aging to get me going (well, that and my dogs; but I don’t consider their walks terrific exercise). Probably ten years ago, my college roommate, Ann, who’s a doctor, gave me a mini-lecture on how I need to be working on upper-body strength to stave off osteoporosis. It took me while, but I’ve finally integrated dumbbells into my morning routine.

Another college friend, KC, has gotten into walking half- and full marathons as part of her quest to get fit. She’s amazing—she walked the entire New York Marathon last month in seven and a half hours. Her enthusiasm for this is contagious and, thanks to KC, our entire group of five 40-something college buddies walked the Lewis and Clark Half Marathon in St. Charles, Missouri, on September 18, 2005. While I was sure I’d never do another, I’m actually training for the P.F. Chang’s Rock & Roll Half Marathon in Phoenix next month. Thus, I walked eight miles yesterday.

If you’d told me ten years ago that I would walk eight miles, pretty quickly, and finish by telling my friend and walking companion, “That was fun!” I’d have said you’re crazy. I’m certainly not obsessive about it, but I’m finally getting why people enjoy exercising. It’s so cool to set an exercise goal and achieve it.

Getting back to the upper-body-strength thing, I’m small, fair, and have a mother and grandmother with osteoporosis. So I’m a prime candidate. I’ve used a fantastic book called Quick Fit: The Complete 15-Minute No-Sweat Workout, by Richard R. Bradley and Sarah Wernick. Each day, I spend only five minutes with seven-pound dumbbells doing five weight exercises. (I try to get the cardio portion of my workout by my three-times-daily dog walks.) Not only are they easy, I’m actually a little strong, for the first time in my life. And I have muscles! (Also a first.) My arms actually look pretty in sleeveless tops, which is the goal of most women in their forties and above, I think. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It’s written for couch potatoes who want to incorporate a quick, no-sweat workout into their daily routine.

If you’re thinking there were an easy way to start exercising, buy this book. Read it, use it, and enjoy feeling proud of yourself—and feeling great.