Peace of Mind Organizing

Did you catch me on the radio?

10 January 2022

I’m a podcaster and I enjoy being a guest on other people’s podcasts but being interviewed live on the radio recently was a thrill! (It was fun to enter a client’s home the other day and be called a radio star.)

On December 30, I was interviewed by Jennifer Blome and Wendy Wiese on The Jennifer and Wendy Show on KTRS-AM here in St. Louis. It was fun—we covered a lot of topics, including whether people are born organized (or disorganized), the difficulty of parting with sentimental items, my advice for decluttering and organizing, Marie Kondo, and the benefits of living with fewer clothes.

You can listen to it here now, if you’d like:

I was flattered to be asked and thoroughly enjoyed the experience!

What's your Word of the Year?

3 January 2022

Each year since 2013 I have come up with a Word of the Year to guide my year. I keep a list of them in Evernote. Here’s the list:

2013: growth
2014: innovation
2015: recognition
2016: balance
2017: fearless
2018: connection
2019: expertise, processes, health
2020: intention
2021: ease

This year I added my tenth Word of the Year. It is generosity. I came up with it when I was behind the wheel of my car, cursing another driver for a minor infraction. I realized I would benefit (really, we all would benefit) from a more generous spirit toward others and myself.

That was in December and the word has come to mind many times since then. My hope that is in 2022 I will embody generosity in thoughts and actions.

Why do I take the time and effort to come with a Word of the Year? (It’s not usually as easy to come up with one as it was this year.) A Word of the Year serves as a filter through which I make decisions throughout the year. It helps keep me on track. It’s my North Star.

Most years, I try to come up with some sort of reminder of my word to keep it top of mind. Last year, I bought a necklace from My Intent that was a metal circle pendant with the word EASE stamped on it. This year I haven’t yet come up with a great reminder, but I am posting on my bulletin board the Post-It® note on which I wrote my word for the top of this blog post.

If you don’t yet have a Word of the Year, you might consider coming up with one. I urge you to stick to a single word. In 2019 when I had three words, the whole exercise really lost its power. I couldn’t remember them! If you’d like a little help in coming up with yours, check out Christine Kane’s Word-of-the-Year Discovery Tool. I’ve used it many times to come up with my word.

The Word of the Year can be a powerful tool and it is fun to look back and see what your focus was in years gone by!

Top nine blog posts of 2021

30 December 2021

As the year wraps up, I thought I’d take a look back at my favorite posts of 2021. I narrowed it down nine that I thought were particularly helpful. I hope you find them useful (or at least interesting)!

In chronological order:

Challenge completed! 100 days of wearing the same dress. I literally wore the same wool-blend dress every day for 100 days and it was an awesome experience.

Styling your Zoom backdrop. When Zoom became a way of life, I knew that I had to up my game with my Zoom backdrop. So I called in the big gun, my friend Geralin Thomas to help me create a peaceful (and branded) Zoom backdrop.

Decluttering dog toys. My standard poodle, Bix, love his toys. And he had an overabundance of them (to say the least). I gave them the big declutter treatment.

10 things you can throw away right now. Lots of folks hang on to stuff they needn’t be afraid of tossing. This list can get you started throwing stuff away.

Go-bag to the rescue. My husband is having some health issues that have resulted in sudden hospitalizations. I created a hospital go-bag to grab when necessary and it proved to be a great help.

Meet my employees. In 2021 I added a second employee to my team and I (finally) put a page about them on my website. They’re great people and great organizers!

Buying and selling a car in this crazy market. When I decided to take a high offer for my van, I had to use my wits to snag a new car to replace it. Here’s what I did.

Do you back up your computer regularly? My computer suddenly died one day in October and having both a backup on an external hard drive and in the cloud meant I didn’t lose anything (though I may gained some grey hairs in the process).

I feel fortunate to have this blog to help me remember what went on in my life over the last year (last 13 years, actually). It’s so nice to be able to share those things that have helped me.

Thank you for reading this blog. I wish you the very best for 2022!

Join me for 30 days of yoga!

27 December 2021

I’m a HUGE fan of Adriene Mishler’s Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel. Encouraged by my niece back in late 2018, I’ve been doing yoga semi-regularly (I went more than a year without missing a day!) and one of my goals for 2022 is to weave yoga into my daily routine so that daily yoga becomes effortless. (You can read Nine Things I Love About Yoga with Adriene if you’d like to learn more.)

Adriene makes it really easy to start a new year off with a daily yoga practice by offering a new 30-Day Yoga Journey every January. This is the eighth year in a row she’s offered it and I am eager for it to start. This will be my fourth or fifth 30-day journey. One of the things I love about it, besides it taking away the dilemma of which yoga video to do today, is that it’s intended for participants of all experience levels and it’s carefully curated, with fresh content that builds on itself.

