Peace of Mind Organizing

Worth repeating (again): My love/hate relationship with homemade gifts

11 December 2025

I wrote this post a dozen years ago after reading an article on homemade gifts in Martha Stewart Living. The link is still live—it’s updated regularly and the projects are different from the 2013 article that inspired this post—but the message is still the same. Please think hard before giving non-perishable homemade gifts. It can be so hard for the gift recipient to let them go. And that isn’t helpful for folks struggling with clutter.

I’m a little bit crafty. I love beautiful, handmade items. I knit as a hobby and especially appreciate hand knits.

But I almost never give an item I’ve knitted as a gift. And that’s because I’ve seen among my clients a real difficulty in giving up an item that was a gift. And it’s even harder to give up hand-made gifts, even if they’ve never been used or loved. Sometimes the gift recipient just doesn’t share the taste of the giver.

I hate to urge people not to give handmade gifts, because I think they can be so wonderful. (I do actually give knitted items to people who have specifically asked for them.)

The current (December 2013) issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine has an article on creating hand-made gifts. (It’s been updated for 2025.) The photos are scrumptious.

This bacon jam looks delicious!

My big takeaway from the article is that there’s a wonderful middle ground between my reticence to give handmade gifts and my appreciation for the warmth and love behind handmade gifts. And that’s giving homemade edibles or other consumables. Gifts like homemade cookies, soap, beverages (like the homemade Limoncelli mentioned in the current article), or the creative aromatics pictured below are fabulous ideas.

Aromatic extracts: An unusual handmade gift

One year I gave away home-baked dog treats to my friends with dogs. (If that idea appeals to you, check out my dog-treat cookbook, You Bake ‘Em Dog Biscuits Cookbook). Another year I made and gave away biscotti. I remember the year my husband was in culinary school, he made gorgeous molded chocolates for gifts.

Making and giving a consumable gift is a great idea for those who feel the urge to make something for their loved ones. It’s a gift that will surely be appreciated. And one that won’t become clutter.

Photos by Maria Robledo. Courtesy of Martha Stewart Living. Copyright © 2013. For the instructions on making bacon jam and aromatic extracts (and other great things), see Love to Give: Handmade Holiday Gifts.

Worth repeating (again): Today's piece of holiday advice

1 December 2025

I wrote this post in 2017 and since then we’ve helped clients part with hundreds of pounds of no-long-loved holiday decor. It may sound like a paradox, but I believe it’s true: The more holiday decor you keep, the harder it is to decorate your home. I urge you to build some ease into your holiday season by following this advice!

Yesterday, I helped a client part with the holiday decor that she didn’t love and wasn’t using. Bags of decor left her storage room to find a new home with folks who will love and use it. She felt great about it (and so did I). When I got home, I wrote down this piece of advice for you.

My blog turns 19 this month!

17 November 2025

On November 10, 2006, I published my first post on this blog. It was entitled, What is organized?. Not surprisingly, it received zero comments. I’m pretty tickled to report that reading it now doesn’t embarrass me!

In the 19 years since, I’ve published 1714 posts (including my Worth Repeating posts, where I revisit favorite posts). That’s an average of 90 posts a year or almost two a week.

Writing a blog is a lot of work—particularly if you dedicate yourself to posting regularly. But for me it’s been well worth the effort. This blog has helped me personally and helped my business in so many ways. Here are a few:

• It helps my search rankings, which puts me in front of prospective clients. Blogging consistently for 19 years has been immensely helpful to my business.
• It lets clients and prospective clients get to know me and understand that I’m not perfect.
• It also lets clients and prospective clients know that despite my imperfection, I have expertise.
• It allows me to share my expertise.
• It’s allowed me to connect with people and companies throughout the world.
• It’s given me a lens through which to look at the world.
• It’s helped record my personal history so I don’t have to rely on my memory (in a way it’s a very public journal).

One thing I like about blogging, over relying on social media channels to reach prospective clients, is that a blog is less ephemeral. Past social media posts are harder to find. Now I have a 19-year library all in one place that anyone can search or browse. I also prefer the spaciousness of blogging that social media doesn’t permit. I can use as many words as I want.

This is my first blog, but it’s not my only blog. In 2012 I started a second blog, Organize Your Family History, which marries my passion for organizing with my passion for genealogy research. And in 2023, after I became a YNAB Certified Coach, I started a coaching practice called Peace of Mind Spending and established a blog on that website, where I write about money mindset as well as nuts and bolts posts around using the YNAB software.

