A PATH FOR EVERYTHING

A quick and easy-to-learn technique for staying focused when confronted with a royal--or even just an everyday--mess is to say to yourself, "A path for everything and everything on its path."

Let me show you an example of how this works.

Many of my clients are Type A's:  high energy, high performance, and driven to succeed type people. They reached their level of success in business and in life by many methods, including hard work, tenacity, and (get this) task completion.

So it is fitting that my Type A clients would attempt to complete every task we come across while decluttering their offices, homes, cars, and storage areas.

But immediate task completion is not the most efficient route to take when decluttering.  It wastes time, energy, and fractures the focus needed for decluttering effectively.

One particular client could not stay focused.  A high-powered sales woman, and parent of a hyperactive toddler, she darted here and there during our first visit, taking each item that we found out of place and running it across the house, up the stairs, or out to the garage or her car to its designated home.

I helped her refocus by teaching her to keep all items going to the same place together in "staging" areas, and then to make one trip to the garage, one trip to her car, one trip to the guest bedroom, and one trip to the kitchen to put away all the things we'd discovered out of place while decluttering the living room. 

Michelle Passoff, a professional home organizer and author of Lighten Up!  Free Yourself From Clutter, has the best phrase for this process:  A path for everything and everything on its path*.  I use it as a mantra when helping clients get organized.  It keeps them focused, and saves enormous amounts of time and energy.

You can use it too!  Instead of ignoring the dry cleaning piling up on your closet floor because you don't have time to drop it off at the cleaners today, simply bag it up and put it in your car.  You haven't taken the clothes to the cleaners yet, but they are one step further down the path to the cleaners.  A path for everything and everything on its path.

Or maybe you still have your Easter decorations out. Instead of procrastinating taking them down, packing them up, and hauling them back out to the garage or up to the attic, simply group them all together today, in an area closer to their final destination.  Seeing them there tomorrow may inspire you to go get the boxes they belong in, and put them in the boxes.  Perhaps the day after that, you'll be inspired to carry them to their final storage spot, and voila! Easter decorations put away.  A path for everything, and everything on its path.

You can apply this mantra to many areas of your life, not just cleaning, decluttering, and getting your stuffed Easter rabbits safely packed away in the attic.

Try it and see how much time you save, and how good it feels to move things forward along the path to their ultimate destination.


 * Passoff, Michelle.  Lighten Up!  Free Yourself from Clutter. HarperPerennial. New York, 1998: pg. 57.

STORED JUNK

Your life is stuffed with useful things, and you have run out of places to put everything away.

The new cell phone your brother gave you for Christmas isn't junk, but you save the box it came in, in case you need to refer to it sometime. The sweater you bought on sale at Macy's isn't junk, but you had to take a cardigan off your closet shelf and cram it into your t-shirt drawer in order to make space for the new sweater. The fake poinsettias you bought (see previous post) are lovely, but now you're faced with sorting through previous years' Christmas decor hidden in eight boxes in the garage and weed through them in order to make room for the poinsettias.

Most all of what you have on shelves, in closets, stacked in the garage, piled in the basement are useful things: electronics boxes, sweaters, Christmas decor. But are they useful to you RIGHT NOW?

If all that stuff you have stored away was useful to you, right now, then you would be USING IT right now.

But you're not.

For your own peace of mind, admit that those things aren't being used by you, and let them go to someone who will gladly put them to use right now.

This isn't brain surgery, and you're too overwhelmed with the after-Christmas stuff-glut to read a longer post anyway, so just GET RID OF THE JUNK!

Contact one of the charities below and arrange to have them haul off all that excess you've got stashed away. You will bless others in need, you will gain extra space for what you use on a daily basis, plus, you'll receive a tax-deductible receipt for what you give away!

Goodwill Industries: www.goodwill.org

Salvation Army: www.salvationarmyusa.org

St. Vincent de Paul: www.svdpusa.org


Many blessings to you!

Micromanagement

Christmas brings out the micromanager in me like nothing else. I want to be the one to wind the glittering garlands around the tree. I want to hang each decoration just so. I want to cut out the gingerbread cookies. And I want to wrap all the gifts.

I have three kids and well-honed delegation skills, but there are things I do just because I enjoy doing them.

Some people feel this way with disposing of their junk.

If you enjoy micromanaging your junk, great! Have a ball. But if you're looking for efficient and quick disposal of your stuff, simplify your life by having two or three final destinations for your cast-offs.

For supreme decluttering efficiency, consider these three:

1. trash
2. recycling center
3. charity thrift store

Any additional options and you're complicating the issue, making more work for yourself, and cutting into your gingerbread-cookie-decorating time.

With my first client, a highly intelligent and motivated business owner, we chose three options for where to move her discards: the trash, a thrift store, and family members. Limiting the number of destinations for junk enabled us to completely declutter her three-story home in about 48 working hours. Had my client micromanaged the disposal of her cast-offs, the time it took to declutter her home would have DOUBLED.

Hear me loud and clear: micromanagement is rarely the most efficient use of either time or money. Unless you enjoy the micromanagement of your things, make disposal of your stuff quick and easy. Save your time and money to deck your halls with O.C.D.-esque perfection.