Confessions of a cluttered editor

I'm learning how to streamline my life.
If I can do it, you can, too.

By Debbie Gardner
PRIME Editor

OK, I'll admit it. There are days when I can't find what I need on my desk.
Either of my desks , the one where I spend my work life at Reminder Publications or the one in the corner of our sunroom where I keep all my home-related paperwork.
Yes, I have piles. And overstuffed files. And misplaced notes (though no lost bills yet, thank goodness!).
I never intended to have such disorganized desks. The disorganization, it seems, just sort-of happened.
I have lots of theories about how my clutter happened.
My favorite is lack of time. I do many jobs at Reminder Publications, which means I often have multiple projects going at the same time.
Because I'm afraid I'll forget something vital in one of these projects, I tend to leave the files on my desktop. And because I'm so busy making sure all the projects get done, I tell myself I don't have the time to file away the end results.
The result everything is always on top of my desk, often in piles that end up being stacked on top of other project piles when I have to start something new.
My home desk suffers from the same malady. As a working mom, my time to handle paperwork at home often gets squeezed in between myriad other chores and obligations. Add to that the files and papers that go with a second job in this case a small home-based business and you can see where the rub can lie.

The paralyzing power of piles
As I've waded through this mess for the past year or so, I've come to understand the curse of clutter.
Just looking at a disorganized space can make you feel tired and unmotivated. It can even be depressing and disheartening. Clutter affects your self esteem. And the thought of dealing with it, even if you want to make a change, can leave you feeling paralyzed and overwhelmed.
A cluttered environment can really make it hard to get excited about your job, or even get your work done.

Choosing to clear the clutter
Sometimes it seems easier just to leave the mess and work around it. I tried that for a while, but of late have found that the clutter is cutting into my productivity and I missed the deadline on a story for a favorite contact (the notice got misfiled in my piles).
I decided it was time to tackle the problem.

99,800,000 organizing sites on Yahoo

I started my organizing quest with a visit to Twingine.com, my favorite search engine. This software lets you search for a topic such as "getting organized" on both Yahoo and Google at the same time, cutting the research time for stories for one-woman editorial staffs such as myself.
The result: 99,800,000 sites on Yahoo, 2,960,000 on Google that matched my criteria.
Now these sites ran the gamut from advertisements for services that offered to come in and organize my mess for a fee to blogs by poor disorganized souls such as myself who were publicly sharing their odyssey to organization.
I signed up for a couple of free newsletters (www.getorganizednow.com by Maria Gracia and www.declutterfast.com by Mimi Tanner) that promised to send me weekly tips on organizing my life.
I also read several organizational dissertations by self-proclaimed blogger/consultants.
One, by a man named Steve Pavlina, suggested that my workspace was disorganized because I'd never learned how to organize.
I balked at that notion. In past jobs I easily developed some very methodical, workable systems that kept my office and desk organized.
Somehow I just haven't been able to establish a workable system for my current position.
Pavlina, I learned, based his theory on information he'd gleaned from a book by author Julie Morgenstein titled "Organizing From the Inside Out."
"Clutter," Pavlina said in his posting, "is created by an inability to make a decision."
Knowing that my husband is often frustrated by my inability to give him a choice of restaurant when we have the opportunity to go out, I wondered to myself if a personal tendency toward indecision might have precipitated my current clutter problem.
Discouraged, I started searching for ways to overcome my inertia and indecision.
That's when I got an e-invite to take a free webinar offering hands-on, useful information on organizing your office space from an affiliate of a company I work for part time.
I signed up, and logged on for the one-hour presentation on a Wednesday afternoon.

Life as an agent of chaos & clutter
This webinar (that's an audio, sometimes video, seminar which is presented live over the Internet) featured tips and ideas by two experts Julie Anne Jones (formerly Julie Weitz), a professional coach and trainer and the owner of a business called Outward Image and Christa Green, who founded of a company called Organized for Life and is now renown as an expert in personal branding and organization.
What I heard there made me feel less bad about my clutter. And showed me there is hope at the end of the tunnel.
Early in the webinar Green, who now admits to running two international companies out of "a seagrass box," said she was not always as organized and streamlined in her business.
"Being in the business of organizing doesn't offer as much credibility as having been there myself," she said.
Green talked about being meticulous on how things were organized but "having a volume issue a five drawer filing cabinet, a two-drawer, active file and I couldn't see the top of my desk."
She related how a tragedy the death of a good friend in a car accident 10 years prior, had seemed to push her further into disorganization. She hit rock bottom in 2002. She said it took her until 2005 to get cleaned up.
"Your environment reflects your inner self," Green said. "When you see all that excess and disarray, that is a reflection of your inner self."
She emphasized how any kind of excess weight be it on the body or in a space is a kind of protective insulation."
"As you begin to heal, you whittle down," she said.
I began to think about my dad's struggle with and death from ALS two years ago, and wondered if my current clutter problem was a reflection of that tragedy.
A later consultation with a local organizational professional, Carleen Eve Fischer Hoffman, known professionally as The Clutter Doctor, confirmed my suspicions.
She mentioned that her own father had become ill and passed away unexpectedly about a year ago, and shortly after her personal tragedy, she began to notice piles of things creeping into her normally orderly home.
As a professional, she recognized the problem and had a strategy to deal with it.
Me, I was just beginning to acknowledge that I needed to make a change.

