Peace of Mind Organizing

No excuses series (part 1): "I might need it some day"

18 March 2024

This is the first in a three-part series of posts debunking the three excuses we hear most frequently from clients for wanting to keep items they no longer use or love. The series originally ran in January and February 2017 and I rerun it periodically. Stay tuned for parts 2 & 3 in the coming weeks.

When we work with clients on decluttering, we discuss their goals and motivations for letting go of excess. They understand that it makes most sense to hang on to meaningful items, not those that are sitting idle. Yet it’s not unusual for a client to want to keep an unused item that’s perfectly good because “I might need it some day.”

We usually push back, particularly if we’re dealing with severe space constraints and the need to let go of a lot of stuff.

Here’s what we say to those clients when we hear, “But I might need it some day.”:

• How likely is it that you’ll need it?
• If you decide to let it go and you do find you need it, are you able to get another one?
• If you keep it, will you be able to find it when you need it?

That last question is important, because if a client is keeping a lot of those “some day” items it may be difficult to organize the stuff they keep in a way that will allow them to find everything.

Here’s the thing about perfectly good items that aren’t being used. If they’re perfectly good, somebody else can use them. Rather than having them sit idle, taking up space, it’s better to contribute to the greater good by donating them and letting them be used. If you hang on to them until a future decluttering session and then decide to let them go, they may be less valuable or useful to others.

Basically it comes down to a couple of things:

1. Your goals for decluttering and getting organized. If you’re trying to create space in your home and life so that you can find what you want when you want it and live with ease (my definition of organized), then storing a lot of unused stuff might well get in the way of that.
2. A fear of regret. I think a lot of us live in fear of regretting our decisions. If you do find that you let go of an item that at a future date you could have used, you may feel a twinge of regret. But you’ll get past it. Crowding your space with unneeded items is a pretty high price to pay to ward off future regret, in my opinion.

I have seen over and over how living with less makes one’s life easier (and I’ve experienced it in my own life). A great first step toward living with less is letting go of the perfectly good stuff you don’t use.

Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3 of the No Excuses series: “I paid a lot for it” and “It was a gift.” I’ll post them on the next two Mondays.

My perfect Bullet Journal pen

13 March 2024

I have been using a Bullet Journal to keep track of everything in my life since December 2021. I’m on my 13th handwritten journal. (I love B5 size dot grid journals. My current favorite is from Scribbles That Matter 120 GSM Dotted Journal – Pro.)

I like making my Bullet Journals pretty without going overboard. I tend to write with a black pen but use a lot of Zebra Mildliner highlighters (I use both brush and chisel points) and Sharpie S-Note Duo for color when I need it. (Check out this October 2022 post about my bullet journals for more details on how I journal.)

After careful trial and error, I have found what for me is the perfect black pen for bullet journaling. It is the Pilot Frixion Synergy 05 clicker erasable pen with black gel ink. There’s so much to love: It’s an extra-fine point pen that writes smoothly. It’s completely erasable—it uses a special thermosensitive ink that disappears when rubbed with the pen’s “eraser” because of the heat generated by the friction. (There’s no eraser dust!) This pen comes in colors, though I primarily use black. And it’s refillable.

I go through a lot of these pens and on Amazon I buy this set, which comes with refills

Pilot has a variety of Frixion pens, including erasable highlighters. I have some, but I find they don’t erase completely and seem to leave a little bit of a residue. I’ve also enjoyed this set of Pilot Frixion Waai retractable pens from Japan that come in pretty, soft colors. I bought them at JetPens, my favorite purveyor of Japanese stationery supplies.

One thing worthy of note is that since the Frixion ink is thermosensitive it could disappear if exposed to high heat (like in a hot car). The JetPens website says that putting the paper in a freezer will magically bring back the ink. I’m glad to say I have no personal experience with this. I do avoid using this pen to address envelopes.

My quest for the perfect pen for bullet journaling ended when I found this particular Frixion pen (the Synergy 05 clicker), which glides nicely over the page and erases without any dust. I just had to share with other pen-and-paper enthusiasts!

Congratulations to my employee, Beth, on her CPO® credential

29 February 2024

I’m tickled pink to congratulate my employee of four years, Beth Hunyar, on becoming a Certified Professional Organizer®. She passed the rigorous exam yesterday.

This is a big achievement. In order to qualify to sit for the exam, an organizer must have 1500 paid client hours or 1250 paid client hours + 250 substitute education hours in the past five years. This is a solid credential that recognizes knowledge and experience.

