Your Life. Organized.

Boards and Belief

Last week I did something I've never done before. Something exciting, something totally new, and something that had never occurred to me to do before. And to top it all off, I did it in front of 25,000 people...

Real Life Organizing Stories

Today at noon Eastern Time on Organization Nation, join me as I do my first ever Free-For-All format! I'll be taking your organizing calls, questions and questions all hour, so get your dialing fingers ready and call toll-free to 1-866-356-0789 and talk to me! Also in studio with me, I'll have two of my past clients and we'll chat about what drove them to get organized, their expectations, the challenges of the process, and how getting organized has affected their lives. This will be a fun and interesting show and I hope you'll be a part of it!

PowerPoint Isn't Inherently Evil -- You Make It So

 I'm an organizing expert, which means I do consulting, as well as hands-on organizing to help people organize their lives. However, another way I make my living is speaking. You know... Lunch and Learns, half-day workshops, full day presentations, that kind of thing. I've been fortunate enough to have spoken at Paramount Pictures, Earthlink, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.

In several weeks I'll be doing a full day engagement at Oklahoma State University and I have to admit that each time I book a new speaking gig,  I secretly hope the person hiring me doesn't want me to bring a PowerPoint presentation. It's not because I'm lazy and don't want to create one. It's because there's been such...

Procrastinators and Lovers: The Time To Act Is NOW

February is full of holidays, isn't it? We have Groundhog Day, Presidents Day, and Valentines Day. Thankfully, only one of them really requires any serious time to prepare. Unless of course, you play to fly to Punxsutawney, PA to visit Phil. Last week I received two nearly identical catalogs in my mailbox;  one from 1-800-flowers.com and the other from ProFlowers. Both offer gorgeous and creative arrangements and they're both running...

Organized Creativity

 Thursday night, Christmas Boy took me out on a date. Woohoo! We went to see Donald Runnicles conduct the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 48 (Maria Theresia) and excerpts from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Woodruff Arts Center. As he conducts, Runnicles' body moves as if...

Antibacterial What???

I gotta say I've never been a fan of "antibacterial" anything. I believe the human body is an absolute miracle, brilliantly designed to be self-healing. And to be honest, I think a handful of dirt in the mouth now and again is...

My Interview with Fran Silverman

I had the pleasure of speaking with Fran Silverman, creator of the Book Promotion Newsletter and host of Book Marketing With Fran on Achieve Radio on her radio show todya. She interviewed me about my book Organize Your Office In No Time.

We chatted for a half hour about how my book deal came about, the various aspects of book writing and marketing, as well as specific segments of the book and how it was developed. You can listen to the archived interview by going to Fran's show page and clicking on Fran's archives.

By the way, Fran has also written a book called Book Marketing from A to Z, which you can get by clicking here. If you're an author, or you're interested in becoming an author, check out Fran's newsletter and my interview on her radio show.

The Circle of Life

This weekend I was at the card store buying cards for two friends. One was celebrating the birth of a new baby and the other was a sympathy card for a friend who just lost his wife. Joy and sadness, sunrise and sunset, birth and death, it's all a balance and part of the circle of life.

Are You a Collector?

From bottle caps to beer cans and old cameras to crystal figurines, humans are collectors. When I was a kid, I collected horses. Not real ones, (much to my dismay) although my hometown was fairly rural at the time. They were figurines of horses. Like most young girls of 12 or so...

The Myth of "Getting Organized"

January is National Get Organized Month, and it's also one of my busiest months of the year, what with New Year's resolutions and all. Last week I picked up a few new clients, both of whom are women and both delightful. While working with one of the women in her home office we got to chatting about how to be a happy, productive, effective and organized person, you have to accept that life requires maintenance and that getting organized is a myth. Let me clarify...

Sale On Organizing Tools

 Heads up folks!

Rubbermaid is having a nice sale for you this month, but only until January 19th, which is this Friday, and ONLY if you shop online. One of my favorite Rubbermaid products is...

Blog Chain

There's a "chain" sort of thing winging its way around the blogosphere, and fellow blogger Gretchen Rubin, tagged me as one of her five to keep it going. The deal is you're supposed to share five wacky, nutty, unusual or just little-known facts about yourself. (Gee only five??) Then you "tag" five other bloggers who are supposed to do the same thing. Oh how I resisted playing, but what the heck... let's take a break from organizing and get to know each other super-duper sixth-grade style, shall we?

