Organizers really get excited when they meet other organizers. Of course, at NAPOCon, there were quite a few of them, and one of the last people I spoke with was Julie Morgenstern. So, this week’s Fact Friday comes from her very popular book, Organizing From the Inside Out.
“Pare each pile down to the true essentials. Remember your goals – and be brutal! If you don’t apply mascara or foundation after you’ve left the house, why carry them around in your makeup bag?” [Organizing From the Inside Out · Henry Holt & Company · 2004 · Chapter 7: Briefcases & Handbags · Page 89]
- Fact Friday: Sustainable Systems (dallisonlee.com)
- 55 things you don’t need (timesunion.com)
- Too Much Clutter at Home? Spring Cleaning Tips (blogs.wsj.com)
Spring time is great time to start organizing. It’s also wedding season. What happens when you put the two together? Well, you might ask this question…
Can you organize your love life?
- Image by Vanessa Pike-Russell via Flickr
When Deb asked me that question on behalf of her readers, my initial answer was: No. Love inherently involves – if not requires – more emotions than logic. How can you organize feelings?
After further thought, though, I realized that while love can’t be controlled or arranged, you could organize aspects of your love life. Here are a few tips for those of you in relationships:
1. Schedule quality time with your significant other every week. One friend came to me for advice as to how to reconnect with her husband. Two jobs, elderly parents and a toddler had understandably increased their stress levels and strained their relationship. I recommended that they take one hour out of their schedules once a week to spend with each other in a romantic or intimate way. Just one. As hectic as their lives were, one hour seemed manageable and helped them reconnect as a couple.
For those of you with more flexibility, make a date with your partner one night a week. Find a romantic activity that you both enjoy and take time for your relationship. Don’t lose the spark because life gets in the way of love!
2. While you are marking your calendars for couple’s time, make sure that you have special days (birthdays, anniversaries and any other important holiday) on there, too. Set up reminder alerts for at least two weeks prior to the actual event.
When you are notified that a special day is coming up, take the time to ask your partner how he or she wishes to celebrate. And then, do just that! Many a couple has fought because one partner has forgotten an important day or not celebrated in the manner in which the other person had wanted. Plan ahead to avoid unnecessary conflict later!
3. Take time to inform your partner about your schedule in the short- and long-term. Will you have to work late tomorrow night? Heading to the golf course, bar or spa with friends? Have an out-of-town event that you’d like your significant other to attend with you? Let your partner know by informing him or her as far in advance as you can.
Treat your partner’s schedule with the same amount of respect that you would a superior in the office or your most esteemed relative. If it’s easier, have a master or separate calendar for the both of you. Communication when combined with organization leads to less stress and a healthier relationship.
For those of you who are not in a serious relationship, how can you organize your dating life? Tune in for tips in my next post.
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About the Author
City Girl is a Relationship and Sex Blogger. A lawyer by trade, City Girl started to blog anonymously in December 2008 at the behest of her friends. She writes about her dating adventures, relationship mishaps and sexcapades. City Girl also provides relationship and sex advice in response to questions from friends and readers. She has been featured in K Street Kate, Oh My Goff, Examiner.com, Pamela’s Punch, Nightlife PR DC and a local cable show, The District Dish. This summer, she will be attending a conference for sex educators and leading workshops in the DC area.
Connect with City Girl: Website | Twitter
Greeting, readers. I hope this post finds you well. As all of you know, the iPad is here. A few posts ago I wrote about the possibilities of the iPad becoming a productivity tool, and why I would or wouldn’t purchase one. I found the various ways first adopters used their new iPad quite interesting. What I didn’t know was that many favored the use of the iPad readily suited for productivity.
A fellow Tweeter (Twitterer?…that is, if “Twitter” is a verb as well as a noun), wrote a post about the iPad being used as a productivity tool. Here are two points from that article:
- Among the highest selling paid apps for the device, five of the top six titles currently come from the productivity category.
- The only two non-productivity titles come from the education and weather categories.
You can read the entire post here: iPad users favor productivity over play. I still think its a bit large for me, but after the usual bugs are worked out, I *may* consider one down the line.
Gift cards can make great gifts…if you use them. Otherwise, they take up room in your wallet and any flat surface you have available. Not a fan of the card you received? No worries…sell them to GiftCardRescue.com and they’ll send you a check within 2 days. Not in the mood to sell? Exchange it for an Amazon.com gift card that never expires. Not a bad deal, huh?
The 2010 NAPO conference was great! There were so many awesome elements of this conference, it’s hard to pick just one thing to talk about. So, here are some highlights from my time in Columbus, Ohio…
Three AWESOME Keynote Speakers
1. The good programming was really enhanced by the fantastic keynote speakers. First up was Tim Sanders. If you looked up “funny,” “motivating,” and “knows his stuff,” you’d find Tim’s picture. He inspired us to be better business owners and to change how we think about relationships. Here are a few nuggets he shared:
• Networking is not giving out your business card. That’s prospecting.
