The main benefit to being organized is that it makes your life easier. Life is easier when you know where your stuff is and you can get to it quickly. The less stuff, the easier to organize it. I try to keep my blog layout organized and uncluttered, although everyday it seems like there's some new cool link or tool or information I can offer my readers. 

I went to a meeting about blogging, organized by my lovely Ladies Who Launch group, and was reminded that clarity and ease of use are important elements of a blog. That means explaining things that might not be obvious to everyone.

First, if you want to leave a comment, you don't need to register or join my site. Click on the word "Comments" below the post and type your comment into the box. You just need to add your name and email address and then type in some characters to prove you're a real person and not a robot. I would love to hear from you!

Second, you can have my blog posts sent to you via email or via a reader. Those links are at the top of the right column. The first option is dead simple: just fill in your email address and then respond to the confirmation email (again, to prove you're not a robot).

You can use a reader to collect blog posts from all the blogs you read in one place. I use Google Reader. You have to set up an account, but it's free and very easy to do. Then go to a blog you like to read and look for the orange or blue subscribe button, like the one on the right.

Click on it, then find your reader on the next screen and click on it. For Google, click on Add to Reader. And you're done. No technical knowledge necessary. Bookmark your reader page in your browser and go there to read your own "magazine" of personally chosen blogs.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo Da Vinci

My general rule about storage units is this: avoid them at all costs! People rent them and forget ‘em and they often turn out to be filled with junk.

Let’s look at why you really might need a storage unit.

There’s a short list of reasons that are acceptable.

• You are temporarily living in a place that’s too small for your possessions
• Your temporary living situation will be so short that it doesn’t make sense to move all your stuff in
• You’ve inherited a large quantity of stuff that will take time to sort through
• Your home needs repairs due to flood or fire

Notice that all these reasons are valid only because the storage is temporary. There’s no good reason to keep things permanently in storage.

Just as you shouldn’t live beyond your means financially, you shouldn’t live beyond your space means either.

I read this quotation from a storage industry executive: “People turn basements into home theaters or turn garages into family rooms and they need space for storage.” I call that living beyond your space means.

Of course, it’s much more common to fill up the garage with stuff so there’s no room for the car and to fill up the basement too so there’s no room for a workshop or pool table. People also fill up their spare rooms so they aren’t so spare anymore.

Okay, on to bad reasons to have a storage unit:

• You moved in a hurry and just boxed stuff up and ditched it there
• You’ve moved a number of times and keep adding to the mystery box collection
• You inherited stuff 20 years ago and never got around to deciding whether you even like it
• The stuff that’s in there is not worth a fraction of what it costs to rent the unit
• You’re storing things for your children to have when they grow up and your kids are babies now
• Keeping stuff you’re going to sell on eBay someday
• Saving clothes you’ll fit into someday
• Hanging on to an exercise machine you’ll use someday

All these reasons involve unmade decisions or hanging onto stuff for future situations that may never come to pass.

They also involve spending money; a lot of it if you keep paying rent year after year.

The year is still young! Make 2012 the year you make those decisions and start living in the present.

Getting organized, along with losing weight and quitting smoking, is on most people's list of new year's resolutions. Here are some ideas for resolutions, and three rules for increasing your success at keeping those resolutions.

First rule for any resolution: keep it small enough to be do-able. You want a goal that's reachable soon, even if it seems insignificant. You're setting the stage for the next, bigger goal. Success breeds success.

Second rule: It's all about you. Don't compare yourself to others, especially that more organized neighbor or relative. You have your own unique skills, talents, desires and motives. Work with them, not against them. Start where you are now.

Okay, here are some suggestions. Scale them up or down as needed.

• I will sort my mail every day
• I will spend 30 minutes a week decluttering (use a timer!)
• I will give away magazines before the next issue arrives even if I haven't gotten around to reading them
• I will keep a shopping bag in my closet to put clothes I'm donating in
• I will keep my to-do list small and manageable (put it on a Post-It)

The challenge:
How do you remember to do all these wonderful things? Despite your best intentions, you may find it hard to work these new behaviors into your life. Make it easier with reminders that work for you. Use Post-Its on the bathroom mirror; a classic. Programmed, regular email reminders are my favorite. Find a partner to trade reminders with on the phone every week.

Third rule: don't beat yourself up if you get behind. Just start again. Remember when you learned to ride a bike? How often did you fall off before you were able to fly down the street on that thing? Once you were flying, you probably didn't think about the falling part anymore. So, get on the bike.

I like an organic approach to organizing books. By that I mean that I suggest paying attention to how you use your books and what works well with your current set up before rearranging them.