1. I'm an NRA certified pistol instructor and an avid shooting enthusiast. Shooting is one of those rare hobbies that's a ton of fun and comes in handy if you're ever carjacked.

2. I was a kickass waitress! (unlike Gretchen, apparently)

3.  I prefer raw cookie dough to actual baked cookies. I've been eating chocolate chip cookie dough -- a LOT of it -- my whole life and never once got sick from consuming raw eggs. (And I'm not stopping now.  Salmonella be damned.)

4.  I have a younger half-sister that I never even knew existed until the summer of 2000. We met that year, we hit it off immediately and she is really cool.

5. I marched four of the best years I ever had in drum and bugle corps.   

Ok, I'm done. Now TAG, YOU FIVE are it...

Alex Fayle
Scott Ginsberg
Curt Rosengren
Steve Olson
Xavier

Oh, I can't wait to see the response to this one. 

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words...

...unless of course it's stuck to a bunch of other photos in a box down in your  basement. HUH???  How often have you thought, "I have to go through those boxes of pictures in the basement" or "I really need to get these pictures into scrapbooks or albums"?? Don't lie. I know you've...

Brainiac Babies or Bull?

A blog entry on Suburban Turmoil got me all fired up about something I'm passionate about, so I wanted to share it. It deals with whether all these Baby Einstein DVDs, language classes, music classes, Gymboree, blah blah blah are actually necessary and are in fact...

Busting Out

This weekend, I'm speaking at the Georgia Home Expo. My topics center around getting organized, simplifying your life and overcoming procrastination. These would be topics you'd expect an organizing expert to cover, to be sure. What I love about doing these speaking engagements is that I infuse them with a much bigger, more powerful message, that I've only just come to realize in my business the past few years. The message is (in a nutshell)...

Atlanta: Come See Me This Weekend!

 Greater Atlanta residents, come see me this weekend at the Georgia Home Expo, Friday, Saturday and Sunday January 12 through 14 at the North Atlanta Trade Center. This is Georgia's premier home improvement show, boasting over 100,000 square feet of innovative products, exhibits, and  demonstrations from designers, landscape architects, builders, kitchen and bath companies and much more! I'll be speaking every day at 2:00 p.m. on the following topics...

Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

January 8 - 12 is apparently Delurking Week! This, according to Paper Napkin, Apartment Therapy, Joel Sax, The Repressed Librarian, Rockstar Mommy and a gaggle of other bloggers. So if you're a regular reader here and you've never said hello or left a comment, this is your opportunity to make yourself known! I don't bite, so don't be shy. Peek out and say hello, then you can go back to your cave... or not.

Professional Organizers, Join My Webinar on Wednesday January 10th

Whether you're an aspiring, brand new, or veteran professional organizer, there's always something to learn! I invite you to participate in a new webinar called Prospecting 101: Making Deposits in Your Relationship Bank.  You'll learn the finer points of networking and making relationships profitable. This interactive webinar will teach you how to make networking easy and fun, as well as be the only organizer your contacts think of when their clients need help. I hope you'll join me tomorrow on the web!

 

Simplicity News January 2007

Happy New Year to all my readers!!

Gwen from Bremerton, Washington wrote me and wants to know "how do I label boxes for storage and then keep track of them. For example, which box has the Christmas decorations and where in the attic did I put it??"

Gwen, thanks for your question. This is a common problem for a lot of folks, but the solutions are actually simple. Like most anything in your life that you've set out to organize, it involves thinking ahead. I believe that's half the battle but the trouble is, it's the half that most people aren't willing to do. When you think ahead, the solutions begin to reveal themselves. For example, when you move into a new house and set up your kitchen, you might just choose a random cabinet for your pots and pans. But if you take a few extra seconds to think ahead and ask yourself, "What are these items used for?" that will tell you where they should live. It's simple; cooking items should live near the stove.

So using the same concept, think about your storage system before you create it, and the answers will reveal themselves to you. If the challenge is remembering what's inside each box and then remembering where each box is, address each problem separately. Every time you pack something away, just create...

You Light Up My Life (And My House)

 One of the side benefits to being organized is that you find you have the mental space to wonder about stuff. Like a child, sometimes I'm amazed by the smallest things. Take, for example, the incandescent light bulb. I think it's pretty incredible that one of the most critical inventions in history is a glowing filament inside a vacuum globe. That's just amazing to me, and I admit, some have said...