• Networking is putting two people together who need each other and getting out of the way. Networking is a verb.
• Being helpful is the best marketing. Otherwise, it’s just noise.
• Grow everyone you do business with. Multiply their value.
• Integrate community into everything you do.
• Turn your clients into friends, not your friends into clients.
2. Our second keynote was Gina Schreck, otherwise known as the Geek Chick. Like Tim, she was hilarious! …and energetic and just fun. She shared a few interesting stats and gave info on how we can use social media tools to brand our companies and get the word out.
• Facebook: If Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest.
• Video: Have a video over 10 minutes long? Post it on http://blip.tv.
• YouTube: YouTube is a power tool. 24 hrs of video is uploaded every 60 seconds. Are you on YouTube?
• Twitter: Be interesting, helpful, or be quiet.
• Twitter: How are people listing you? Are you seen as an expert?
• Twiter: Twitter is a FREE power PR tool – don’t follow blatherers! Follow 5 smart people.
• Make yourself easy to find. Post your content everywhere.
3. The third and final keynote was delivered by Monica Wofford. Apparently, she went to comedy school with Tim & Gina. =) She, too, was very inspiring and focused on how we can build our confidence. She says that everything we do, say, think, and believe is contagious!
• Have you ever felt negative on the inside and tried to pretend to be positive on the outside? Does it work?
• The next time someone doubts that you can succeed, say to yourself, “Watch me.” And mean it.
• It’s ok to not feel confident…but not for long.
• You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most, so surround yourself with people that have similar goals and thoughts…but, first, be clear about what you want.
• There is no substitute for you.
• If 2% of the population loves you, that’s over 1 million people and that’s enough. You can’t be all things to all people.
Want more info? Search #NAPO10 on Twitter.
Neat Company's Paper Monster
Connecting With Vendors @ The Expo
I ran into Jim, Lauren, and Erin at the Rubbermaid booth and caught up with the folks at Neat Company. Some of you might remember that I won a NeatDesk last year. This year, I got lucky again and won a Dymo Label Manager 360D Label Maker! I’ll be testing it out and will share in a later blog post.
Kim Oser, Liz Jenkins, & Deb Lee
Catching Up With Friends
This was my second time attending NAPOCon. It was so nice to catch up with “old” friends and to connect with people I’ve been tweeting with for a while. Here’s one of my favorite pics…
Visit my Facebook page to see more pictures!
“Delegate, simplify your life, and leverage IT.” [Sophie Vandebroek, Chief Technology Officer and President, Xerox Innovation Group]
Since my own wedding, several family members and friends of mine have gotten engaged (Yay, Lori!)…one of them got married last Saturday (Congrats, Lindsey!). OTR friend, Naomi Seldin, will also be taking a trip down the aisle (Woo Hoo!). Here’s how she’s dealing with all that planning…
Planning a wedding? Congratulations! So am I. Five months ago, after I got engaged, I was overjoyed — and a bit overwhelmed.
I write about ways to simplify life and get organized, but when it came to wedding planning, I had a lot to learn. Here is some of my advice about the initial stages that could help you save time, money and headaches.
1. Take time to prioritize. My fiancé and I have a small budget for the wedding, so we’ve had to make decisions about what we value most and can afford. Having our loved ones and closest friends there was our priority. We also wanted to give them a good meal at the reception and an open bar. Most of our friends live in the same area we do, so we wanted to make it as easy and inexpensive as possible for them to attend. That (and our budget) narrowed our search a lot.
2. Get organized. Mark and I have three main places we keep our wedding-related documents and research:
- A “wedding” file in my portable filing cabinet. This is where I’m putting things like site contracts and receipts – any important document we might need later on.
- A wedding planner (a gift from one of my bridesmaids). Most of them have basic resources like to-do lists, countdown calendars, pockets for vendor brochures, and pages you tear out of bridal magazines. If you don’t want to buy one, you could easily create your own binder and fill it with information available for free on Web sites like TheKnot.com.
- Online: Mark used Google documents to create spreadsheets for things like our guest list and possible venues. They’re shared documents, so we both have the ability to update them as needed.
To cut down on clutter, go through all three periodically and get rid of the things you decided not to use.
3. Pick the right venue. If you’re on a tight budget, find a venue that’s already attractive and has as much of what you’ll need on your wedding day. Mark found a great restaurant for our reception that holds up to 80 people, the size of our guest list. We looked at other beautiful sites, but realized pretty quickly that we would have to hire a caterer, rent chairs and tables and linens and a sound system, rent a tent in case it rained … you get the idea. Renting out a restaurant ending up being the simplest option because it had everything we needed to wine and dine our guests, plus cool décor and an iPod-ready sound system. It ended up being the least expensive venue we looked at, too.
4. Don’t go it alone. If you’re planning a big wedding and can afford to hire help, find an experienced professional to answer questions, negotiate with vendors, put out fires and shepherd you and your guests from chapel to dance floor. If you can’t, accept help from your family and friends.