• You may find that books you use a lot are already on the most convenient shelf. If not, that's a good place to start. It doesn't matter if those books are on different subjects and are different sizes, keeping them as handy as possible is a good idea. If you have a visual memory, returning your books each time to the same spot makes it easier to find them next time.
  
•  If you like a fun, decorative look to the bookshelf, arrange your books by the colors of the spines.
  When I first saw this method it seemed silly to me, but then I realized that it would be easy to start remembering my books by their colors.
• If your bookshelves are spaced far apart, maximize the space by putting
  your books on the shelves horizontally. This also makes it easier to
  read the titles.
• Use loosely grouped categories where needed. My bookshelf has several sections: professional reference, travel, decorating and home care, and gardening are some of them. Not all the books are categorized. It makes sense to categorize them when I'll refer to more than one at a time.
• Once you start reorganizing, make sure you really want and need each book. People often find it very hard to get rid of books, but just like anything else in your home that you don't use, books can be clutter. Release the ones that aren't serving you anymore.

Gorgeous bookshelves courtesy of chotda's flickr stream.

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That’s when things pile up because you haven’t made a decision to move them on to their next stop: being put away, thrown away, taken to the cleaners, returned to their owner, tossed in the Goodwill bag, shredded, mailed back or foisted off on someone else.

Clutter can also come from projects in progress.

It’s understandable to want to leave everything out until you finish whatever you’re working on, but if you’re working on more than one thing at once and you’ve got the kitchen table, the dining table, your desk and the living room coffee table covered with projects, there’s no room to eat dinner or set down a tea cup.

Here’s how to combat this problem:

• Make it easy to put things away
• Get in the habit of putting things away
• Embrace the idea of completion

Make it easy to put things away by getting a box or special
case (for jewelry making, for example) to keep your project supplies in. Use a
container if the place you work is different from the place you store
the supplies so you can easily carry them back there. Or set aside some
space on a bookshelf or in a drawer in the room you work in to stash
your project.

Get in the habit of putting things away by remembering and visualizing
how you want the space to look when you’re not working. Think of
putting things away as setting them up for your next session.

These techniques make tidying feel like a positive and beneficial activity, rather than a big drag that you want to avoid.

Completion means that even if your project is unfinished, you still put things away after each session of working on it. Don’t rely on seeing your stuff out on the table to remind you to finish. If you’re busy and have several projects going, that kind of reminder just doesn’t work. It often has the opposite effect; to make you feel guilty that you haven’t finished!

For each session there are three steps: get out your supplies, work on the project, put everything away. Don’t stop after step two!

Slowing down to combat the stress and dehumanization of modern life isn’t a new concept, but it’s been taken to greater and more charming heights by Ella and Bruno Contigiani. Their “slowmandments” offer tips about avoiding multitasking and hurrying and a few more novel and Italian-inflected ones, such as the ones below.

“Write your text messages on your cell phone with no symbols or abbreviations and get in the habit of starting with “Dear…”

“Don’t force yourself go shopping; most probably there is enough food in your cupboard to make something tasty for dinner”

This wonderful sentiment is on their home page:

To stay for all your life a free thinker: this is the meaning of Slow living; to have the courage to stop, ponder and made your own choices before external events and trends will sweep you away.

How to be messy and organized. At the same time. A contrarian view, perhaps. Organizers get sick of having to inform people that being organized and being tidy do not necessarily co-exist. The organized part refers to an underlying system that helps you function. It can be more or less detailed, depending on how much effort you’re willing to put in and what kind of results you need. The tidy part is about looks.

It’s also about how an environment feels to you.

People who are messy on purpose revel in being immersed in their possessions. They are inspired by seeing all the possibilities around them. People who are tidy get distracted when there’s too much visible at once. They need to shut off all those possibilities when they want to focus on getting a particular task done. This is an important distinction.

A common misconception about tidy people is that they are dry, dull and boring.

My view is that they can get overloaded with ideas and plans provoked by what they see around them because they find it hard to ignore. Messy types seem to be able to tune into the inspiration of stuff and then tune out their environments entirely, so they can happily work at a cluttered desk and not even notice what’s next to them.

So the question is: what kind of environment do you prefer to work in? If it’s a messy one you can still have a system, it just may not be apparent to anyone else. How do you keep everything out but still have access to all of it, not endanger self and others by its placement?

