Peace of Mind Organizing

Worth repeating: Happy surprises might be hiding in your mail

21 September 2026

Eleven months ago, I received a surprise check in the mail in the amount of $1,119.26. I wrote a blog post about it, encouraging readers to open their mail and they might have a happy surprise. Today, I opened an envelope from my health insurance company and it happened again! Today’s government-required rebate check was in the amount of $596.52. So I decided to rerun the post from last October as a timely reminder.

Over the years, I’ve encountered many clients who don’t open their postal mail. Some take it to extreme levels. I get it. Mail can be scary. I remember back when I was dealing with credit-card debt I would be afraid to open the mail and see my statements.

But I’ve learned that the truth is the truth whether or not you know about it. And ignoring your mail never helps.

Moreover, when you open your mail, you may find happy surprises. This happened to me recently when I received a letter from my health insurance company. (I get my health insurance on the marketplace.) I fully expected it to be a notice of a rate increase for 2026. But I cringed and went ahead and opened it.

It was a check in the amount of $1,119.26! I was incredulous so read everything in the accompanying letter. Come to find out, by law there is an audit every three years of companies who offer health insurance through the marketplace. If a company doesn’t spend at least 80 percent of its proceeds from premiums on health care, its members are due a rebate. (I’m paraphrasing from memory and probably grossly oversimplifying.) I’d never heard of this rebate, so wasn’t expecting it. And if I hadn’t opened my mail, I wouldn’t have known about it!

Three weeks later, I received an email from my health insurance company telling me I should have received a rebate, so I eventually would have opened the envelope if I hadn’t thrown it away.

Just like clearing off your desk, putting away your clothes or emptying your email inbox (and lots of other things), opening your mail is easier if you do it every day before it becomes overwhelming. And who knows? Maybe your effort will be rewarded by a surprise check in the mail! (Or something equally nice.)

Photo by Wolfgang Vrede on Unsplash.

Helping out my future self

15 September 2026

I store all my food-storage bags in a drawer using some lovely bamboo food-storage bag organizers. I recently bought a large box of quart-size Ziploc bags…more than will fit in the container. Storage is at a premium in my apartment, so I put the overflow in the less-than-convenient cabinet over the microwave.

I was afraid I wouldn’t remember they were there and order more when the bamboo container was empty. So I helped my future self out by leaving a note stuck to the bottom of the quart-size container. It says, There are more Qt bags above the microwave.

It makes me happy when I think to do stuff like that. (I’ve surprised myself in the past with notes about overflow items.) It’s not only helpful to my future self, but it removes some tension right now. Even if I’m not consciously aware of it, my brain gets concerned that when the time comes I’ll forget something like that. I don’t need that bouncing around in my head.

What can you do to help your future self today?

The five-pieces-at-a-time puzzle trick

9 September 2026

I originally published this post back in September 2019. Due to space constraints, I haven’t done any jigsaw puzzles since we moved to an apartment two years ago. But when I came across this post while perusing my blog today, I was struck by how helpful the information is. And how it could apply to so many other things. (For example, I use a similar approach to writing my postcards to voters.) So I thought I’d repeat it today.

I enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles. One-thousand-word puzzles are just the right size and my favorite kind to do are collage puzzles. I think I like collages because of all the easy sorting that can be done.

Last month I completed a 1000-word collage puzzle five pieces at a time and mentioned it on Episode 68 of Getting to Good Enough, the podcast I host with Shannon Wilkinson. I’m just about to finish another puzzle using this method, which I devised for myself, and I find the method so successful (and relevant to other parts of my life) that I thought I’d share.

I do jigsaw puzzles at the end of our dining-room table. There’s room there, since there are only two us of eating (unless we have guests). But I don’t want a puzzle to languish there untended. I also don’t have hours a day to devote to doing puzzles. And I don’t want to wreck my productivity on a workday by getting sucked into a puzzle. So here’s what I do.

I start by connecting the edge pieces of the puzzle, which has always been my favorite part of the puzzle. (I can’t imagine working on the interior with the edges set up…I wonder what that says about me?)

