photo credit Love the 214

Be who you are.

Not all approaches and products work for all people. Some of  us are horses and some are zebras. Or donkeys. What’s important in organizing is to know who you are and what works for you – what you prefer to have around you and what kind of set-up suits you best.

Some people like to be surrounded by the things they love, while that would make others claustrophobic. Some people like to move around while they work  while others find that distracting. And some folks like to focus on the big picture while others prefer to be buried in the details. There’s no right or wrong; it’s just what works best for you.

Therefore you need to be aware of your personal style and which kinds of systems support you in how you like to work. (Just because your neighbor swears by his iPhone doesn’t mean that getting one would be the answer to your organizational prayers.) First – kick up your awareness level a few notches and observe yourself and how you like to operate.

Then, and only then, see what’s out there and how those tools would assist you in doing what you do. This approach will help prevent you from going to the store and buying an attractive item with the hope that if you leave it on your desk long enough, it will organize you. 

http://www.organizate.com.gt/

Check out the web site for my new cooperative venture in Guatemala!

My new class is ready to go! If you live in the Sedona, AZ area, register with OLLI for the April 11th start-date.

Written by Lu Stitt

Friday, 25 March 2011 00:00

+ Tom Hood/Larson Newspapers Preserving memories is something everyone wants to do — to keep those bits and pieces of a life well lived preserved for coming generations. If that is true, then why do most of us just toss the items in a box and stick it under the bed or in the back of the closet? “Oftentimes, people just don’t know how best to put those items together in some type of organization,” Sunny Schlenger said. “There are many ways to create your personal legacy.” Schlenger teaches a class through Yavapai College’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute to help people create and preserve their life story using the memorabilia, photographs and writings they’ve kept piled together in a box. The first step, she said, is organizing. “It doesn’t have to be done all at once. You can even start with one photograph and write a description about it and why it is important to you,” Schlenger said. Schlenger has written two books on organization. After her parents died, she inherited a large number of pictures and collected items from several years of saving. “Some [organizing skills] I knew and some I didn’t. I started scrapbooking about the same time and found I had to find things first, then organize them,” Schlenger said opening the book she made. “I decided I wouldn’t just pass along a box of unmarked ‘stuff’ to my kids.” From that decided statement, Schlenger came up with an idea of how to put her life into a book, then the idea for a class began to surface to help others do the same. “In my class you take one photograph and write about it, focusing on the positive. You ask questions of why and how this item is important. Include what memories and feelings are associated with the photograph and why. If we take it a step further, we can create pages from an era, like the 1960s or one year,” Schlenger said. Other ideas for organization are by people, family or events. It can be very basic, like a photograph and information about the people pictured. This is done most often with very old photographs of an ancestor. Creating a personal legacy is not just about remembering the past. It’s paying attention to the present and passing the stories along. “I want my kids to know what life was like for me on March 8, 2011. You can go from very general, like who is my family, to what I did yesterday,” Schlenger said. She starts by asking the question, “If you were gone tomorrow, what would you want others to know about you and the life you lived?” She said it is like an African proverb she likes to quote: “When an elder dies, it is as if an entire library burned down.” What Schlenger and the people in the class will do is keep it simple and specific to the individual. Every person’s life is different, even if the experiences are similar. Many people crossing the American plains and prairies in the 1800s to find a better life in the West bore some of the same hardships, but the journals they wrote were all different. “History books were written from people’s writings, how they saw what was happening. We all have a history that is worth telling. It helps us to see our purpose in life — why we are here,” Schlenger said. “It also helps us revisit those most treasured moments of our lives.” Creating a personal legacy can be like a treasure hunt to discover those bits and pieces, and why they have been kept as cherished possessions. “It helps connect us to ourselves and to each other. You can approach this from any angle,” Schlenger said as she opened several books on a table to demonstrate the different approaches she has used with her own legacy project. “It’s a lifelong process you can start at any age.” She said virtually everyone who comes to the class walks in the door with a tub full of photographs and collected items, and wants to organize them somehow. “Where should I put this item?” is a big question for most people, Schlenger said. “I want to help get people where they are and bring them into the perspective of their life as a story. I encourage people to write about their lives and having an item to write about helps,” she said. “I think this is part of my mission, to help people record their own lives.” The class is also designed to help people understand what is important in their life, what is worth keeping, and how, with a deep breath, to blow the rest away. “People need to record their lives, and not be just a name on a family tree or three paragraphs in a newspaper obituary. It’s a way to reclaim your life and have something to pass along,” Schlenger said. Schlenger is the author of “How to Be Organized in Spite of Yourself” and “Organizing for the Spirit.” She received a bachelor’s degree in social and behavioral sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s in counseling from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Schlenger has lived in the Village of Oak Creek since 2007. Creating Your Personal Legacy will be taught for five weeks beginning Monday, April 11, from 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in Room 39 of Yavapai College Sedona Campus, 4215 Arts Village Drive in West Sedona. For more information, call 649-4266.

Last fall I was asked to do a Train The Trainer seminar in Antigua, Guatemala. The coordinator of the event, Daniel Lopez, had read the Spanish translation of  How to Be Organized in Spite of Yourself and had been endeavoring to bring me to his country for four years. In December we finally were able to meet and spent a week together with a wonderful group of people who are dedicated to introducing my Styles approach of organizing to Latin America.