• Plenty of open shelving, with shelves placed as close together as needed
• Literature holders with lots of cubbies for paper and other things
• Apothecary cabinets have many small drawers that can be turned into cubbies by removing the drawers
• Rolling carts with wire drawers that pull out are handy
• A big table instead of a desk to give you more horizontal space
• A laptop computer to save desk real estate. Or a flat screen monitor with the CPU on the floor
• A big bulletin board

What’s the quickest way to clear off your desk? Stuff everything into your in box. That’s where it should have gone first anyway.

Don’t fool yourself that having everything out where you can see it is helping you get things done faster. Stop setting things down on the counter, or the edge of the desk, or on top of the printer until you can get to them. Use one spot, your in box, to collect everything and then go through it every day, or more often if need be.

The beloved Wikipedia has an entry on David Allen that succinctly describes how to use an in box. I don’t think it’s verboten to put things back into the in box, however, if you aren’t ready to decide on them. Such a rule is likely to encourage you to make a separate pile and that would mess up the system. The point is that everything you need to do something about is in that box until you do something about it.

Here are some more in box benefits:

• You know where things are. If there’s an important piece of paper you haven’t dealt with yet, it’s in there.
• You desk will be free of clutter. If you routinely have non-paper items in transit on your desk, get a big enough in box to hold them (computer peripherals, books, stray socks, whatever)
• You’ll be able to find things that often get hidden under the piles, such as your planner, address book and calculator.

Try it for a few weeks. You can start out with a cardboard paper box. Practice putting everything that’s on the desk and in your hands when you come in the door into the in box. When you sit at the desk, go through the box as described in the Allen article. Even if you don’t do this religiously, you’ll still gain the three benefits mentioned above.

Your in box need not be cheesy black plastic. The Container Store has a nice looking wooden box. This rattan basket is from Ikea. An in box need not come from an office supply store, but it needs to come from somewhere, so go get one!

How do I want to feel when I’m doing my work, when I’m at my desk, when I’m in my life everyday? Magic. I want there to be magic.

When I was a kid I loved the book The Secret Garden. I really loved the beginning of the book, when Mary finds that secret door covered by ivy (I just reread that chapter and it gave me a chill down my spine). The magic of finding a hidden door. A door to a forgotten place where no one had been in ten years.

I seek out magic. I create it in my life. Sometimes in little ways, like rearranging my furniture so that everything looks different, but it’s the same. Sometimes in big ways, like when I visited The Lightning Field. Magic for me is about curiosity and exploration and discovery.

I turn things upside down so I can see them fresh. I ask stupid questions that I already know the answer to so I can get a new answer.

Magic erases my expectations, biases, assumptions and “shoulds.” It evokes beginner’s mind. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” (Shunryu Suzuki).

Where can you get magic today?

Magic photo of me by Ron Nelson

Working with an organizer can be immensely helpful to get you to your organizing goals faster, just as hiring a personal trainer keeps you on track with getting in shape.

It can be a little intimidating to think of hiring a stranger to come inside your home, so I wrote this list of things to consider.

1. Trust is vital. You’ll be sharing with your organizer parts of your life that you’re embarrassed about or even ashamed of. The organizer should make you feel comfortable and supported. Good organizers adhere to a code of ethics and promise confidentiality and respect.
2. A good organizer offers an objective viewpoint. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s pretty darned hard to get perspective on your own situation. Your organizer should be able to make a nonjudgmental assessment that focuses on how things are now, how you want to change them and how that will happen, rather than mistakes you made or skills you lack.
3. Look for an organizer who understands your unique situation. You are the one who chooses the goals you want to work toward. A capable organizer will ask questions to assess what’s going on with you and help refine your goals, but not make assumptions about what you want. Whether an organizer is a good fit for you should be determined by how easily you can communicate.
4. Pay attention to personality and temperament. An upbeat, high energy organizer may be ideal for you to stay motivated and charged up. Or that organizer might make you feel anxious and tired. You’ll be spending hours at a time with your organizer, so make sure you click.
5. A good organizer listens actively, taking in not only what you say but how you say it and how you feel. As I mentioned above, getting organized can bring up some uncomfortable feelings. You don’t need to let it all hang out, but an organizer can help you better if she knows what you’re feeling.
6. Creative problem solving is an essential skill. People who seek out organizers often have tried to get organized by reading books, but find the programs too hard to follow, or just not suited to them. A good organizer uses her professional experience and understanding of the client to develop solutions that are tailor made for each one.
7. Don’t forget to find out if the organizer can work with your schedule! If you can only devote time to organizing on the weekends, a Monday-Friday organizer can’t help you. You’ll get better results if you commit time to your organizing project. If you work full time, squeezing in sessions on weekday evenings isn’t ideal. The time and energy you put into the project will pay you back generously with a sustainable organized space.

Did I leave anything out? What would you look for?