Once I have the edge pieces connected, I tell myself that I will connect five puzzle pieces and then I’ll stop. That’s it. It’s that easy.

Much of the time in the early stages of completing a puzzle is spent sorting. With collage puzzles, I sort pieces into likely sets. I use empty boxes for the sorting. (At last! a use for those Apple boxes I can’t seem to throw away.) To achieve my pieces, I will connect pieces within those sets and/or I’ll connect pieces within the puzzle itself. If I connect a group of already-connected pieces into the puzzle, that counts as one piece.

This is the puzzle I’m currently working on (The Games We Play from White Mountain Puzzles), taken a week ago.

Here are some of the boxes of sets.

And here is the puzzle this morning. I’m almost finished! This puzzle has been particularly enjoyable.

As I see it, here are some of the benefits of my five-pieces-at-a-time method:

• It makes the puzzle feel very achievable
• The goal is so small I can easily grab a little pocket of time to do it, so the puzzle doesn’t languish
• I get to enjoy working on the puzzle many times a day
• I don’t get so caught up in the puzzle that I don’t go to bed or work (it’s kind of like setting a timer)
• I get the pleasure of watching the puzzle emerge slowly
• I get to enjoy little achievements over and over again while doing the puzzle

I think that last point might be most important and also really relevant to other (non-puzzle) tasks. By setting tiny goal after tiny goal, I get the thrill of achievement each step of the way. I am literally never frustrated by a puzzle because I can always find five pieces to put together. (That might be because I like collage puzzles…I think I’d find puzzles with vast swatches of monochromatic areas frustrating.)

Next time I get stalled or frustrated while working on a project, I’m going to think about how I might make it more like a jigsaw puzzle and just set my sights on connecting the next five pieces.

Worth repeating (once again): Decluttering old papers and memories

11 August 2026

I wrote this post back in October 2015 and reading it today made me appreciate that not only can letting go of excess be liberating, but the process itself can be a wonderful trip down memory lane. I loved reviewing my accomplishments but was still happy to let go of the physical reminders of them. I’ve moved since then and let go of even more. Here’s the good news: In all that time, I haven’t missed any of the papers I purged!

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!

Leaving my comfort zone

31 July 2026

Yesterday, I saw the new Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey on a 70mm IMAX screen.

This is only the third film I’ve seen in a theater since the lockdown in 2020. That seems crazy, since prior to COVID, I was a big fan of going to the movies. (And I now live across the street from a movie theater!) But I became more comfortable watching films at home alone (or with my husband) since they’re now available online so quickly.

A friend reached out a week or two ago asking if my husband and I would like to go to see The Odyssey at a specific showing at a specific theater. My initial reaction was to say no. I don’t go to movies in theaters any more. I don’t like fantastical movies. I don’t like IMAX because in my past experience I had to tilt my head back uncomfortably. I figured I’d probably fall asleep since the movie’s running time is almost three hours.

But something told me to say yes to this invitation. I knew the movie was well-received and critics seemed to love it. I wanted to spend time with my friends. My husband was excited to go (though he would have been fine going without me). I decided to say yes.

For a week I dreaded it and wished I’d declined. When we got to the theater and paid $25.30 for 1 medium popcorn and 2 junior fountain drinks (on top of $36 for the tickets), I was aghast. We took our (excellent) reserved seats and then I endured four or five really loud previews for incredibly violent/horrific movies.

I started thinking about whether I could get the car keys from my husband and leave if I wasn’t enjoying the film.

Then the actual movie started and it was amazing. I was drawn in from the first scene and was never once even close to falling asleep. The 2 hours and 52 minutes passed by quickly. I am SO glad I saw it in the theater, on the giant IMAX screen.

As I left the theater I reflected on the lesson of this. How many great experiences am I missing out on by staying in my comfort zone? I love hanging out in my apartment and my neighborhood. I’m extremely happy and cozy in my comfort zone. But listening to my inner voice telling me to say yes to this turned out to be a very good idea.

I am going to remember The Odyssey every time I am on the fence about whether to do something out of the ordinary for me. Perhaps it will tip me into deciding to venture out more. I’m kind of excited to think what this new attitude my bring me!

