Peace of Mind Organizing

Just launched: Insider's Guides for New Organizers

28 August 2017

In 2010, I starting publishing my Organizing Guides, concise downloadable pdfs containing bits of wisdom on various organizing topics. Currently, there are eight Organizing Guides, focused on providing help to the general public.

In 2014, I added a guide to the collection aimed at helping people who want to start an organizing business. The most widely read post on this blog is my post on becoming a professional organizer. (Watch for a new update to that post soon!) I wrote that guide to help provide more in-depth information for new or aspiring organizers.

I’ve added three more guides for new organizers and renamed the series the Insider’s Guides for New Organizers. Currently there are four available:

• Living the dream: 10 ingredients for a successful organizing business. (This is a slightly updated version of the 2014 guide)
• Ten things I wish I’d known when I started my organizing business
• The organizing essentials I take to every client appointment
• Do you have what it takes to succeed as a professional organizer?

Each of these guides is designed to stand alone, so some of the most important points are repeated. But each has its own focus.

If you’re a new or aspiring professional organizer and are curious about what qualities I attribute my business success to, please check out the Insider’s Guides for New Organizers. I plan to continue adding new titles to the series in the very near future!

Like the Organizing Guides, the Insider’s Guides are only $9 each. They range in length from 6 to 12 pages. Click here for more information and to purchase them!

Gaining focus when I'm feeling distracted

24 August 2017

I’ve had a crazy busy couple of weeks working with clients. It’s been very rewarding, but it’s meant that some administrative tasks (and mess) have built up in my absence. When I came home after a long day, I did the bare minimum to keep my business running. Tasks like working on Quickbooks and putting away papers fell by the wayside.

I’m thrilled to have a two whole days at my desk this week (today and tomorrow) and a light client load next week. It’s after 3 pm and while I have created some order, not a whole lot else has been accomplished. I’m particularly distractible today—I’m finding myself bouncing from small task to small task and website to website. I have a task list, but I’m not exactly plowing through it.

When this happens, I know that it’s time to pull out my secret weapon: My timer. I know from experience that when I set my timer for just a few minutes—as little as five minutes—I get stuff done. I like playing beat the clock, and knowing the clock is ticking in the background tends to keep me focused.

Once the timer goes off, I pick a new task (or keep going on what I’m working on) and set the timer again. I find on days like this, I’ll get a lot more done in five five-minute bursts followed by a five-minute break than I will if I set the timer for 30 minutes.

My other big challenge this month is get some writing done. My writing projects include a promised guest post for Unclutterer, an article for the Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly, and my own organizing guides, not to mention posts for both my blogs. I had hoped to get the non-blog writing finished this month and suddenly the end of the month is just a week away.

I have high hopes that I’ll have a productive writing week next week, but if that’s going to happen, I need to get started now. So today I made a list of the writing I hope to accomplish in the next week and what the priorities are.

Sometimes the hardest part is getting started, and I’d like to start on the first piece today. That’s where my timer comes into play. I know which article I want to work on. Once I publish this blog post, I’m going to set a timer for 15 minutes, with the plan to do two 15-minute bursts. Then I’ll call it a day for writing. I know that having started today will make it easier to keep going tomorrow.

So on these days when my problem isn’t that I don’t have enough time but rather that I don’t have enough focus, I pull out these handy tools:

• My task list: I break the projects down into tiny tasks. (I keep my list in Evernote.)
• My timer: I decide what I want to work on, then set a timer for a tiny amount of time.
• Some breaks: When my timer goes off, I allow myself to take a break, then, if need be, I’ll shift focus after the break to keep me engaged.
• I get started without worrying about finishing.
• I set an end time to the work day. On open-ended days like today, I can get more done if I decide what time the work day will end. That throws al little urgent into the equation. Today, I’ve decided to end the day by 5:30.
• Dangle a reward. I’ve already decided that I’m going to stream a movie when I’m through with my work day.

Now it’s 4 pm. I could beat myself up over my lack of productivity today. Instead, I’m going to give myself a little productivity boost and set myself up for great success tomorrow by creating a great, detailed task list to the start the day with.

