The Wonder of Konmari Organization

If you know me personally, you know that on the spectrum of things, I'm sort of a minimalist.  Yes, I do admit that I love sparkly things, but I don't love having a lot of things.  That's just not how I roll.  It works out great as I live in a house the size of your fridge.  No problema there.  (That is why I was all gung-ho and loving the ideas brought forth by Man Vs. Debt.  Those peeps are bomb!)

sparkle pants, please and thank you

But, my dears, I have news.  News of something fantastic, wonderful, and pretty much earth-shattering.

Maybe some of you know that I have owned a little business of organizational consultation in the past.  What that looks like is me tearing up the residential world and telling people they have way too much crap and showing them how to re-organize it.  You've seen stuff like that on TV, right?  Yeah.  That's my thing.  So, being that that is my thing, I take pleasure in gutting out drawers, closets, cupboards, counters, etc., on a regular basis.  It is a joyous thing to dispose of a garbage bag full of stuff that I won't use anymore.  

It is through this view that I encountered Konmari.  My friend, E, texted me Saturday morning and threw out this as a post script - "Hey, have you heard of Konmari?"  At first I thought it was some new teaching method that I had missed out on, but she informed me it was related to organization.  While she was giving me a few details via text, I popped over, fired up the tablet and read a bit in between texts.  

Instant crack addict hooked, baby.  

So, if you have no idea what this is or what I'm talking about, here is the basic gist.  There is a woman from Japan named Marie Kondo who has been reading about and loving organization ever since she was able to move her arms around.  She came from an averagely clean family, but she was a little OCD.  She loved it clean and perfect but she hated how she had to keep going back and fixing things.  I get that.  Can I get an amen?  

One day she had an epiphany.  Seriously.  She was cleaning something out and she thought, "No, I must look deeper."  (Not literally, like her phone was buried under her sweaters or something.)  By the way, I am pretty sure that you can only do that if you are Japanese.  No American would have been cleaning and thinking of cleaning theory and think, "I must look deeper."  That just does not happen.  Americans think, "I must look deeper...into this potato chip bag...I think I can stick my licked fingers on the salty crushed bits and get a little more for my fix..."  Don't be offended.  You know you've done it.  That's because you tipped the bag once and got a shower in the eyeball of salt chips and had a new moisturizer called oil of Lays and wanted to go the less offensive way (so irritating to get chips out of your hair!).  

But I digress.  Back to the cleaning Zen master lady (actually she's Shinto).  She thought of something that is very poignant, very perfect.  And also totally cheesy and kind of yoga-esque.  She found a better question to ask when purging.  It was not, "Will I need this in the future?  Should I keep this because Billy gave it to me for my birthday?"  It was, however, "Does this item spark joy in my life?"  

You know what?  This is a very easy question to answer.  Seriously.  You don't have to think about it, you don't have to deliberate.  You just know.  This is what is lacking in regular organization.  All of the "could I use this for something in the future" gets tangled up and shackles you to your crap that you really won't ever use again.  

Here are the simple steps to Konmari freedom:
 
Dump all of your clothes out onto your bed, pick them up and hold them in your hand one by one.  Ask that question for each one.  "Does this spark joy?"  

Make two piles.  A yes and a no.  The no's go to bye bye heaven and the yeses get to stay and live with you, bringing you joy.  The yes pile has very good and specific folding requirements that she will show you.  I didn't realize why they did at first, but now I can see why.  If you follow her folding techniques, you put your stuff in your space and you can see all of it all at the same time.  No socks balled up hiding under each other in a sea of infamy, no stuffed pants drawers so tight that you can only pull out the top pair of jeans anyway, no wearing the same four shirts every week because the rest of your closet is too much of a pain to navigate.  

She's a genius.  

I got rid of two and a half black garbage bags full of just my clothes.  My hubby only could bear going through the storage closet (because he was very busy shooting his bow in the basement in his special set up) but he pitched an entire bag (that looked like me repeatedly grabbing shirts and holding them in front of him and asking, "Does this shirt spark joy, honey?").  

When I told my friend that I did this, she halfway freaked out and said, "I didn't think you had two and a half bags of stuff!  You're going to have one shirt left in your whole wardrobe!"  Can I tell you something?  It feels so much better!  (I have a closet full of clothes, still, don't worry.)  I am only surrounded with stuff I actually love.  I can take care of the clothes that I really want to wear and see them all at a glance.  

It. is. so. nice.  I encourage you to give it a whirl.  

