Peace of Mind Organizing

The tiny wardrobe continues!

9 October 2017

On July 1, 2016 I decided to try out Courtney Carver’s Project 333, an experiment in having a minimal wardrobe. I thought I’d do it for a year, but I think I’m hooked. Each quarter, I select 33 articles of clothing from which to dress for the next three months. The clothes I don’t wear, but don’t want to give away, reside in bins in my basement. I’ve blogged about my collection each time I’ve made the selection.

October 1 marked the start of my sixth quarter doing this. I’ve been traveling so I’ve been a little behind but today I finalized the collection. Because I’ve been doing it so long and I’ve proven to myself I can do it, I decided to cut myself some slack and give myself permission to have as many clothes as I wanted in this season’s collection, rather than limit myself to 33.

I had a pleasant surprise. Even though I’d given myself permission to have as much as I wanted, when I chose the clothes for this collection, the number came to only 36.

Here’s why: I have found that having fewer clothes in my closet makes my life so much better. Far from feeling limited, I feel liberated by having fewer choices to make when I get dressed. It gives me time for more important things in my life!

My collection includes clothes, shoes and accessories that I wear out of the house to client appointments (but not team organizing appointments, to which I wear work-out clothing) and social events and just going about life. It does not include dog-walking clothes, exercise clothes, pajamas or underwear. This quarter, I decided to exclude jewelry and coats from the count.

Here’s what made the cut:

• 3 pairs of pants (including one pair of jeans)
• 3 pairs of leggings
• 7 dresses/tunics
• 6 sweaters
• 1 turtleneck
• 1 jacket
• 3 long-sleeved tops
• 3 short-sleeved tops
• 2 ponchos
• 1 shawl
• 2 scarves
• 3 pairs of boots (1 long, 1 short, another short pair I plan to purchase)
• 1 pair dress shoes

Here’s a photo of the collection. I love how I can see everything in my closet and I don’t have to think hard about what to wear. (I could probably put on a blindfold and pull out an outfit, since everything is coordinated.)

It feels ample and abundant to me and I’m very excited for cold weather to finally arrive so I can wear these clothes!

Worth repeating: Using my early-morning time

6 October 2017

I got up this morning at 5:30 to get some important tasks done before I leave for a client appointment. Over a year ago, I wrote this post about using the precious early-morning time and I’m still making great use of the time I have when everyone is asleep. I’m still doing my genealogy research first thing in the morning and it’s working out very well!

I’m a morning person. I know that I’m most productive in the morning. Especially first thing in the morning. My brain is turned on and I can be pretty focused when everyone else in the house is asleep. (And by everyone else, I mean my husband and dog.)

I’ve learned that if I want to get something done I should do it during this precious early-morning time. For me, this is especially true of blogging. It’s easier for me to blog first thing in the morning than later in the day. I have trouble sitting down and focusing on blogging in the afternoon or evening. So I know that if I want to blog consistently, I am best off doing it in the morning.

Recently, I’ve turned that early-morning focus to doing genealogy research. (I blogged about this very thing on Organize Your Family History recently.) I had not been taking the time to do genealogy research, which was really disappointing me. Now that I’m doing it first thing, I’m really enjoying it and making progress. Of course that makes blogging the second thing I do in the morning, but that’s working out too.

I started to think about the things I can do to make it easier for me to do important things first thing, even on days where I have early client appointments. I’d prefer not to have to get up earlier, so I try to do routine things the night before instead of taking precious morning-brain time in the morning. These things include:

• Loading my car with supplies
• Deciding what I’m going to wear and even putting out the clothes
• Making lunch or gathering snacks
• Clearing off my desk so it’s easy for me to get right to work
• Making a short task list for the next day so that I’m reminded of what I want to get done first thing (instead of mindlessly going to email or Facebook)

Just doing these easy things the afternoon or evening before can allow me to harness the power of my early-morning brain. If you’re a morning person and you have something you’re having trouble getting done, you might give it a try.

If you’re an evening person—which is okay too, of course—you might try switching this up for your schedule. If you know your peak time, work around that. If you’re on your game at 9 pm try to make sure the mindless before-bed stuff is done so that you can really get into your flow at 9 and nothing gets in your way.

Is there something you’ve been wanting to accomplish regularly that keeps going undone? Try doing it before everything else.

Repurpose a contact lens holder

26 September 2017

I had lunch with my friend and former team member, Julie Hough of Enjoy Mouse Travel, the other day and she pulled a plastic contact lens holder out of her purse. She casually opened it, dipped her finger in and rubbed it on her lips. I immediately stopped the conversation to ask her more about what was in that contact lens case, since it obviously wasn’t holding contact lenses! Julie uses a special lip ointment and she makes it very portable (and non-messy) by filling the little compartment with ointment.

I thought it was brilliant and snapped a photo of it. It seems to me that you could use these highly portable, tightly sealing cases for a lot of things, including pills, lip balm, even makeup.

I mentioned this in my newsletter last month. If you don’t subscribe to my monthly newsletter (it comes out on the 15th of every month), now’s a good time to start because I just had the format refreshed so that it’s now mobile responsive. I think the new format is a little easier to read and I now have the capability to add photos, if I’d like. I occasionally offer promotions to newsletter readers, so it might be worth subscribing.