I'm swooning over the new Brother P-touch Cube

17 August 2017

Professional organizers love our label makers. I’ve owned a few Brother P-touch label makers over the last dozen years an have always appreciated the clean, crisp laminated labels and the QWERTY keyboards. (I blogged about how to select a label maker back in 2015).

None of my label makers has been perfect. The LED readout on my PT-2030 isn’t backlit and sometimes it’s hard to read. The keyboard is too small to touch type, so typing can be laborious. Navigating the little readout to make corrections is tedious. But it still makes great labels.

I’m delighted to report that Brother has upped its label maker game and created the Brother PT-P300BT aka the Brother P-touch Cube and it’s a game changer. The Cube is a bluetooth-enabled label printer that links with a smartphone app. You download the P-touch Design&Print app and use it to type and design your labels. (The app is available for Apple and Android phones.) Your phone communicates with the printer wirelessly via bluetooth. And it works like a charm.

I just finished up a large team organizing project that required my making a lot of labels. I had read about the Cube on an online forum for professional organizers and was intrigued. But I didn’t see an immediate need to shell out $60 for a new label maker. After labeling 20 or more bins on this job, I realized that if I could dictate my labels rather than type them, the process would go faster. I had a day between the third and fourth sessions of this job, so I purchased the Cube (which was on sale for $45). Yesterday I created 20 or so labels at the end of the session and it was so fast and easy. I’m in love with this new technology.

Here are a few of the features packed into the Cube and the Design&Print app:

• It’s smaller than a traditional label maker (though at 4.6” x 4.6” x 2.5” it’s by no means tiny).
• It uses regular TZ laminated tape cartridges, so I don’t have to buy new label tape.
• There’s lots of flexibility in terms of designing the labels; the app has many frames and symbols.
• The app comes with templates for attractive labels for typical uses (cords, flash drives, clothing bins, kitchen, for example).
• You can use any font that your phone has available.
• My team members can put the app on their phones and print to my printer (using my tape) from wherever we are in the client’s house.
• You dictate your labels like you dictate your texts!

Is it perfect? Of course not. Here’s my wish list to make it better:

• I wish it had a rechargeable battery (like my phone) rather than my having to use the included power adapter or my own batteries (it takes 6 AAA batteries, not included).
• I wish it had an automatic label cutter. Instead I have to press down on the cutter between labels.
• I wish I didn’t have to pair my phone to the device each time I use it. In fairness, I’ve had it for less than 48 hours—maybe there’s a fix for that.
• I wish it would default to one label to be printed so I didn’t have to touch the quantity each time. (Again, perhaps there’s a setting for that I haven’t found.)

The Cube is on sale for $45 at all the online outlets I checked (Office Depot, Amazon, Staples). I believe that sale price expires on August 19. That said, I would have been happy to pay the full price of $60. For me, it’s well worth the price tag.

What can you do in five minutes?

9 August 2017

I’m a big believer in using a timer to motivate me to work quickly and get stuff done. I have a seriously full calendar but a relatively free morning today so I thought I’d see if I could some clutter spots and other small tasks taken care of.

So I pulled out my phone and asked Siri to set a timer for five minutes. I did it seven times. Here’s what I managed to accomplish in just seven five-minute blocks:

• I printed a couple of genealogy-related documents, wrote a cover note, and mailed them to a friend who doesn’t have internet access.
• I whittled away at my email inbox, taking it from 78 messages to 35 in two five-minute sessions
• I took out of the car and put away a bunch of containers that I’d taken to a client session
• I inventoried those containers
• I put away and inventoried a different of set of bins that are stored in my basement
• I cleared off the completely cluttered countertop in our extra kitchen. It had become a bit of a dumping ground (to say the least).

That’s a lot of distracting clutter busted in just 35 minutes!

Because I apparently have no shame, I’ll share with you that cluttered counter and how it looked five minutes later.

It’s not amazing, but it’s a heck of a lot better for a really small investment of time and effort. (This is a room I don’t spend much time in, but I’d been turning a blind eye for so long!)