Blogging regularly takes discipline. But it’s also something that can easily become a habit. I don’t pre-write (or even pre-plan) my posts. I just decide what to write each writing session. I don’t use AI to write my posts. I made my living as a freelance writer prior to opening my organizing business in 2005, so writing comes naturally to me.

I try to blog once a week on each of my blogs, though I’m the first to admit that doesn’t always happen. I include a link to the month’s blog posts in every issue of my monthly email newsletter, which is an easy way to make sure you don’t miss a new post.

I’m always open to blog post ideas from readers. If you have an idea for a post, please email it to me!

Photo by Jane Graystone on Unsplash

Happy surprises might be hiding in your mail

24 October 2025

Over the years, I’ve encountered many clients who don’t open their postal mail. Some take it to extreme levels. I get it. Mail can be scary. I remember back when I was dealing with credit-card debt I would be afraid to open the mail and see my statements.

But I’ve learned that the truth is the truth whether or not you know about it. And ignoring your mail never helps.

Moreover, when you open your mail, you may find happy surprises. This happened to me recently when I received a letter from my health insurance company. (I get my health insurance on the marketplace.) I fully expected it to be a notice of a rate increase for 2026. But I cringed and went ahead and opened it.

It was a check in the amount of $1,119.26! I was incredulous so read everything in the accompanying letter. Come to find out, by law there is an audit every three years of companies who offer health insurance through the marketplace. If a company doesn’t spend at least 80 percent of its proceeds from premiums on health care, its members are due a rebate. (I’m paraphrasing from memory and probably grossly oversimplifying.) I’d never heard of this rebate, so wasn’t expecting it. And if I hadn’t opened my mail, I wouldn’t have known about it!

Three weeks later, I received an email from my health insurance company telling me I should have received a rebate, so I eventually would have opened the envelope if I hadn’t thrown it away.

Just like clearing off your desk, putting away your clothes or emptying your email inbox (and lots of other things), opening your mail is easier if you do it every day before it becomes overwhelming. And who knows? Maybe your effort will be rewarded by a surprise check in the mail! (Or something equally nice.)

Photo by Wolfgang Vrede on Unsplash.

20th anniversary reflection: The power of working with a professional organizer

14 October 2025

Even after 20 years of helping others get organized, I still need help myself sometimes! This 2023 story reminds me why I fell in love with this profession in the first place—and why I still believe deeply in the transformative power of having support. (That’s why I had whole teams of organizers helping me when I downsized to an apartment in 2024.) Here’s a personal reminder of what we do…”

I’m always amazed at how often I put off dealing with clutter in my own home. If I give it some focused attention, I’m able to declutter and organize pretty easily. But if I add a professional organizer to the mix and the process is supercharged!

Last week, I asked one of my employees, Lydia, to help me declutter and organize four spaces: one of my bathroom closets, my food-storage containers and two of my pantry cupboards. I am so glad I did.

My house is 115 years old and most of his not been renovated. If you are a lover of old houses, you’d probably really like my house. It has plenty of “character.” The bathroom closets are functional but not at all customized for storage. I reorganized my primary bathroom closet a few years ago (again) and I just let disorder creep in to the point where I could barely stand it any more. So I reached out for help. And I’m so glad I did.

In two hours, that closet went from this:

To this:

We emptied the contents of the closet, shelf by shelf, onto a folding table right outside the bathroom. I looked at each item, got rid of those that had aged out, sorted like things together and then put it all back together again. Lydia suggested that a three-tiered rolling cart would work well on the floor of the closet (genius!), so I repurposed the one I’d been using next to my washing machine. (In its place, I put a nightstand I’m no longer using, which stores my laundry supplies very nicely.) The cart is perfect for my purposes in the bathroom.

Moving items to the rolling cart not only made much better use of the floor space, it created space on the shelves. (That was helped a lot by my letting go of so much.) Lydia suggested we move the towels from the top shelf down a shelf (since we now had room) where they’re now within reach. We folded guest sets together and put them in the back of the shelf and the towels I use in the front. For 22 years, I have been storing towels on the top shelf, where it’s difficult for me to put them away and get them out. I struggled for 22 years. Why didn’t I consider moving them to a more accessible shelf?

I love it when I have organizers help me because it makes me really appreciate the value of working with an organizing professional. You set aside time to focus on the process. You make a financial commitment. And you get a fresh set of (expert) eyes on your situation. The five hours I spent with Lydia on Friday made a huge difference. I’m been smiling every time I use the refreshed spaces.