In the meantime, go watch a video of her.  You'll be inspired. 

Peace, love, and cleaned out and free, 
Ms. Daisy

EIGHTY-THREE pairs of socks

I have been pondering a bit on that same subject of minimalism.  While I am not a true minimalist (I have things in my life that go beyond the practical - like sparkly bracelets, for example, and I don't think true minimalists have sparkly bracelets.  They have like...a tattoo of a bracelet or none at all.), I do relish, enjoy and agree with the tenets of minimalism.  I suppose if there were a spectrum of hoarding/consumerism on one side and minimalism on the other, I'd like to place myself 75% towards minimalistic.

Here's why - as part of my whole philosophy on organization and life, I believe that you either own your stuff or it owns you.  I have worked with a lot of hoarders in the past and the problem isn't a physical one (well, it is - they risk their lives as they walk down their hallways of towering boxes and junk and can't sleep on the other side of their beds because their pile of clothing might wake up and attack them or their cat is living in it).  It is completely a mental issue.  Even if - EVEN IF - you were to go in with a team of expert organizers for five days straight and fill seventeen dumpsters of utter crapola, if you left this suffering person to themselves without helping what's behind it mentally, you could walk back in in 90 days and find things were how they were before you cleaned it all up.

This, I think, has two sources.  The first source comes out of the philosophy of what happened during the Great Depression.  Everything that could have a possible use was saved, from scraps to cardboard to only partway rusty nails and the rest.  People didn't know if they would be able to make it and so they scrimped beyond what was normal up to that point in history.  The adults and children of this generation had their lives severely changed and molded because of this traumatic experience.  They had children and some passed on that "save" mentality.

This coincided with the second source - the birth of ultra-consumerism.  In the 1950's, people lived with a lot less than what we do now.  I have personal proof of this in my house.  Our house was built in the early 1950's.  It is about 950 square feet and the closets are 36" - 44" across.  There is no pantry.  In this neighborhood, pretty much everyone has 3 bedrooms: one for the parents, one for the boy children, and one for the girl children.  The amount of children could be 3, 6, or 10.  Some people slept in beds with their siblings.  And those 3 children in one room SHARED that 36" closet.  

If that were a situation someone had to be put into now, they'd cry out as if they were being tormented and abused.  Where on EARTH would they put their laptops, ipods, fifteen pairs of jeans and 300 articles of clothing!?

As the decades chugged on, house sizes got markedly bigger.  The average house size for homes built in the 60's was much larger than those built in the 50's; the 70's showed averages larger than the 60's; the 80's continued the pattern and it increases until today.  Why?  Were people just turning into giants and they needed more room?  (Well...some were getting a bit fatter, but that's not the why, I don't think.)  No.  People wanted to jump onto the bigger, faster, more bandwagon that they bought into as they watched their new favorite family member, the TV, and the commercials therein.  There was no cause to scrimp - people in the United States were not living in a war time (men did go off to war, but that's the thing, they left and war wasn't here and present around us, so those who stayed back, although affected somewhat, were not as affected as let's say those who lived in London in the times of the air raids.).

Then the fish tank thing happened.  You know how fish grow in proportion to the size of their tanks?  Yeah, well, that was people and their homes.  They got a larger home and they filled it up to the top until they decided they needed more room and built a larger house and moved in and filled it up too.  

I had a client once who, after I asked him what he would do if he started noticing he had too many things in his house to live comfortably said, "Oh, that's no problem, I usually just build another storage facility."  SUPERB.  Yes, great.  Pay money to build storage and house your stuff.  I might say that somewhat owned him rather than the other way around.  

So this brings me to yesterday.  Ever since I wrote the post about the minimalist dude, I have been purging my house like a madwoman.  I attacked the basement, the kid closets, my own closet, the hallway closet and the linen closet.  3 giant black garbage bags filled with crapola are gone.  There was something else that was nagging me in the back of my head, though.  There was this pit, this black hole...and it was so prolific and there were...socks...climbing out of it.

It was my dear husband's dresser.  He has a thing for socks.  I left him to himself in this area and I've never purged this for him in our entire life together.  

Until.

Last.

Night.

Oh he did not like this, not one little bit.  I was on a tornado-ish path throughout the house and when this little lightbulb went off for this area, it seemed as if I had hit the jackpot of purging.  It seemed as if I had struck gold.  The joy of purging these depths filled me with excited estatic joy!  It filled my husband with tiredness and dread.