P.S. Julie left organizing to become a Disney Travel Planner. She did a guest blog post about her services with Enjoy Mouse Travel back in June 2017. If you’re planning any sort of Disney trip I encourage you to contact her—you can enjoy an organized, stress-free Disney trip without any charge for her services!

What to do before an organizing appointment

18 September 2017

It’s not unusual for a new client to ask me what she should do before I arrive at her home for the first time. (And, yes, most—but not all—of my clients are women.) Most assume they need to clean up the house.

I almost always suggest that the client not clean up her home for me. Piles and messy spots can be revealing. They reveal where the client and/or her family naturally tends to rest stuff. They reveal the stuff that’s actually in use, typically. They reveal an absence of a working system for handling the mail.

There’s no need to be ashamed of piles and messy spots. It’s why you’re looking for help, after all. (And believe me, I’ve had professional organizers help me in my home, so I understand the discomfort of airing my dirty laundry, so to speak.)

What you can do that is helpful is to spend a little type visualizing what you would like your space—and your life—to be once you achieve your organizing goals. Try to put that into words that you can share with your organizer. Knowing what success looks like is a huge part of achieving it. And being able to communicate that vision of success will really help your organizer.

So I suggest you put aside the notion that you have to clean up. Take that energy and put it into thinking and perhaps writing down what you desired when you decided to call in an organizer. And, please, be kind to yourself. Self-recrimination over a messy space doesn’t do you or anyone else any good.

Worth repeating: How not to label a photo

15 September 2017

I wrote this post in 2013 and came across it again today. I think the advice is still good. Even if you’re working with digital, not printed, photos, creating good labels (in the metadata) is a good practice. It makes the photos much more valuable for generations to come.

I blogged over at Organize Your Family History about the importance of labeling photos while the information is fresh in your mind. It’s also important to make the labels meaningful.

While I was going through a box of old (very old) family photos with my mother on my recent visit to Walla Walla, we came across this one, whose label made me laugh.

In the absence of a date, that’s a meaningless label. Well, virtually meaningless. At the very least, we know this photo is about 95 years old, since my mother inherited it after her mother died in 1999. And let’s not even talk about the fact that the label doesn’t mention who is in the photo!

Now that we’re printing out fewer and fewer photos, remember that you can label digital photos as well, using metadata. That’s a little easier said than done as this blog post from the Library of Congress discusses, but worth the effort.

When it comes to archiving your own photos, I urge you to think of the next generations who will be looking at them. That means consider getting rid of duplicates and bad shots and labeling those that you deem worth keeping and passing on! Great labels include the names of the people in the photos and where and when it was shot. If it’s a special occasion, that’s nice to mention too!

NAPO has a new name!

12 September 2017

If you’ve read my blog or website before, you’ve seen me write about NAPO, the National Association of Professional Organizers. This educational organization has been a huge part of my life and business since I started Peace of Mind Organizing® in 2005.

In 2017, NAPO members voted to change the association’s Doing Business As name. The new name is National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals. (The website remains the same, NAPO.net.) A new logo to go with the new name was revealed just a week ago. Here it is:

I think it’s lovely!

NAPO’s acronym will not change. The new name reflects that professional organizers help people more with stuff; we help with their productivity, at work and at home, as well.

It’s going to take me little while to update everything on my website and even longer, perhaps, to say the correct name when I’m talking. I’m very glad NAPO will remain NAPO!

The joys of working with an organizer

31 August 2017

For seven years, I’ve periodically swapped organizing services with the amazing Aby Garvey. Aby is not only great at making spaces function really well, she makes them beautiful too. I absolutely love watching Aby fiddle with a collection of something to make it look great in a container. I could do it all day.

This past Saturday, Aby was kind enough to come to home and help me address my the large closet in my home office, where I keep supplies. Three years ago, she helped me tackle the same space and made it really lovely. I blogged about that experience in a post called Lessons learned while decluttering. In the intervening three years the space had become a little unruly. It still functioned well, but it had lost its visual peace.

I thought Aby could work her magic on it and didn’t really think there was much I’d let go of. I was wrong about that latter point.

Here’s a before picture. Not bad. Not great.

And here’s the after picture.

Ahhhh. I was able to let go of a lot of stuff that wasn’t serving me, which allowed for more open space. I can’t stop looking at it. It makes me smile.

What really struck me, as usual, is how much easier it is to let go of stuff in the presence of an organizer. Aby wasn’t cajoling me by any stretch of the imagination, though she did encourage me. But there’s something about the focus on my stuff that comes during a session with an organizer, along with the objective presence of a professional, that allowed me to make decisions that for years I’d been avoiding.

I ended up letting go of a lot of items I had decided to keep during that 2014 session with Aby. For example, we had created a little box marked “Special Notebooks” that I literally hadn’t opened since we created it. Virtually everything in that box was donated, along with the box itself.

I donated three bags and two boxes of books, office supplies and notebooks. (I have a thing for notebooks, even though I barely use them anymore.) I donated a binder whose spine label made me realize I’d had it for about 25 years. It felt really great to part with stuff that had just been languishing in my office for no good reason.

I absolutely have the skills to organize my office-supply closet myself. But it’s much less enjoyable to organize alone. Having Aby there not only made it made the organizing session fun, it made it more effective. I let go of stuff I probably wouldn’t have on my own. And I benefited from Aby’s expertise and aesthetics. Lucky me!

Thank you, Aby!