Worth repeating (again): Lessons learned from a painful thumb

21 July 2026

I wrote this post almost exactly ten years ago today. When I re-read it, I nodded along with the insights. I was glad for the reminder so I thought I’d share it again today. I’m happy to report that my thumb remains pain-free, ten years after that cortisone shot!

I was diagnosed with trigger finger recently (trigger thumb, actually). Trigger finger happens when the tendon in a finger or thumb becomes inflamed, causing the finger to catch in its sheath. The finger then locks in the bent position and then releases with a snap.

As soon as I noticed severe pain in my thumb and experienced that tell-tale snap after waking up, along with a constant dull pain in the thumb, I made an appointment with a hand doctor. (My husband has had surgery for trigger finger twice, so I was clued in.) The doctor confirmed my self-diagnosis and suggested a steroid shot. I’d heard that the steroid shot was really painful, but I decided to give it a try.

What does this have to do with organizing? It brought to mind two things that I see in clients while decluttering and organizing.

First, the fear of the pain of the shot was worse than the pain itself. And while it was quite painful for about 10 to 12 (long) seconds, it wasn’t by any means unbearable. Once the pain of the shot was gone, the pain of the condition slowly started to fade away.

It got me thinking about the fear some clients feel about hiring an organizer or the prospect of going through the decision-making process of decluttering. It seems scary, but the pain is over pretty quickly. And once you’re past the pain of getting started, you can start getting relief.

After I got my steroid shot I was (unrealistically) expecting instant relief. That wasn’t the case. It took probably a week, but every day there was less pain in my thumb. Then one day there was no pain at all. I could grip items without pain and the constant dull ache was gone. And mornings were much easier, since I woke up pain free.

It probably took me a week to notice the absence of pain. That was a real a-ha moment for me. Once I noticed that my thumb no longer hurt, I was delighted. The shot had worked! I was amazed that it took so long to notice.

Isn’t that true of a lot of things in life, including organizing systems? We notice what isn’t working. We feel the pain and frustration of failing systems or the absence of systems. But when things are going well, we often don’t even notice. We’re missing an opportunity to feel good about ourselves!

I encourage you to think about the things in your life that are working well. Notice the absence of frustration. Think about what you’re doing right and apply those lessons to the frustrating aspects of your life.

Noticing the absence of pain isn’t easy. But it can be rewarding!

Photo by Tash Williams on Unsplash

Our 300th episode!

1 July 2026

The podcast I co-host, Getting to Good Enough, hit a milestone a couple of weeks ago. We published our 300th episode! I co-host the podcast with my friend, life coach Shannon Wilkinson. We started it in 2018, published weekly for five years, and took a two-year hiatus before reviving it in 2025.

The 300th episode is special because Shanon and I were together when we recorded it. We typically record it over the internet from our homes in Portland, Oregon (Shannon) and St. Louis (me). Since the reboot, we’ve also recorded video for our YouTube channel. The 300th episode shows us sitting side by side, rather than in a split screen. If you’re interested, you can watch it below. (Feel free to click over to our YouTube channel and subscribe!)

The theme of the podcast is letting go of perfectionism so you can live with more ease, less stress and a lot more laughter. It’s a theme can apply to so many topics. Early on we identified a truth that underpins all our discussions. It comes up in our conversation almost every episode. And I wanted to share it here:

The key to letting go of perfectionism is identifying what’s important to you.

Once you are in touch with what’s important to you, decisions become easier. When you let what’s important to you be your touchstone, things fall into place.

Shannon and I started the podcast because we thought it would be fun. And it is. (Though it does require some work.) We certainly don’t do it to make money. But I get to talk with a seasoned and talented life coach every week, which is not only fun it’s beneficial. Exploring themes around perfectionism has made me aware of when I’m letting perfectionism get in my way (despite considering my self a “good enough” person). It’s helped me make improvements in my life and productivity.

If you’re not listening, I encourage you to check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you have a dream of starting podcast (or really, doing anything that might feel outside of your comfort zone), I encourage you to give it a shot! If we can do it, you can too. The tools available in 2026 make it much easier to start a podcast than it was in 2018. Just don’t let perfectionism get in your way!