Peace of Mind Organizing

Afraid to toss paper? Ask yourself these 5 questions first

12 October 2026

I wrote this post back in 2012, and I’m re-sharing it because paper is still one of the biggest sources of “just in case” clutter we see. When you’re worried you’ll need something later, it’s easy to keep everything—and then the piles create even more overwhelm. These five questions are a quick way to calm the fear and make confident decisions, one sheet at a time.

Sometimes when I work with clients, I realize that they’ve hung onto a lot of paper out of fear. They’re afraid that they’ll toss or shred a piece of paper and find out later that they need it.

When you’re afraid to let go of paper, before long you get overrun with it. Then you add a feeling of overwhelm to the fear and becomes really hard to go through the paper.

So to make things a little easier (and perhaps take away some of the fear), here are the five questions I suggest you ask yourself when you’re trying to make a decision about whether or not to keep a particular piece of paper (particularly paper related to finances):

• Can I get this information online?
• Can I replace this paper if necessary?
• Have I kept this type of information in the past and, if so, did I reference it?
• Can I scan this document and keep it electronically?
• What’s the worse that can happen if I get rid of this?

The fact of the matter is that very few papers are irreplaceable. So fear of getting rid of them is pretty unwarranted. You can always ask your tax advisor or your financial planner for advice. But hanging onto unneeded paper can weigh you down.

Why not take a few minutes now to go through your file cabinet and get rid of some outdated paper? (Don’t forget to shred anything with identifying information like social security numbers or account numbers.)

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

How decluttering is like exercising

5 October 2026

I first published this post on May 16, 2014, when I belonged to a gym. After leaving the gym a few years later, I had quite a few years without a solid exercise routine, primarily doing at-home yoga. But in January 2025 I started working out with a trainer weekly and that’s been the key to getting me to exercise. The benefits have been huge. A dozen years later, this post still resonates with me!

I’ve had my struggles with getting myself to exercise over the years and I’ve detailed some of them on this blog. The bottom line for me is that I’m pretty fit and pretty slender without going to the gym, so getting myself to go has been challenging, since I don’t enjoy it that much.

But now that I’m past 50, it feels like more of an imperative. I know that regular exercise will help me age more gracefully and healthily. I know that it will help stave off osteoporosis, which runs in my family. I know that it might help with the fact that my stomach is no longer perfectly flat. (Certainly, not exercising isn’t going to help with that!)

So I’m trying to make exercise a priority. But it’s not easy because I’m very busy with work. And did I mention I don’t enjoy it that much?

Back in October 2013 I joined a gym, the tiny exercise studio called Take Action just a couple of blocks from my home. The membership and some personal training sessions with Take Action owner Jeanna Jackson were a (requested) 50th birthday gift from my husband. At that time, I discovered the similarities between personal trainers and professional organizers.

So the other day, as I was going through my exercise routine—created for me by Jeanna—I got to thinking once again about how exercising for people like me is like decluttering for folks struggling with clutter. I’ve already mused here about the how both decluttering and exercising get easier with practice. But more recently, I’ve been thinking about these similarities:

• You might not feel like doing it, but afterward you’re glad you did
• It can be hard to find the time
• Both decluttering and exercising can be easier to do when you have company (and/or guidance)
• You may not see instant results, but little by little you see progress
• Any effort at all is worthwhile
• You’re frequently struck by inspiration while exercising and while decluttering/organizing
• Both can become habits

When I look around my house and see the progress I’ve made over the years in keeping order despite being a naturally messy person, I know I can make progress in with exercise. I’m working on focusing on the benefits and making it a priority. I hope one day soon to make exercising a natural part of my day just as certain habits for keeping order (like clearing off my desk every day) have become habits.

Photo by Andrew Kayani on Unsplash.

Re-running favorites through the end of the year

30 September 2026

I’m going to try something a little different for the rest of 2026: I’m going to focus on re-sharing older posts from the archives.

I’ve been blogging for nearly 20 years (my blogiversary is in November!), and in that time I’ve published more than 1,700 posts. While I still love writing and connecting here, I’m also ready to build a bit more ease into my life. And I’ll be honest—after two decades of blogging, I’m finding it takes more effort than it used to to come up with fresh ideas.

So between now and December 31 (and perhaps beyond), you’ll see me re-running posts I still love—posts that feel evergreen, posts that readers have told me were helpful, and posts that I think are worth bringing back into the light.

A couple of notes about how this will look:

• I’ll add a short italicized intro at the top with a little context about why I’m sharing it again.
• I may give a re-run a new title (because sometimes a different title fits how I’d describe it today).
• If I’m inspired to write something brand new, I’ll absolutely do that too.

My hope is that this approach keeps the blog useful and fun—without me feeling like I have to reinvent the wheel every week.

Thanks for being here, for reading, and for letting this blog evolve over time. If there’s an older post you remember loving (or a topic you’d like me to revisit), I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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!