But being the lovely he is, he succumbed to my torture.  I dove in.  I began pulling out sock by sock by sock.  I counted them and piled them on the top of the dresser.  I began hysterical laughter as I got to 50...then 60...then SEVENTY (?!) and finally we toppled over everything and found the last pair, #83.  And a half.  (One of the little guys didn't have a partner.)

Those socks had a death grip on him, though.  He wanted to keep this one because what was wrong with it, it was perfectly fine!  This one was soft and you can't get rid of a soft sock!  What if this other one gets a hole?  Are you going to get rid of this other one that could be a backup?

*cough* sock hoarder *cough* *cough*

Now wait just a minute.  You may think, "Oh, what a naughty boy!"  If you do, I challenge you to go count your socks, or articles of clothing you've saved since you were a freshman in college.  Unless you are a minimalist, you have no room to talk and if you talk smack on my hubby, I got his back and you betta check yo-self befo' you wreck yo-self!!  (I'm the only one allowed to call him a sock hoarder.  You know the drill.  You can mess with your bro, but if someone else does, they're gonna get it.)  Ahem.  Yes.  All I'm saying is, don't diss.

This example is to bring to light for you a possible area you may have neglected over the years.  Are you a sock lover?  Do you just rue the day that anyone suggest to you that you throw away a book?  Do you keep CDs like you're hoping you'll one day DJ a frat party?  Are you saving that entire half-wardrobe of clothes that "might fit one day once I lose x pounds"?  Get real with yourself.  You AIN'T gonna wear those, baby.  By the time you lose your weight, you'd rather go to Salvation Army and wear those than your hoochie mama mini-skirt you flaunted to the club when you were 19.

So get going.  What has a hold on you?  Don't let it own you.  Purge, baby.  I don't want to picture you as you crouch over your crapola wide-eyed whispering, "My preciouses..."  Yeah.  Go on, Schmigle.  You can do it.

Be the boss of your stuff.  It shouldn't control you.  Fight ultra-consumerism.  Live right, live simply.

Peace, love and go fill up a garbage bag (or twenty),
Ms. Daisy

A Minimalist Dude

I think a good way to go in life is to live simply.

I found a dude who is doing that to the max.  Or is it more accurate to say minimum?  Anyway, you know what I mean.

I found him when I googled "how can I convince my hubby not to buy a new TV" and his blog came up.  Why was I searching for that phrase in the first place, I suppose you may be wondering - well, I'll tell you.  We had this TV, it was new-ish (4 years old?) and this last week or so it started smelling like a meltdown electrical burning toxic puddle of explosion.

Yay, hooray, I say!  The TV is dying!  Finally I can rearrange my living room furniture! GLORY!  No more TV!  Freedom, freedom, freeeeeedoooom!!!

But somehow that was lost in translation.  A broken, un-fixable TV to my hubby meant that he was going to buy a new one.  Wha?  A new one?  We don't even have cable, my peeps.  We HAVE AN ANTENNA.  We get something awesome like 19 channels.  Five of them are PBS.  So you can see how vital TV is to my life.  When The Office was on, I watched TV once a week.  Now the series is over and so is my TV watching.  

So, back to the minimalist guy.  He certainly doesn't have a TV.  He has 416 things that he carries around in his RV.  He has a kid, a wife and they have a Jeep.  His blog is called http://manvsdebt.com/.  He advocates selling all of your crap, keeping minimal stuff (see the difference between crap and stuff?  I do hope so.) and doing what you love, in a debt-free manner.

He literally inventories all of his stuff and takes a picture of it.  (Or I think his wife takes the pictures.)  He has nothing superfluous whatsoever.  I do not know how he makes a smoothie (since I don't remember seeing that he had a blender), but I suppose it is a small price to pay for his care-free life.

What would you get rid of if you were going to really think about all of the things you needed - and just kept THOSE things?  He has 5 pairs of socks, 10 undershirts, 2 or 3 pairs of pants, a minimal amount of books, 17 total silverware pieces.  His daughter has two coloring books.  His wife has one dress.  (This I could not do.  Are you really going to wear the same dress to church every single week?  What about your girls night out dress?)  I like this, though, however nose-wrinkled I get on it.

