Peace of Mind Organizing

How will you be remembered?

16 May 2016

Rick Simoncelli

My husband and I attended a friend’s memorial service on Saturday. Rick Simoncelli was a warm, wonderful, accomplished man, who will be greatly missed not only by his family and friends, but by the St. Louis community. His memorial service was a beautiful celebration of a life well-lived, though Rick was only 65 when he passed away from brain cancer. 250 or so people crowded the church to pay their respects in a touching and joyous celebration of life.

Listening to the kind words spoken about Rick and learning about aspects of his life I hadn’t known about, I started thinking about my own memorial service. What do I hope will be said about me?

Two things jumped to my mind: I would like to be remembered for how my life affected others (in a positive way, of course). And I would like to be remembered as a kind person.

Do I want to be remembered as a successful business person or author? Sure. But it’s more important to me to be remembered as someone who brought joy to others and really helped them.

The good news is that this is within my control. I can live life as I want to be remembered. It’s so easy to get caught up in day-to-day activities, focusing on the minutiae rather than the big picture. As death tends to do, Rick’s passing brought home the realization of how short our lives our and how important it is to make the most of every day.

In the coming weeks, will take the opportunity to ponder my legacy and renew my efforts to live the life worthy of remembering. And I will miss Rick and try to be a good friend to his wife, Claudia, and daughters, Jessica and Amelia, who will miss him even more than me.

How would you like to be remembered?

The importance of a place for everything

9 May 2016

My husband and I are in the midst of a kitchen renovation. If you’ve ever done that, you know how disruptive it can be. We’re lucky in that we actually have a spare kitchen to use. (We live in a two-family house, but no longer rent out the downstairs apartment.) Still, despite my best efforts to organize the downstairs kitchen for our temporary use, everything feels topsy turvy.

This has led to two realizations on my part:

• The kitchen really is the heart of the home. Take it away and you feel adrift.
• When you don’t have a place for everything, you really can’t maintain order.

I’m a naturally messy person, as I’ve written here many times. I don’t mind a little disorder around me. But I’ve come to learn that the critical component to maintaining my sanity amidst disorder is that I know where everything goes and know I can put it away swiftly.

Right now, we have items that usually belong in the upstairs kitchen (our main kitchen) and need to reside on the second floor that I just can’t find a home for. So the dining room table and a desk remain cluttered, despite my efforts. We’re slowly getting into a groove (we’ve been out of our kitchen a week). Just getting out the door has been challenging because we’re accustomed to exiting from the back staircase off the upstairs kitchen and that’s where items like our keys, my purse and dog-walking paraphernalia used to reside. For a little while, until we established a new place for them, we’d walk all over the house looking for those items.

The whole experience has given me new-found empathy for my clients who struggle because they don’t have a place for everything and therefore can’t find anything. And it’s made me understand the relief they feel when we help them establish a place for everything so they can put things away.

So far, the renovation is on schedule and (knock wood) we’ll be back in our kitchen by the end of the month. I cannot wait to unpack our kitchen stuff into the new space. (I created a spreadsheet detailing where everything’s going to go.) I’ll probably enlist the help of one or more professional organizers to help me organize my kitchen when that happy day comes.

Here’s the bottom line. The adage, “A place for everything and everything in its place” is truly the key to a peaceful life for me. If you’re not living it, I encourage you to do what you can to get there! (Here’s a hint: the first step is usually decluttering!)

POMO in the news

26 April 2016

I was delighted to be included in articles on blogs published by a couple of prominent magazines recently!

I provided one of the tips for the article 9 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Get People to Respond to Your Email on FastCompany.com, affiliated with the business magazine. My tip is indeed simple, but effective: Write “Response Needed” in the subject line of the email. That blog post appeared on March 30.

Less than a week later, I was included in an article on GoodHousekeeping.com called 11 Secrets from the World’s Tidiest People. Now, if you have read this blog for any length of time you know that I am by no means one of the world’s tidiest people. In fact, I’m naturally messy. I gave full disclosure to the writer but answered her questions anyway. And she liked what I had to say. This just goes to show you that you can learn to be organized!

These articles are both great reads and I encourage you to check them out!

Deal with the low-hanging fruit first

18 April 2016

My Inbox Zero policy has taken a beating in 2016. I blame my puppy, Bix, for allowing me to get behind on it. (I blame Bix for a lot of things…it’s very handy.) But whatever the reason, I’ve had a really challenging time keeping my inbox in check this year.

I really love the habit of emptying my inbox daily. It has so many benefits. But it is one of those habits that’s a little harder to reinstitute after a backlog develops. I have no interesting in declaring email bankruptcy. i just want to get it down to zero and get back to a daily habit of keeping it down every day, if not to zero then to no more than ten.

I was working on it this morning. When I sat down at my computer I had something like 70 messages in my inbox. I set a goal of getting it down to 20. I surpassed that goal—I’m at 6 right now. I would really like to get it down to zero by the time I go to bed tonight.