Your turn. Do you have a spare five minutes? What can you do in that time to make a difference in your home?

Worth repeating: Visual task management

31 July 2017

Last week, I took an ICD tele class on Personal Kanban for people with ADHD. I was familiar with personal kanban, having tried it out myself a few times over the last seven years. I was happy to hear Jim Benson, who gave the talk, state that while there are plenty of platforms in which to do kanban digitally, he recommends that people start out with Post-It® Notes and a whiteboard, like I’ve always done. The overriding principles with kanban are (1) visualize your work and (2) limit your works in progress. Here’s my August 2010 post about my experience with personal kanban.

As I blogged last month, I’ve been experimenting with personal kanban for task management. It’s based on a Japanese model of project management, adapted to personal tasks.

I’ve found it to be simple and effective (though I haven’t dug into all the theory behind it) and thought I’d share my thoughts on it. It seems to me that the system is particularly good for visual people, who like to keep things in their face.

Here’s how it’s worked for me:

I took a 30” x 24” white board and divided it (using dry-erase markers) into three columns:

• Backlog (which takes up half the space)
• Doing (which takes up 1/6 of the space)
• Done (1/3 of the space)

I did a brain dump of my tasks, one per Post-it note (I use 3” x 3” Post-its) and put them in the Backlog section. I add tasks as they come to me.

When it’s time to plan my day, I peruse the backlog, selecting up to five tasks to put in my Doing column. I never allow more than five tasks in my Doing column.

When I finish those tasks, the Post-it moves to the Done column. At the end of the day, I remove the Done tasks, placing some back in Backlog if the task wasn’t completely finished.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It seems very simple to me, though when you start digging around on the Internet, there’s lots of theory and jargon behind it.

Here’s today’s board, at the beginning of the day, after I took off my Dones and figured out the day’s Doing:

Daily tasks are stashed in the lower right area.

I’ve found some great benefits to this system:

• It keeps me focused on the few tasks I’m supposed to be doing at any given time, rather than flitting from one to another or feeling overwhelmed by my backlog.

• I use my intuition to pick the tasks that move from Backlog to Doing. I don’t do any fancy prioritizing. (I hate prioritizing tasks.)

• I get to see my progress as the Done section fills up over the course of the day.

• I don’t have to keep track of tasks—I just put them in the Backlog section.

• It’s easy to color code, which gives me a sense of the time I’m spending in various arenas of my life. I use different colored Post-its to represent general business/client work, work on e-commerce, work on business-related volunteer projects and personal items.

• The physical limitation of the Backlog section forces me to get stuff done (or throw tasks out).

Every now and then the Backlog section gets really crowded. When that happens, I follow the suggestion of Jim Benson, the personal kanban guru, and do a Time Capsule in which I pluck off a bunch of small tasks, put those notes on my desk, and power through them. That’s very effective. If I spend an hour or so a week doing that, lots of little things get done (and off my board).

The biggest drawback, so far, to this system (for me) has been the lack of portability. I’m accustomed to keeping a to-do list with me (like my Autofocus list, one of the systems that preceded this effort). When I’m out and about, I have to jot down the task and remember to put it on my board.

I just today downloaded a personal kanban iPhone app called iKan, which may solve the problem. I don’t like the the idea of having both electronic and physical boards, so I envision the iKan for me to capture tasks. But I haven’t even played with it yet. I’ll report back.

If I were into electronic task management, I could use an electronic personal kanban system, like LeanKit Kanban. But the physical one is working nicely for me.

Using Evernote to organize my Kindle library

28 July 2017

As I posted back in 2013 in a post called there’s no such thing as a free book, I have no shortage of books on my beloved Kindle Paperwhite. (I still love it and I’m still using the same device I bought in December 2012!)

Because it’s so easy to download free Kindle books, thanks to Bookbub and my local public libraries, I have hundreds of books on my Kindle. Unfortunately, the user interface of on the Amazon website under “Your Content and Devices” offers only two ways to organize my vast library. One is to sort it by Title, Author, or Acquired Date. The other is to put books into collections. Neither is sufficient, in my opinion.