I’m very grateful to Daniel for his perseverance and gracious hospitality and hope to be making more visits in the near future!

photo credit trevor loken

Yes, it’s very very cold out there. Not so much here in Sedona (I won’t rub it in) but in many other places it’s just way too cold.

The planetary Mercury Retrograde is also in effect and that just adds insult to injury. Technical things tend to go haywire during this retrograde, and I’ve been dealing with that here on the blog. Fortunately I can fix the fact that many of my photos and internal links have gone missing but it requires painstakingly slow effort on my part to restore them.

The upside? (You know I had to find an upside I’m looking at posts from several years ago that I had forgotten about and realize that they’re perfect for today. Here are two related to organizing from 2007, on cleaning up my office and the question of: Do you erase addresses in your address book?

photo credit

Trust Your Crazy Ideas  is the current sign on my desk.

I have a lot of ideas as do most of the people I mentor/coach. Some of them are unlikely to be executed but some are ground-breaking (e.g, my best-seller, “How To Be Organized In Spite Of Yourself”) and many of them are ahead of their time. I like being in front of the curve but it can also be frustrating when the timing isn’t right.

I was talking with Jamie this morning and we were discussing how to deal with an overflow of creativity. Jamie’s a brilliant conceptualizer but she still has to deal with the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. Plus, she doesn’t want to be going full-tilt every minute. What to do, since she keeps generating so much great stuff?

Answer: Put those ideas in an Idea Box. I used the same concept when I used to tell my organizing clients to go through their files every 6 months or so. There are likely some gems hidden in there that never got to see the light and when you view them later, the circumstances may be perfect for digging them out.

So save those crazy ideas and jot a note in your calendar to review them at regular intervals. You never know what fabulous concept might be waiting in there that the world is now ready to receive.

photo credit Xander Shaw

Set some sort of objective.

It’s hard to know when you’ve arrived if you don’t have a destination in mind. Let’s take the subject of clothing as an example.

If you’ve decided to winnow down your collection of T-shirts or sweaters, you understand that your goal is to  have fewer of these items when you’re finished the sorting process. But how many fewer? It’s fairly easy to pass on the ones that are no longer fashionable, serviceable, attractive or comfortable. But what if you still have too many to fit into your available storage space? You can, of course, invest in more storage space, but what if you want to stick with what you already have?

One objective then might be to reduce your remaining collection by a certain percentage — out of every 5 items, you’ll only keep three. Another is to use a ranking system – give each item a number of 1 or 2. You can save the 1′s, but the 2′s must go.

Each person’s objective will be different, but what’s important is to know what yours is, and stick to it. Using numbers can be helpful because you’ll know if you’ve satisfied your objective or not. And I guarantee you that of every 10 items you dispose of/give away/sell, you may miss at most 2 of them, but it will be worth it to let go of the other 8!

photo credit bkaehny

Start slow and easy.

Have you ever woken up one Saturday morning and decided to clean out the hall closet? You get your cup of coffee, go to the closet, pull everything out onto the floor, stand there and look at the mess, feel overwhelmed…throw everything back into the closet and go back to bed.

Not an auspicious start to the day. Trying to do too much at once, or working for longer than you really want to can be exhausting and make you quit before you’ve accomplished anything. It’s much better to begin with a small space (say, one shelf of the closet) and a limited time frame (maybe fifteen minutes), and see what you can do with that. It may be that you’re going strong and decide to add another shelf and work for another 15 minutes, or you could feel that your initial effort was enough.

Either way, you allow yourself to feel successful. That’s what’s key. Once you’re able to associate a sense of accomplishment with your efforts, you’ll be more likely to be motivated to begin again. And again.

Organizing is actually a series of beginnings that take you to the end result of having a space that feels more comfortable, efficient and supportive of what it is that you’re trying to do.

It’s not a race, so stick to whatever pace feels right for you.

(See the first 3 Rules for Organizing here.)

photo credit Love the 214

Be who you are.

Not all approaches and products work for all people. Some of  us are horses and some are zebras. Or donkeys. What’s important in organizing is to know who you are and what works for you – what you prefer to have around you and what kind of set-up suits you best.

Some people like to be surrounded by the things they love, while that would make others claustrophobic. Some people like to move around while they work  while others find that distracting. And some folks like to focus on the big picture while others prefer to be buried in the details. There’s no right or wrong; it’s just what works best for you.

Therefore you need to be aware of your personal style and which kinds of systems support you in how you like to work. (Just because your neighbor swears by his blackberry doesn’t mean that getting one would be the answer to your organizational prayers.) First – kick up your awareness level a few notches and observe yourself and how you like to operate.

Then, and only then, see what’s out there and how those tools would assist you in doing what you do. This approach will help prevent you from going to the store and buying an attractive item with the hope that if you leave it on your desk long enough, it will organize you. 

photo credit Adam Kuban

If you don’t already have one, develop a good sense of humor.

Getting organized, getting better organized, changing up your systems can be challenging. (And then there’s Murphy’s Law and Mercury Retrograde to factor in. You need to be prepared to laugh whenever necessary – especially at yourself.

Most of us take ourselves way too seriously. We judge, constantly, and make negative evaluations that just slow down the process. It’s important to recognize that we’re usually doing the best we know how to do at the time and to give ourselves a break. As long as we’re making steady progress toward whatever goals we’ve set for ourselves, it’s natural and OK to screw up a little or even a lot.

Once you have this rule firmly under your belt, you’re ready to tackle the job ahead.