Some people I talk to sometimes say they live (or used to live) in a small house.  (Okay, I'm not talking about people who lived in China in a 12x12 room or my friends who went to the Peace Corps and lived in a hut.  I'm talking about people who are mentioning their house here in the U.S. of A.)  Then, after I furrow my brow a bit and ask them to clarify, they say something like, "Oh, yeah.  Not as small as this."  (p.s. "This" = my house.)  No, it's not the 234 square feet at Ikea, but it's an itty bitty cute cozy home and if it isn't organized and minimalized, it looks like a cross between those hoarder people and the world's largest trash dump.  Let me give you a glimpse - I have 22" of closet space (half of it is behind a wall).  The depth is exactly one standard hanger.  My hubby gets the other 22" (although sometimes I squish him to 20" and I take 24", sorry honey.) and we make it work.

But even with what most would consider keeping a minimum, I know we could do with a lot less.  

As I've been reading about this, I've (obviously) been inspired to purge (how could you not!).  I bagged up some books I know I'll never read again (off to the Friends Of The Library they go), some kitchen utensils I don't use, some decorative candle holders, some magazines I thought I'd re-read (but didn't), and the purge continues.  I'm going to hit the undies drawer for all the peeps in my fam because when I thought about it, unless you're in the very middle of toilet-training (which, imho, should be done way earlier than most people do it), you don't need more than 5-7 (you are doing laundry more than once a week, no?).

So what could you do without?  Would you like to be more minimalistic?  Do you long to live more simply?  Or do you think it's bunk?

Gotta go pitch some undies (that's knickers and pants for my Brits).

Peace, love and cheers to making it easy on yourself,
Ms. Daisy

Just do it, and right now, por favor.

Do you ever feel like things are falling to shambled pieces all around you?  Do you ever look around your house and as your eyes fall upon one thing to the next, each view is a reminder of a chore you need to get done?

I was speaking to one of my organizational consultation clients about this very subject recently.  Here's what I think - I've often said that the people who seem to be the most organized really have a secret laziness.  I know this doesn't seem to be possible, but let me explain.

People who are very organized are guardians of their future investment, specifically in the area of time.  Here's an example: let's just call this person Sean.  Sean walks into his house and takes his shoes off (he doesn't want to get mud on his kitchen floor), he walks immediately over to the closet to hang up his coat (instead of putting it on the banister at the bottom of the stairs or throwing it over the back of a chair), and puts his keys on the key hook and cell phone in its designated place.  He stands over the garbage can and pitches all of the junk mail, opens the bills and puts them on his desk (where he will pay them later at the time he has designated each week to do so), marks the invitation to the fishing tournament on his calendar and off he goes.  This really isn't a big deal, right?  He's not really taking up a lot of time, just a couple minutes (if that).  Good job, Sean.  You guys should see his garage!

Contrast that with someone we'll call Ms. Piggy.  Ms. Piggy walks into her house, drops her purse on the floor next to the door, throws her coat on the couch, dumps her pile of mail onto the kitchen table and off she goes (with her dirty shoes) to find her lost skirt that she totally wanted to wear out tonight, but she has no idea where she put it AND she is in a rush because she's supposed to meet her friends in 45 minutes but she didn't plan any dinner (and she is totally starving and they're all going out for drinks, so really she should have something, but whatEVER, she's got to get that skirt).

But oh crudsicles, Ms. Piggy took 43 minutes to find her lost skirt and then on the way out she realizes she can't find her keys that she must have put somewhere when she came in in a rush, oh CRUD!  WHY?  WHY?!  WHYYYYYYY!?  Now she's late, she has had no food and she's going to spend ten more minutes trying to find her keys.  Great.

Fast-forward to future, Ms. Piggy has collected a lovely pile of mail on her kitchen table (which she now cannot eat off of because it is so covered in myriads of junk) and she has to toss a few jackets to and fro off of the couch to find the right one (and a place to sit).  

Here's the point: In order for Sean to have his stuff cleaned up, he will need to take about zero minutes to do it.  In order for Ms. Piggy to de-piggify, she basically just ate her entire Sunday afternoon.  Sean was protective of his future time by using thirty seconds of what he has now to save himself several hours later.  Ms. Piggy blew her time now by spending her future time.

Every single thing you do to save your time now is putting it in the bank for later.  Time is just like money.  Little by little makes a difference.  You don't know what you'll have for time later, so don't swipe it like an impulse with your credit card.

My mantra: if you can do it in 30 seconds, don't wait.  Just do it.  You will spare your future self time, possibly money and multiple piles of stress.

Anyway, just a thought.  Whaddya think?

Peace, love and just do it - now,
Ms. Daisy

Happy organizational season!

