Peace of Mind Organizing

It's my 9th blogiversary!

10 November 2015

November 10, 2006 was a big day for Peace of Mind Organizing. It was the day I published my first blog post. (That post was called “What is organized?”.) 1,080 blog posts later, I’m celebrating my 9th blogiversary.

I’ll be forever grateful to Nora Brown, who designed this website, for encouraging me to start a blog. Back then I may never even have read a blog.

Blogging has required discipline, creativity, and effort, but all that has been paid back in spades. My blog has allowed me to connect with folks I would not otherwise have known (and vice versa), from all over the world. It has helped Peace of Mind Organizing be in the top of the search engine rankings for folks looking to hire a professional organizer in St. Louis. It allows my clients to get to know me before they hire me. It establishes my expertise. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

I like blogging so much that I started another blog, Organize Your Family History, in 2012. I love that blog too.

Blogging is part of my life and this blog feels like a friend. I’m darned proud to celebrate and acknowledge my 9th blogiversary!

Worth repeating: Shifting your perspective by shifting your furniture

5 November 2015

Nearly three years ago, I moved my desk 90 degrees. The impact was immediate and amazing! I’m still loving the placement of my desk, so I thought I’d repeat the post I wrote about it in 2013.

I’m not somebody who switches furniture around. I know there are people who consider that fun, but I’m not one of them. I typically agonize over the placement of furniture and once it’s done, that’s that.

I’ve been in this home office (in what was a bedroom of our house) for 12 years. I rearranged the furniture in it in 2005, after a feng shui consult.

This year, I decided that another change was important. I’d heard a speaker say, “Change your space as you change” and that made an impact on me.

Trouble was, I didn’t have a clue as to how to change my space. (Space planning is not one of my strengths.) Then I read the description of the Workspace and Studio Redesign program from Jen Hofmann of Inspired Home Office. That really resonated with me and I signed up.

We had three terrific phone sessions. She helped me create a vision for my space and realize that what I was after was a clean space, clear of non-essential items. I decluttered my desk and then the rest of the office, to great effect. At our second session, she suggested I try the desk rotated 90 degrees, so that the left edge, rather than the front of the desk, was against the wall. She also suggested I rotate it another 90 degrees so my back was against the wall.

I got out the furniture movers, unplugged everything and gave it a try. I immediately liked the first iteration, the 90-degree rotation. I tried the 180-degree rotation, but it did not feel right at all.

So with the desk turned 90 degrees, so that I’m now facing the door and a set of bookshelves, I set about plugging everything back in. I realized that if I moved a fabric-covered computer desk upon which a laser printer and scanner rested so that its back was to the front of my desk, I could hide all my cables.

Oh my goodness! My quest for better cable management was complete! I can’t tell you how exciting it is that my cable mess is all but gone.

Here’s a before photo, taken after the initial declutter, of what my desk was like against the wall.

Here’s a photo I took today to give you a sense of the new placement of the desk.

And here’s a photo taken from the door, to show how relatively cord-free the space now is.

It’s been just over a week and I’ve found this shift quite interesting. I love having a fresh perspective on my office. Above my monitor I see the top two shelves of my bookshelves, so I moved to the top shelf the copies of the books I’ve written. It reminds me of my accomplishments and gives me confidence to glance up and see them.

To my left, on the wall, underneath the fabric-covered bulletin board that was already there, I mounted a magnetic strip so that I can post my daily task list and my weekly social media checklist. I also mounted my bingo board on the wall next to the bulletin board. I store the magnets for covering my bingo squares on the magnetic strip. And I hang my bluetooth headset from a hook on the magnetic strip.

Behind me, on the radiator in a desktop organizer, are the items I used to keep close at hand on my desk. I feel like my desk has become a cockpit, with everything right where I need it.

Since everything has a place, I’ve had absolutely no difficulty putting things away. My desk is effortlessly clear at the end of each workday and, pretty much, throughout the workday. It may just be the novelty of the situation, but I’m really enjoying how easy it is for me to keep this clean. There’s just no extraneous stuff.

Same goes for the floor of my office, which traditionally gets pretty easily cluttered. I now have less floor space to clutter up and it hasn’t even been a bit tempting to put something on the floor instead of putting it away.

I did have one little problem caused by turning the desk that I addressed in a stroke of brilliance (if I say so myself). I’ll describe in Wednesday’s blog post.