My problem would arise when I finished a book and wanted to figure out which one to start next. If I looked at the Amazon site, I would see one screen of books, usually the ones most recently acquired. I tried making collections, but that was cumbersome and less than helpful.

Then I thought about Evernote, which I already use to I organize virtually everything else in my life. Eureka!

I created a notebook called Kindle Library. In the notebook I entered about 30 books from my library that I was fairly sure that I wanted to read. Each book gets a note. The title of the note is the book’s title. The body of the note contains the author and the date I acquired it.

Here’s a screenshot of the most recent notes in my library:

I use tags abundantly to make it easy for me to figure out which book to read next. I have tags for genre and for favorite authors. And I use a tag called Next Up for books I know I’ll be anxious to read. I tag library books so I can try to read them before they expire. I also tag a book Read once I’ve read it.

I’ve created the habit of adding a book to the Kindle Library notebook as soon as I acquire it. That is the key to the success of this system.

I read a lot and I try not to spend a lot of money on books. (Apologies to the authors out there.) With my daily Bookbub email, I try to only consider downloading free books. And lately I’ve been resisting even those because I know they will just clutter up my Kindle library (and the device itself).

Using Evernote for my Kindle library has taken away the slight stress that my Kindle had introduced into my life. Now when I finish a book (I try to read a book a week), it’s easy for me to pick the next one. The key, again, is creating a note for each book as soon as I download it.

Once again Evernote comes to my rescue!

Shifting priorities

25 July 2017

My dad comfortable back at home.

In July, I scheduled a one-week trip that had me in Portland, Oregon, for the wedding of dear friends, followed by five days in Walla Walla, Washington (a 4.5-hour drive from Portland) visiting my father.

Things didn’t go quite as planned. I had a marvelous time at the wedding on Saturday and headed to Walla Walla on Sunday as scheduled. But I discovered on the way that my father had fallen in his condo, where he lives alone, and had been unable to get up for 16 hours. That’s scary business for an 86-year-old. Fortunately, he was able to get up and get help and he was driven to the emergency room. I arrived at the ER about 30 minutes after he did.

Suddenly, the tenor of my trip changed. I quickly extended my day of departure from Friday to Monday. I spent five days hanging out with and advocating for my father at the hospital. On Thursday, the day before I was originally scheduled to leave, he was transferred to a skilled nursing facility for rehab. He did so well there that he stayed only a week. (The original estimate was one to two weeks.) When Monday came, the day of my rescheduled departure, it was very hard for me to envision leaving him without my assistance in handling his home safety visit and transitioning back into his home. I ended up extending my stay again, by a week.

Looking back, the decision seemed like a no brainer. Of course I should stay. But at the time, it was difficult. I had to reschedule about a half dozen client appointments (some of which involved rescheduling teams). I had to adjust my flights and figure out what to do with my rental car (the original plan had me driving the car back to Portland for my flight home), all while trying not to rack up a huge bill. I also was feeling bad about being away from home, where my husband, Barry, was doing all the care for our poodle, Bix, in blistering hot weather.

The minute I made the decision to stay and started changing plans, I felt relieved. Thankfully, I didn’t take too big a hit financially and my clients and team members were, of course, understanding. And Barry was great about it.

I am so glad that I have the flexibility to make adjustments like these. Nothing else I could have done at that time was more important than helping my father stay safe, continue his remarkable recovery, and know how loved he is. At his age (and after a fall-related concussion) it was hard for him to understand everything the medical professionals were telling him, so I was glad I was there to explain things and ask questions on his behalf.

When I left Walla Walla after two weeks, I felt comfortable that my father was safe and could take care of himself. We were both overwhelmed and gratified by the show of concern and support from his many friends. So I’m feeling okay about being back in St. Louis.

Sometimes when life throws things at us, we have to make some tough decisions and shift our priorities. In this case, I’m really glad I followed my gut.

Oh, and by the way, even though my trip swelled from seven to 17 days, I still only wore half of the clothes I brought in my suitcase! Thankfully, I had easy access to laundry facilities.