The CPO® credential was established in 2007. At that time I didn’t have the hours to qualify for the exam, but I took it the following year and became St. Louis’s first CPO®. There are currently nine CPOs in Missouri (counting Beth). Nationwide, there are 332 CPOs, and seven from other parts of the world. And there are 16 emeritus CPOs. (You can read the list of CPOs here.) It’s an elite group.

Being a CPO is not a requisite for being an amazing organizer. Both Beth and my other employee, Lydia, have natural organizing ability, coupled with a deep understanding and compassion for our clients. They’re very skilled. One of the things I love, though, about the CPO credential is that it requires study and preparation and continuing education. Clients know that when they hire a CPO they hire an organizer with knowledge, experience and professionalism. (CPOs must adhere to a strict code of ethics.)

Those of you who have worked with Beth know that she fits that description to a T. I’m so glad she has achieved this milestone. She has worked hard gaining the experience and preparing for the exam.

If you’re interested in reading take on on the value of hiring a CPO, check out my blog post Why hire a Certified Professional Organizer.

If you’d like to read more about Beth and Lydia, check out our Meet the Team page. It will be updated soon with Beth’s new credential!

Organizing my charging cables

22 February 2024

I just got a new iPhone 15 Pro (I love it!). It uses a USB-C cord to charge rather than a Lightning cable. My MacBook Pro also charges with a USB-C cord. Each of those devices also has an optional MagSafe charging cable (iPhone; MacBook). I also have AirPods that use a Lightning cable. And a Kindle that uses a mini-USB. And an external hard drive that uses a micro-USB. And any of them might connect to a power source with either a USB-A or USB-C cable depending on what it’s plugging into. That’s a whole lot of cables to wrangle.

Earlier this year I did a cable clean out, letting go of cables that I no longer need. It was a huge improvement, but it didn’t feel easy enough for me to access what I needed. Then I came home to one day to find that my husband had bought an HDMI cable despite the fact we had several. He looked where he expected to see them and found none. They were big, so I’d moved to another location known only to me. A very bad idea. I wanted to rectify the situation

Here’s a photo of my first attempt, organized into an Elfa drawer:

When I decided I could do better, I took the suggestion of my brilliant employee, Beth, and bought a Short Medium All-In Modular Divided Box with 15 compartments from The Container Store. She had sent me a picture of how she used that bin to organize her charging cords in her house and I wanted to give it a try.

I went through my bins of charging cables again and separated out the ones I use most often for my devices, which are the USB-C and Lightning. I put them in a bin like Beth’s and then used the Elfa drawer I’d been using all along to store just the mini-USB and HDMI and printer cables.

Here’s how the divided bin looks. I’m particularly pleased with the labels!

And here’s how the other cords look, stored in the Elfa drawer. (The HDMI cables are back where Barry would look for them.)

I also keep a packing cube with my travel cables so they’re at the ready when I travel. That still feels a bit like a moving target as devices change so I went through it to make sure it contained up-to-date cables. And I updated my travel cord checklist. I’m writing this from North Carolina and it looks like I brought the right cables, so that’s good.

Here’s a photo of the travel cables.

So I have cords in three places, plus a few connected to the wall in a couple of places in the house. That’s a lot. But at least I can pretty easily find out what I have and put my hands on what I need. The labels in the divided bin will help me keep those cords organized. At this moment in time I’m feeling good about my charging cables!

What are you waiting for?

12 February 2024

If you’re like me, you have plenty of little organizing projects around your house. You look at them and say to yourself, “I have to organize that [fill in the blank].” I do this regularly and sometimes I’ll let the same little project go undone for months on end. And then when I complete it, it ends up taking very little time.

That happened this weekend when I finally reorganized my underwear-and-sock drawer. The sock situation in my drawer had gotten out of hand and it had become a bit of a struggle to grab a pair of socks in the morning. All my socks were stored together, which worked together when I had two types of socks and colors of socks. But now I have wool socks in five different lengths and they weren’t separated enough.

So on Saturday, I finally emptied the drawer, donated a couple of items, relocated a couple more (like a seldom-used swimsuit and coverup) and sorted what was left. I knew I wanted smaller sock categories. I use inexpensive IKEA drawer organizers (Skubb) and was going to buy another set to get the granularity I needed. But I found I actually had an unopened set stored with my other organizing products! So that was an easy organizing solution to implement.

So in about a half hour, a drawer that was a literal source of stress became an easy-to-use source of peace. Why didn’t I do it sooner?