So how did I go from 70 to 6 in the course of an hour or so this morning? I started with the low-hanging fruit. This is the order in which I took things:

• I deleted junk emails that came in overnight. (I get an astounding number of Italian-language spams. Talk about low-hanging fruit.)
• I moved emails that required no action but that I wanted to archive.
• I skimmed a few newsletters that I had let languish in my inbox—that took almost no time and revealed a few nuggets I was glad to know about. Then I deleted the newsletters.
• I forwarded to Evernote emails that I wanted easy access to or reminders about.
• I took action on a few emails, like deciding to register for a conference and then actually registering and making a hotel reservation.

That left me with six emails, all of which require some sort of consideration and reply. I am confident that given less than half an hour of focused time, I can take action and archive them before I go to bed tonight (and, of course, deal with everything else that comes in in the interim).

With email, as with clutter or so many other things, dealing with the easy items first can have a large impact. And once you’ve distilled the backlog, it becomes much easier to focus on the important items and take action.

I’m traveling now, but I have high hopes that I’ll get to zero in my inbox today and maintain it until I get home. (I am fortunate in that my schedule allows me some focused times in the morning on this trip.)

Taking just a few minutes a day to take care of the emails I consider the low-hanging fruit (or better yet, delete them the moment I see them), will help make this process easier.

ETA: It’s 10:30 p.m. on April 18 and I was able to get my inbox down to zero. It feels so good!!

Photo by Ian Carroll via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License

Extra three days for taxes!

11 April 2016

Have you finished your taxes yet? If not, the government has a happy surprise: You have an extra weekend to get them done.

The deadline for federal taxes this year is April 18, rather than the usual date of April 15. That’s because this year, Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia is celebrated on April 15 and all Federal offices are closed. Emancipation Day is usually celebrated April 16, but that’s a Saturday this year, so it’s observed on the 15th.

Emancipation Day commemorates the April 16, 1862 signing by Abraham Lincoln of the Compensated Emancipation Act, which freed 3100 slaves in the District of Columbia, almost nine months before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

If you live in Massachusetts or Maine, you get one more extra day because April 18 is Patriots’ Day, celebrated in those two states. So federal taxes in Massachusetts and Maine are due on Tuesday, April 19. (Please note that estimated taxes, which are mailed, are due on the 18th, even for residents of Massachusetts and Maine.)

I’d suggest checking your own state and local deadlines, however. Here in St. Louis, we have until the 18th to file state taxes, but city earnings taxes are due on the 15th as usual, as far as I can tell from the city’s website.

Procrastinators, rejoice!

What a difference three months make!

4 April 2016

Our standard poodle puppy, Bix, was eight weeks old when we brought him home from the breeder. My camera is chock full of photos of adorableness. Back in January, I posted a cute pair of photos of Bix on the couch looking out the window.

Bix enjoys looking out the window from the couch and does it frequently. The other day I snapped a photo to send to my husband, who wasn’t home.

Looking back at that January blog post I was amazed at how much Bix has grown in just three months. So I thought I’d put the two pictures together here (the app Pic Stitch makes it easy).

The lefthand picture was taken January 3. The righthand one was taken April 2. It’s amazing how much a puppy can grow in three months!

Bix weighed about 15 pounds at the beginning of January and is 45 pounds now. He’s ten pounds heavier than his predecessor, Kirby, was at Bix’s age. Kirby grew up to be 70 pounds. So we may have a giant on our hands here!

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that such a big boy is really a puppy. Well, Bix reminds us daily, of course, but I think we place some unfair expectations on him at times. He’s really a very good boy.

What have you been putting off?

31 March 2016

I had a colonoscopy this week. I’m 53 (and a half) years old and for the past 3.5 years I’ve been putting off getting the screening colonoscopy—a procedure that can catch deadly colon cancer while it’s still treatable—that’s recommended for everyone at 50 years old.

I’m a smart woman. I know it’s a good idea to get a colonoscopy and that sooner is better than later. But I couldn’t get myself to do it. My college buddies encouraged me to schedule it (they’d done theirs). But I resisted. Finally, I got a new primary care physician and she basically made the appointment for me.

Why was I dragging my feet? Partly because of the horrible things you hear about the prep (the bowel has to be cleaned prior to the scope). But, in truth, there was also a certain amount of fear that there would be bad news. Irrational, but true. Because of course, if I did have colon cancer, it was better to know than not know. But not knowing bad news can feel safer than knowing it.

Well, it turned out that the prep wasn’t all that bad. Not fun, but not tortuous. And the procedure itself was nothing, because I slept through the whole thing. When it was over the news was good—and immediate. Everything normal. Come back in ten years.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to have that behind me. I didn’t realize the psychic energy I was expending avoiding it. It makes me want to find something else I’m afraid of and just do it.

How about you? Is there something you’ve been putting off? Could you take a tiny step today toward doing it? Trust me, you’ll feel better when it’s done!