If you have spaces in your home that are getting on your nerves, I urge you to set aside some time to focus on decluttering and organizing them. If you have inclination and budget, you can supercharge the effort by hiring a professional to help! If you’re in St. Louis, shoot me an email. Or go to NAPO’s website to find an organizing professional near you!

Jane Goodall's part in my becoming a professional organizer

2 October 2025

Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist, died this week. I felt a special connection to her because, believe it or not, she was the catalyst to my becoming a professional organizer. I was a freelance writer from 1995 until I started my business in 2005 and I worked with her on my last book. To put it mildly, it was not a good experience (that was the fault of the publisher and her staff, not Jane herself). After it was over, I knew a radical change was is order and I started Peace of Mind Organizing. I just reread this post, originally written in 2013, about why I became an organizer and why I continue being one. More than a decade later, all the reasons in this post are still valid and I’ll add another: It feels so great to have helped so many organizers get their start in their own businesses by working on my teams. (I now have employees, as well as independent contractors, and I’m thrilled they enjoy their jobs so much.) Peace of Mind Organizing® has helped hundreds of clients over the years and helped many organizers along the way. I feel so good about that. If you’ve ever wondered what a PO gets out of her work—which to some people looks decidedly unglamorous—read on.

Often when I meet folks who learn what I do for a living, they’re keen on learning how I became a professional organizer. I explain the training I took and how I went about starting my business. (That’s all detailed in my blog post, Are you interested in becoming a professional organizer?)

But seldom am I asked why I became a PO, rather than how. I thought I’d spend a little time exploring that question.

In my observation, there are two sorts of folks who become professional organizers:

• Those who do it because organizing comes so naturally to them. Being organized is like breathing. It’s their passion. So why not make a living doing it?

• Those who enter the field because of their own struggles in getting and staying organized. They’ve spent a lifetime seeking solutions for themselves and want to share those solutions with others.

I fall into that second camp. As I’ve mentioned over and over, I’m a naturally messy person. I’m pretty organized in my space and I’m definitely organized inside my head, but I’m a bit messy and unruly. I sought solutions for my time management and clutter issues throughout my life and I learned a lot. I felt it was time to start sharing.

When I first contemplated starting my business, I was a freelance writer. I’d been writing about pets for ten years and had written hundreds of articles on various aspects of pet care. I’d had seven books published (most of which are no longer available) and contributed to several others. I was working on my last book, an ill-fated venture called Jane Goodall’s Return to Gombe co-written with the famed primatologist. The book was never published (though a cover, pictured above, was produced). The process of writing that book excruciating and I knew that in order to get through writing that manuscript I had to know it was going to be my last book. So I started looking for other things to do.

As I considered becoming a PO, I thought of several very important things that being a professional organizer would offer that being a freelance writer was not delivering:

• The ability to help people directly and tangibly
• Respect for my expertise (I was being very disrespected during the whole Goodall book experience)
• Payment at the time of service

Those things were very appealing and a big part of why I became a PO. But why do I keep doing it, after twenty years? The truth is that my employees do most of the actual organizing. But I still thoroughly enjoy running the business, communicating with the clients and seeing the huge difference my organizers make in their lives.

Those initial three reasons did prove to be really compelling. In addition, here are some other things I’ve found to be very rewarding (as do my employees):

• We get to help people transform their lives.
• We help people feel better about themselves as we normalize (and sometimes empathize with) their messy behaviors.
• We can help our clients go from striving (and failing) to be perfectly organized to reveling in being organized enough.
• We get to effect vast, fast change by working in teams, rather than one on one.

Being a professional organizer has been life-changing work for me. And its results can be life changing for our clients. It is easily the most rewarding work I’ve done in a career that’s spanned four decades. And as long as it continues to be this rewarding, I’ll keep doing it. I’m so grateful to have the help of my wonderful employees!.

5 Lies About Keeping a Clean Home (That We All Need to Stop Believing)

25 September 2025

My employee, Lydia Boda, who herself has ADHD and is an expert on helping neurodivergent clients, shared this video with me. The creator, Jessica McCabe, is a superstar in the world of ADHD and I can see why. I love her charming, relatable style. And I found her video, 5 Lies About Keeping A Clean/Decluttered House to be spot on. I don’t have ADHD myself, but I could relate to everything she said and I think many of my readers will too.

You can see more of Jessica’s videos on the How to ADHD YouTube channel. Or check out her New York Times bestselling book, How to ADHD: An Insider’s Guide to Working with Your Brain!

I’d love to know which of her five lies resonated most with you!