What about you? What are you waiting for to complete a life-enhancing organizing project?

Why I became a professional organizer

6 February 2024

I’m in my 19th year in business. I consider my anniversary to be the day I joined NAPO, which was June 30, 2005. I am so fortunate to have chosen such a fulfilling career. I just reread this post, originally written in 2013, about why I became an organizer and why I continue being one. A decade later, all the reasons in this post are still valid and I’ll add another: It feels so great to have helped so many organizers get their start in their own businesses by working on my teams. (I now have employees, as well as independent contractors, and I’m thrilled they enjoy their jobs so much.) Peace of Mind Organizing® has helped hundreds of clients over the years and helped many organizers along the way. I feel so good about that. If you’ve ever wondered what a PO gets out of her work—which to some people looks decidedly unglamorous—read on.

Often when I meet folks who learn what I do for a living, they’re keen on learning how I became a professional organizer. I explain the training I took and how I went about starting my business. (That’s all detailed in my blog post, Are you interested in becoming a professional organizer?)

But seldom am I asked why I became a PO, rather than how. I thought I’d spend a little time exploring that question.

In my observation, there are two sorts of folks who become professional organizers:

• Those who do it because organizing comes so naturally to them. Being organized is like breathing. It’s their passion. So why not make a living doing it?

• Those who enter the field because of their own struggles in getting and staying organized. They’ve spent a lifetime seeking solutions for themselves and want to share those solutions with others.

I fall into that second camp. As I’ve mentioned over and over, I’m a naturally messy person. I’m pretty organized in my space and I’m definitely organized inside my head, but I’m a bit messy and unruly. I sought solutions for my time management and clutter issues throughout my life and I learned a lot. I felt it was time to start sharing.

When I first contemplated starting my business, I was a freelance writer. I’d been writing about pets for ten years and had written hundreds of articles on various aspects of pet care. I’d had seven books published (most of which are no longer available) and contributed to several others. I was working on my last book, an ill-fated venture called Jane Goodall’s Return to Gombe co-written with the famed primatologist. The process of writing that book about killed me (and was never published) and I knew that in order to get through writing that manuscript I had to know it was going to be my last book. So I started looking for other things to do.

As I considered becoming a PO, I thought of several very important things that being a professional organizer would offer that being a freelance writer was not delivering:

• The ability to help people directly and tangibly
• Respect for my expertise (I was being very disrespected during the whole Goodall book experience)
• Payment at the time of service

That was very appealing and a big part of why I became a PO. But why do I keep doing it, after almost twenty years? The truth is that my employees do most of the actual organizing. But I still thoroughly enjoy running the business, communicating with the clients and seeing the huge difference my organizers make in their lives.

Those initial three reasons did prove to be powerful rewarding. In addition, here are some other things I’ve found to be very rewarding (as do my employees):

• We get to help people transform their lives.
• We help people feel better about themselves as we normalize (and sometimes empathize with) their messy behaviors.
• We can help our clients go from striving (and failing) to be perfectly organized to reveling in being organized enough.
• We get to effect vast, fast change by working in teams, rather than one on one.

Being a professional organizer has been life-changing work for me. And its results can be life changing for our clients. It is easily the most rewarding work I’ve done in a career that’s spanned four decades. And as long as it continues to be this rewarding, I’ll keep doing it. I’m so grateful to have the help of my wonderful employees!.

Look for me in Real Simple Organizing Basics magazine!

30 January 2024

Over the years, I’ve been quoted several times in organizing-focused editions of Real Simple magazine and it’s always a thrill. I’ve loved Real Simple ever since it debuted in 2000.

So I’m delighted to let you know that I’m included in the new issue of Real Simple Organizing Basics magazine. I’m part of a roundup of experts in an article called The First-Timers Club in which five experts “share their secrets for organizing success.” The other experts are Julie Bestry of Best Results Organizing in Chattanooga, Wendy Buglio of Wendy Buglio Consulting in Arlington, Mass., Schae Lewis of Mission 2 Organize in Chicago and Tanisha Porter of Natural Born Organizers in Los Angeles.

The four-page spread starts on page 20 of the issue, which is on sale through April 5 at newsstands and bookstores nationwide, as well as at grocery stores, home centers, big box retailers, drugstores and discount chains. Or you can order it from Amazon.

The whole edition is a second printing from 2022 (“Back by Popular Demand!”), which I neglected to mention on this blog then. So if you haven’t already, you might look for it. The ad-free issue is full of great insights and lovely photos.