Being flexible and giving up some control can help reduce stress. Mark has done a lot of the research, worked on invitations and designed our website; my future in-laws and my mother have offered to help with decorations and more. My sister, who got married two summers ago and is my matron of honor, has answered a lot of my silly questions and found dresses for the bridesmaids that all of them like.
5. “Your wedding day will not be the best day of your life.” That’s one of the first things my sister told me after I got engaged. And even though it sounds negative, it’s actually a comforting thought. Danby had a small and relatively simple wedding, too, and it was a beautiful one. But, she says she had more fun on her honeymoon.
If you feel pressure to plan the “perfect day” or the “wedding of the century,” try to remember what the day is really about. It’s the beginning of a marriage, not the end-all, be-all of your life. You really need only four things to get married: a partner, a marriage license, someone to marry you and someone to witness the event. If you’re lucky, the people you love the most will be there to help you celebrate, and you’ll all have a good time. The rest is frosting.
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About the Author
Naomi Seldin is a features content editor at the Times Union of Albany, N.Y. She writes about how to live well with less at Simpler Living.
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It ‘s NAPO conference time again! …and my second year attending. Last year, 700+ organizers gathered in Orlando, FL for the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers. This year, we’ll be in Columbus, Ohio, and as I write this today (Tuesday), I’m sitting in a very comfy Southwest Airlines seat alongside my colleague, Kim Oser.
What’s so special about NAPO conference (a.k.a. NAPOCon)? It’s the only place where so many pro organizers get together all in one place at the same time, and we often get to see new organizing products (and some old favorites, like Rubbermaid). There will also be a few TweetUps and I’m sure a some attendees will live tweet from the sessions they’ll be attending.
I’m particularly impressed with the way the conference organizers distributed this year’s program book. It was all digital. Each attendee received a special code to open the digital notebook, and we had the option to print all pages or just the ones we were interested in. I might suggest that they make it a little less circuitous to get session information. None the less, it was easy to use and a green way to distribute the info we need. Somewhere out there, a family of trees is breathing a sigh of relief. =)
Kim took a different approach by going “high tech” with paper, well, as high tech as one can get with paper. She created an 8.5×11 Circa notebook filled with the pages she printed. She also copied/pasted the agenda on annotated pages, added labeled tabs, and used the blue Circa disks to match the blue NAPO logo color! Only an organizer would be this detailed (read: anal) and only another organizer would be jealous that she didn’t do the same (read: moi). Between the trip to the Levenger store in Tysons Corner (she already knew what she was going to buy before going), printing, and putting the book together, Kim estimates that it took her a total of 2 hours from start to finish. Not bad, especially since it will be a tremendous help to her and her roomie (me) over the next four days.
Another plus…though the conference bag was blue, it was also green…
Stay tuned for more updates from NAPOCon 2010. There’ll be lots more to share. Ciao!
How many times has your pro organizer asked if you really needed some item that you haven’t used in years? Have you ever taken her advice to sell that item?
I’ve had several clients who did just that. One in particular finally decided to sell 1 set of large speakers and an adult bicycle on Craig’s List. She very quickly found a buyer for both but then she got cold feet. Not because she wanted to keep them, but because she was going to be home alone during the pick up (shipping them would have been a huge hassle).
So, the moral of the story is go nuts with selling unwanted or unused items (if they’re in good shape), BUT please be sure that you stay safe by doing one of the following:
- Conduct your transaction in a public place that you’re familiar with
- Have a friend or two with you if the item(s) must be picked up from your home
- Ship the items
You have no idea who’s coming to meet you, so why not err on the safe side?
On a recent episode of V…
Anna: “Did you find what we’re looking for? “
Lisa: “There’s just so much. What does it all mean? They don’t seem to serve any purpose.”
Anna: “Human memories contain emotion, not just information. That’s why they can be difficult to interpret.”
Lisa: “Why aren’t our memories like that?”
Anna: “Our species is designed for efficiency. We’re not burdened by emotional imprints like humans.”
This exchange between the mother and daughter characters on the series, V, really resonated with me. I think it’s safe to say that most of us value emotional connections with friends, family, colleagues…and, for some of us, things. That’s the reason why Anna’s last statement got stuck in my head.
Often, it’s our strong attachment to things that makes them hard to let go of. When working with clients, I usually suggest that they allow me to handle the items that may be donated or thrown out. I’ve noticed that when they touch them, their feelings about those items seem to heighten – and they tend to keep them, even if they know they will never use them again. Once the client decides to keep that object, there’s no persuading them otherwise. Interesting how the “emotional imprint” drives the decision irrespective of consequence.
Having no emotions means that the V’s are not slowed down by unnecessary thoughts and connections. Theoretically, decisions would be easier and quicker to make. We’d be better, stronger, faster…just not human. It’s an extreme notion but I have to wonder if it would be preferable to be “designed for efficiency” rather than wade through emotional baggage (even it’s just a small suitcase).
Would no emotions = less stuff = simple life?
- Happy or sad, emotions persisted beyond remembering an event in people with amnesia (scienceblog.com)
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