I’m still in awe of the difference this change has made. I love no longer facing the wall. I love the fact that everything is so neat and that I’d rid myself of the extraneous. I love that everything in the room represents who I am and where I’m going, rather than who I’ve been.

This is powerful stuff. If you’ve been tempted to switch things up in your office, I urge you to give it a try!

Peace of Mind Organizing in the news

2 November 2015

I was delighted when I was asked to organize the pantry of St. Louis Magazine’s dining editor, George Mahe, for an article for the Winter issue of the glossy newsstand magazine, St. Louis At Home.

I spent a couple of hours with George, along with the writer and photographer (you can bet I put them to work), in his lovely, if petite, kitchen. George is serious about food and his pantry was already pretty great before I got my hands on it. I helped him take it up a notch in those two hours and the terrific writer, Jeannette Cooperman did a great job of capturing what happens in a pantry-organizing session.

The result was full-page article (dominated by a picture of me!) in the current issue of this glossy magazine. Here’s a photo of the article:

The online version gives more of a blow by blow of the session and it shows a set of before-and-after photos of the pantry, if you’re curious. You can see that his pantry already had it going on, especially his pull-down spice rack which was working really well for him. Even well-organized pantries have expired foods in them.

This article was especially sweet for me, as I celebrate my business’s tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I had my very first magazine interview as organizer, for an article that was published in the January-February 2006 issue of St. Louis At Home. I’m happy to say that magazine interviews have become less stressful as the years go by!

Edited to add: I wrote this Monday and then on Tuesday received a link to a profile of me on the Kahoots blog. (Kahoots is a contacts management app.)

Transpose + Kanban = Great task management

29 October 2015

I readily admit that I’m a bit fickle when it comes to task management methods. I like to switch it up to keep it interesting. One look at the task management tag on this blog and you’ll see that I’ve tried (and enthused about) a lot of different task management methods. It’s not that I’m in search of the perfect system. I just know that, for me, keeping it interesting by trying new ideas is important and effective.

For the last month or so, I’ve been using a template I created on the fabulous form-making making website, Transpose, to manage my daily tasks kanban style.

If you’re not familiar with kanban, I blogged about it back in 2010, when I was using a white board and Post-Its® to list my tasks and then move them through a To Do-Doing-Done process. That white board took up some space and just writing down the tasks took a little effort (not to mention Post-Its®). Now, doing it electronically has been very easy and very enjoyable.

Here’s a screenshot of this morning’s kanban board. I try to start fresh every morning, clearing out the Done items and revisiting any left over To Do or Doing items.

I can drag the tasks from the To Do column to the Doing column to the Done column. I can change the order of the tasks by dragging them around. I find the ease of use and complete customization really appealing. And I love that the user interface is easy, uncluttered and attractive.

The Kanban view in Transpose allows you to group notes by an additional field. So my template has a priority drop menu. I select one of three priorities for each task and then, if I choose, I can group those together. That way the top-priority items stay at the top of the list.

If you’re interested in trying it out, I made my very simple Today Kanban template available in the Transpose Public Library. Just download and adapt it to your needs.

Decluttering old papers and memories

26 October 2015

Over the weekend, I faced down the challenging of decluttering a file cabinet full of old papers and memories. I love having these experiences that put me in my clients’ shoes and help me better understand what they’re going through.

A number of years ago, I moved my office four-drawer filing cabinet into the basement, replacing it in my office with an Elfa file cart. I didn’t bother decluttering the stuff that moved to the basement with the file cabinet. It was all papers related to achievements in my first two (and only) jobs, as well as administrative and project files from my decade as a dog writer, along with over 100 files of newspaper and magazine clippings of published articles I’d written.

They might have sat there until we moved, except that we’re doing a big repair and renovation in our basement, so the file cabinet has to be moved several times. It seems like a good time to (literally) lighten the load in that cabinet.

So I went to the basement and started going through the files. It was a fun and sometimes sad trip down memory lane. The tricky part was much of the material in that file cabinet pre-dated the worldwide web as we know it so isn’t available online (or at least not easily). I always caution people to give some thoughtful consideration to discarding irreplaceable items, but I also tell them that the more sentimental items they keep, the less value any of it has. So I was experiencing the push-me-pull-you of those two factors.