To sign up, just go to the Move website. The whole experience is free. You’ll receive an email each day with the link to that day’s video. And you’ll be doing yoga with hundreds of thousands of people. What a community!

If you plan to participate, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Great advice from organizers (including me!) in Porch.com + Secrets of Getting Organized

23 December 2021

In case you’d like to hunker in this holiday week and read some great organizing advice from professionals, I wanted to share a couple of resources that I was included in. These are both outlets I’ve been featured in more than once and it’s always nice to be asked back!

First it’s, Tips for Starting 2022 Clutter-Free: The Experts Advice, an article on Porch.com. I’m one of more than a dozen professional organizers offering advice in various areas. (I was also part of their Home Organization: Tips from Professional Organizers roundup in November 2020.)

In addition, I received in the mail yesterday the most recent issue of Secrets of Getting Organized magazine from Better Homes and Gardens. This is the fifth year in a row I’ve been interviewed for this glossy magazine. (It’s such an honor to be included among my esteemed colleagues.) And it’s a really enjoyable magazine to read. There are no ads, the advice is terrific and the photos are absolute eye candy. It’s available wherever you buy magazines (or online at magazine.store) until March 10, 2022. That’s a picture of the cover at the top of this post.

Now’s a great time to read about getting organized. I hope you’ll check these resources out!

December tiny projects challenge: Day 5

20 December 2021

After a weekend off, I took on a truly tiny project today: My evening bags. I store the few fancy dresses I own plus my evening bags and shawls in the guest-room closet. Last Friday when I put away all the little wristlets that I had been taking up space in the household desk, I noticed that I have a large collection of evening bags, which is puzzling since I’ve attended probably two fancy events in the past 15 years (both were weddings).

I had put the wristlets in a Kangaroom hanging purse organizer (which, alas, is no longer for sale as far as I can tell), where I also store my evening bags. Here’s the before picture:

They were tidy enough, but excessive. And as I noted on Friday, I had room to let go of some of the wristlets too.

So I quickly went through them and pulled out evening bags that didn’t make my heart sing. I ended up keeping four (probably at least three more than I need). I also let go of four wristlets, keeping five.

In addition to the evening bags, I let go of a velvet evening stole. (I kept two fancy shawls.) Here’s a picture of what I donated:

The purses are in excellent condition. It makes me happy to think of someone being able to use them.

And here are the wristlets I said goodbye to:

Finally, here’s the improved closet. Not a dramatic change, but I love that there is now white space there!

This entire tiny project literally took six minutes. It speaks to the power of grabbing little pockets of time when they’re available! I hope this series inspires you to look for tiny projects in your house!

December tiny projects challenge: Day 4

17 December 2021

Today’s tiny project was the organizer on the desk in my home that I call the household desk. My husband and I each have home offices with desks, but this desk is in a central room in our living space and stuff definitely tends to accumulate there. This teak organizer is a clutter magnet (as such organizers often are).

So I decided to declutter and organize this little space, which I probably haven’t been done in a few years.

Here’s the before shot (please don’t judge):

I started with the top shelf on the left of the organizer and just worked my way through. I went through each shelf, slot and drawer, editing as much as possible. I threw away a number of old items (like business cards for contractors we didn’t choose and expired Airborne gummies). I relocated a number of things to my office, which helped a lot.

Here’s the after shot:

Probably the most helpful thing I thought of was to move the face masks that I would just toss on the organizer to a doorknob. There’s a door just to the left of the desk that opens in and almost always remains open. So I hung the masks by their earloops on the inside doorknob, where they’re accessible but unobtrusive. And since I’ll surely go to the desk for a mask, they will be nearby when I don’t find them where I’m looking for them.

Here are some of the other things I did that were easy to do and so effective in cleaning up this space:

• I moved the blood pressure cuff to my office, where I’m more likely to remember to use it.
• I put Bix’s clickers for dog training in a little felted wool bowl I’d knitted
• I tested all the pens and removed most of them, so I would have easier access to pens when I needed them. (The pen holder was too full!) And I used a glass I was going to donate as a pen holder rather than the less attractive red one I’d bought in the 90s.
• I moved one of my action figures (Robert Mueller) to my husband’s office, because there was obviously one too many action figures in that space.
• I gathered up my inordinately large collection of wristlets and wallets (from a ceaseless quest for a solution to carrying around my money) and moved them to a different space downstairs. I’ll probably donate a lot of them. (By the way, I found a wallet/small purse solution, which I’ll share in a future post.)
• Best of all, I got rid of the expired Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons, since they no longer accept expired coupons.

This one took longer than I expected—probably 40 minutes. But they were very pleasant minutes and I’m enjoying the results!