Happy organizational season! Yes, folks, it’s time once again for a boost in the butt, a shot in the arm (does not contain mercury or aluminum, don’t worry, I’m not down with that) in the area of…bum ba da dum – ORGANIZATION!

The word strikes fear and panic in some and causes others to swoon with gleeful anticipation – how could a little (or okay, big. Ish.) word cause so much widespread emotion? However you feel about it, let’s jump in and see what we can do to help you out.

I am happy!  Oh, so happy!

I am freaked, oh so freaked!

I want to attack a philosophy first off because that’s where we get the guts of it. People who are considered organized are actually…well…get ready for it – a little lazier than the rest of the population. WHAT? LAZIER? What are you TALKING ABOUT? Okay, okay, okay, I know, it sounds weird. I was talking to my friend about this very thing. When it comes down to it, I am a pretty organized person – I have an organizational business where I like to go in and tear up peoples homes (and offices, whatever you’ll let me get my hands on) and mainly get you to simplify your life and make your stuff work better for you. So what’s with the lazy? Okay, total secret. (Apparently not for long anymore.) People who are organized actually take things as they come and plan ahead so that they have LESS work when the fun hits the fan.

Visualize: You put an important paper inside of a cardboard box because you 1) didn’t take/have the time to file it and 2) don’t have a home for it anyway. Your hubby calls you and wants that paper. You now spend five hours looking through a box of papers for the right one. You just did five hours of work. That is not lazy, that is INTENSE for one sheet of paper.

 Let me give you a few examples so you can understand the depths of the recesses of my bubbling mind – when I first got married, I hated (this is an understatement: picture – near slumping down onto the floor, writhing and halfway to seizure-imitation) 4:30 p.m. Why? Because it meant I had to make something for dinner. OH GOOOOOSH DINNER, NOOOOO!! So it would be like this: open fridge. Shut. Open freezer. Stare. Shut freezer. Open cupboards. Shut them. Walk in a circle in the kitchen. Look out the window up to the sky and ask God why-for must I make dinner, can’t we just have cereal or pb&j for dinner!? And then, because time was getting closer for the hubby to come home, I would grab some pathetic lump of frozen meat out of the freezer and try to come up with something that I had enough ingredients with to make. When it was finished, it was like a gigantic weight was lifted from my mind. Until I went to bed, woke up the next day and then nasty 4:30 came back to murder my life once again. (Did I not see it coming? I’m not sure how that escaped me…)

Did you miss me?  I'm back.  I'm Martha.
I am a genius!  Don't hate.

At some point (I don’t know when – I think it was about 4 or 5 years ago) I started attacking dinner on the front end. I sat down on a Sunday evening with my Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazines and would flip through them. (She is my hero and a genius, don’t hate.) I would write down what I was going to make that looked good out of those magazines (because hey – whenever you are flipping through recipes you’re always saying, “OOOH, I should make that sometime, that looks good!” And then you never do. Because you didn’t actually plan it. Then you lose the recipe and your life is just plain sad.). I would pick five or six recipes and plan it for my upcoming week. And then, something else happened. I thought that while I was doing this, I could scratch down a grocery list so I could go to the store and get exactly what I needed (thus saving some time and some money – no wasted food, etc.). Then my anal self took over and I ended up with a spreadsheet of my grocery stores in order of aisles – but HEY – you don’t have to go OCD on it, it’s just an example. What, pray tell, is my point in all of this? Now I am up to doing menus for the month and so I sit down for a couple hours (or less) on a Sunday afternoon, flipping through magazines and recipes I’ve collected throughout the month and what do I have to gain for this? NO TORTURE AT 4:30!! I don’t hate 4:30 anymore! The frozen block of meat is now defrosted and I know what I’m making for dinner. I know that you will think I am mental for having such an issue with this, but whatevvvvvs! I am just being honest.

This applies in other areas – clean up as you go when you cook; pick things up throughout the day. I am going to give you examples from my life because that’s the only life I get to live, so yes, I am OCD and sometimes a little O.T.T. but it’s fine. That’s how I roll. I have established times in my day that are considered full-clean-up times – that is – points in the day where my whole house is cleaned up/picked up. This helps me to move on to the next thing without mind clutter. It also makes it VERY easy to clean everything up because I do it so often throughout the day. How often? (You don’t have to copy me, as I said, I might have issues…) Before a meal, before we leave the house, before the hubby gets home from work, before bed (and when the kids were little – before they took a nap). Doing things often made it so there were not so many things to deal with and it only took a few minutes to get me back to ground zero.