In the eighties, I worked for a non-profit on an international project that involved publishing magazine supplements in magazines around the world. I had a copy of each of those supplements. They really don’t have any value for me—in thirty years I’ve never once been asked about them. Yet they evoke some fond memories. (I traveled around the world and met those magazine editors.) And I don’t think they exist in digital form. What to do?

After a little thought, I decided to keep one of them and recycle the rest. That felt a little scary but also gave me that great feeling of lightening the load.

My next job was doing media relations for the Missouri Botanical Garden and I had kept some important clippings I’d placed. Back then I was able to garner some pretty significant attention for stories that felt like a very hard sell. Those clippings and the news releases I’d written to place them could be handy if I were every seeking a job in media relations. But the likelihood of that is close to nil. So I ended up keeping a little portfolio I’d created back then and recycling everything else.

Then I came to the more recent career—all the files from when I was a dog writer from 1995 to 2005, when I started Peace of Mind Organizing. I threw away all past project files, which was a pretty easy decision. Then I dealt with the clipping files. I wrote something like 150 articles and back in those pre-internet days one mailed photocopies of clippings with query letters to try to get magazine assignments. So I had made a bunch of copies of every article I published. Only laziness had stopped me from getting rid of the extras years ago. Yesterday, in the spirit of lightening the load, I kept one copy only of the more significant articles, like the ones that appeared in national magazines (I wrote quite a bit for Family Circle—that’s part of one of my favorite Family Circle articles in the photo above), the columns I wrote for a now-defunct magazine and a now-defunct website, and the articles for which I won awards. I went from hundreds of files to a single, fairly thick, file.

Going through this process was a great mental exercise. I got to revisit some achievements, which is always fun. I cried when I read the column I’d written after our dog, Scout, died in October 2001 and the one I wrote after our other dog, Kramer, died in December 2001. It made me appreciate, as I probably didn’t at the time, that those articles probably helped others who were grieving the loss of their pets. I’m glad I kept hard copies of those because they’d be tricky to find online.

Do you have ancient files or other memorabilia lurking somewhere in your house? I encourage you to bring them out into the light and go through them. You may jog some really fond memories. And you find it easier than you think to let go of this particular type of excess. Trust me, it can be liberating!

Interested in genealogy? Check out my new Orderly Roots guides!

22 October 2015

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a genealogy enthusiast. I love genealogy so much—and so enjoy organizing my genealogy research—that three years ago I created a blog called Organize Your Family History.

This week, I introduced my new Orderly Roots guides. These short downloadable guides are modeled after the Organizing Guides I created on this website five years ago. The Orderly Roots guides allow me to go a bit more in depth than I can on the Organize Your Family History blog.

So far I’ve published two of a planned ten guides. The first two are:

• 10 Secrets to Organizing Your Genealogy Research, based on my experience as a professional organizer and
• 10 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started Doing Genealogy based on all the mistakes I made when I started out.

The Orderly Roots guides are about ten pages each and sell for $8.99.

If you have any interest in family history research, I encourage you to check them out!

Expert clothing advice for women of a certain age

19 October 2015

Geralin Thomas

As I posted last week, I had a lovely time creating a capsule wardrobe with my friend and wardrobe advisor, Geralin Thomas. Geralin has been helping me with my clothing for eight years and I am so grateful for her expert advice.

In 2007, I was 45 and now I’m 53. In that time, my body has changed somewhat, with a little more padding in the hips than used to be there. That, plus the fact I’m now in my fifties, has changed Geralin’s advice for me a bit.

Last week, she gave me five bits of clothing-selection advice (and permission to share) that is specific to me, but applies to many fifty-something women. (The last one is specific to narrow-on-the top, wider-on-the-bottom women like me.)

1. Colors matter. They help simplify the shopping process by ruling some colors out.
2. Some colors are so much more flattering than others. Try to shop for colors that match your hair and eye colors and complexion.
3. Smaller lapels are less trendy and more classic and therefore have more staying power.
4. Thin knits are not so great on many of us as we’re getting older and losing muscle tone, gaining lumps and bumps. Instead, look for thicker knits; ponte knits are especially nice if you’re trying to “glam-oflauge” areas like thighs, bottom, or back-bulge.
5. Longer cardigans are not figure friendly for me. Instead, a little structure in a sweater or a jacket helps bring balance.

Geralin always looks amazing and I am delighted that she is so willing to share her wardrobe wisdom. Thank you, Geralin!