One of the things that I have noticed is that sometimes people do not have an exact (read: reasonable) grasp of how long it takes to do something AND they do not factor in the clean-up of that activity to do such things. How long does it take you to get ready for church on Sunday morning? Did you plan time in there to clean up the breakfast dishes, sweep the floor, and pick up the whole house before you leave? If you have goals to have your house clean (and often), this is a factor you need to take into consideration. A little work on the front will save you in the end.

Sometimes I am asked to give organizational talks and a point that I’d love everyone to adapt into their lives is this: if you can do it in 30 seconds, DON’T wait to do it later. Just do it. (Nike. Rawrr.) If you leave all of your 30-seconders (not a word) for the end of your day, guess what, homegirl/homeboy? You’ve got an hour of piddly junk to do! How utterly unpleasant! I’d rather read, crochet, imagine ways to be a hippie/farmer/anti-Monsanto activist or do something to help me the next day (like pack my swim bag for the next morning).
The moral of the story is this – do a little now and save yourself a lot of time later. It is the principle I live by and when life attacks, you have a couple things laid out so you are less likely to flip your lid (just picture that Reach toothbrush commercial from 15 years ago where they suggest you get a flip-top head).

Get on top of your things: do your laundry before you lose a child in it, swish out the dishes before they need to be chiseled out with a crowbar, sweep the floor before the dog hair piles grow legs and start reproducing and demanding food, stuff like that.
Have you had enough philosophy? Do you just need a list? Let me break down some things you can do to make your life easier.

1. Make your bed as soon as your feet hit the floor. Your bed takes up a lot of visual space in your bedroom and visual clutter is like an ever-multiplying to-do list bashing your head like a frying pan.
2. Bring in your mail ONLY when you are 1) standing over a garbage can and 2) have a minute or two to deal with it. Pitch the junk. If you seriously keep stuff (for ANY amount of time) like those newspapery advertisement crapola they send on Mondays, you have a problem, call Sam.
3. Make a meal plan for yourself. Start off with a week and if you want to make it longer in between, work up to that.
4. Clean up your life as you go. Clean up the kitchen as you cook. Pick up the toys/clothes/hairballs as you pass them.
5. Purge. If you don’t have the philosophy of having a grasp on your finite space, you may run into problems. When you are standing at the store and you’re about to buy something (and you use your charge card and Dave Ramsey cries an elephant tear), know 1) where it will fit in your home and 2) what thing is going to move out of your home because something new is coming in. New in, old out. You are the owner of your things but when they hide around in spaces and reproduce themselves, they start to look more like an army and start owning you. Don’t let the inanimate objects suffocate you and your life.
6. Keep an inventory list of things that are difficult and/or odious to navigate. For me, it is my chest freezer and my cellar. I HATE being cold. I am not going to go freezer diving to see if I have a whole chicken. It makes me die to be so cold and for such an unrewarding prize. I stopped that madness with a simple yellow legal pad duct taped (don’t hate on my glam) to the top of the chest freezer. Each page has a category and I do something very advanced and complicated: tally marks under the “in” and “out”, yes, I know, high tech and remarkable. Running a home is like running a business, you should know what you have so you don’t waste money.


Side note: If you are a hoarder (you have cats, collect bags, collect wrapping paper like you’re about to open up your own Hallmark, etc.), you need to get help. People can come and help you clean up but until you find out what is going on in your mind that makes you want to do things the way you do them, your home will always regress to the state that it is in. Don’t call an organizer unless you’re also speaking to a counselor or a psychologist. (And I like to joke and stuff, but for real, I am not mocking and I am not looking down on you, I am encouraging you to get help.)

Side note 2: If you are a frozen perfectionist and can’t do anything unless you’re doing the WHOLE thing and doing it perfectly, you need to take a look and see that you are hindering yourself. It is not a valid excuse for you not to do anything because you can’t do it all. That is like saying you’re not going to try that 5K because you haven’t run a marathon yet. That is something you need to work through in order to be successful. A lot cleaned up seldomly vs. some cleaned up often: think about it, you will be closer to your goal in trying to approach the latter.


One more thought: I sometimes ask my clients this question while standing in the doorway of one of their rooms – if someone came and pushed a magic button and everything in this room evaporated, what would you miss? Your answer to this question will reveal what is really important. The rest of the stuff may no longer have the purpose it once did, it may be time for it to go.

At any rate, live simply. Plan ahead. Your tomorrows will thank you.