Baby steps to better organization
After researching and reading and listening to lots of information about getting better organized, I broke my space - and-psyche makeover into two parts things that I could implement immediately, and things I needed to plan time to do.
I'd gleaned the importance of scheduling time to do certain organizing tasks from the Internet webinar on desk organization. During the presentation, Julie Ann Jones had stressed the need to make appointments with yourself to accomplish tasks such as sorting materials and finding proper homes for things.
"Go to your calendar and and schedule time so you are committed," Jones said. "I guarantee you are going to be committed if you write it down or put it in your electronic planner."

Lists and in-out folders

My first step toward getting better organized was the resurrection of a daily to-do list.
In the worst of my dad's illness, when situations changed at the drop of a hat, I kept a running list of what stories and projects I needed to get accomplished over the course of a week or a month.
Somehow that went away over the last two years, but it was a tip I read in almost every organizing web site.
So I went back to creating two lists one for work and for home. The work one I write just before leaving for the day. The home one I write just before I go to bed.
I showed my work list to Hoffman, who praised my effort, but told me I was trying to accomplish too many things (I write down everything for fear of forgetting something).
She said that I should have just the three most important things I need to get done in each area of my life on that respective to do list.
"By writing it down and getting it on paper you get it out of your head and open up space in your brain," Fischer Hoffman said. "The act of writing it down also helps you to remember it."
She also suggested I use Sunday night to plan my week's errands and incorporate them into my daily to-do lists (I haven't gotten that far yet).
But I have implemented another anti-clutter device for my home space- this one to handle the pile of must-do things that seem to accumulate near our main telephone.
I'd read in a back-to-school article on Joan Goldner's BusyBody Book web site (Goldner runs a company that produces grid-type calenders to organize family life) about assigning each child an in and out folder for school papers that need to be looked at and/or signed.
I decided to use the same approach for my telephone table clutter, creating an in file for those things we need to attend to in the near future, and an out file for those things we need to mail or return.
I popped the folders into two of three previously cluttered slots in a wall-mount keys/letter holder file ( I made a coupons folder for the last slot- another clutter tamer) and I have to say the system seems to be working well!

Tackling the bigger mess
I know I still have to schedule time to take on the bigger clutter problems on my respective desks.
Hoffman suggested I come in on Saturdays to tackle my work desk so my project won't be interrupted by colleagues or deadlines.
Her prescription to my clutter involves breaking the project down into smaller tasks, such as cleaning the left side of my cubicle, then tackling the right side.
I'm also supposed to use a timer to limit myself to 30 minutes or one hour per task.
"The clutter wasn't built in a day. It's not going to take a day to get it all out," she said.
She also suggested I start on the left side because "we read from left to right."
She said my goal is to "pick up and touch every item" as I clean out and organize, so that I can better decide if an item is going to go (as a donation or in the trash) or stay. Then I have to decide if it is going to stay on my desk or in another storage area.
Her assessment is that finding another storage area for many items especially books and CDs that I have not yet reviewed will help me control the clutter in my work space.
That, and devoting 10 minutes at the end of each day to filing to keep the clutter from accumulating again.
"Everything has a home," she said. "If you take it out, put it back."

My home work space

As far as my small work space at home goes, I'm going to try and implement Christa Green's office organizing program, which involved establishing a hot, warm and cold filing system. On my desk will be only "hot" items things that I need to touch or work with within the next two weeks. My file cabinet will hold "warm" items, those things I need to access within the next month. All "cold" items things I only access once a year at best will go into the attic in labeled boxes.
Of course, to accomplish this task, I still need to make an appointment with myself to do the initial sorting of my paperwork by task (the first Friday morning after school starts looks good).
This will initially clear my desk.
Then I can choose to go through and further sort each box at my own pace one per day, week or month,
"Don't overwhelm yourself," Green said in the webinar. "Just focus on getting your 'hot' items razor-sharp."
"Organizing is like driving," she said. "When you first start it's hard to master the brake and the mirrors and keeping your hands on the wheel. But as you practice, it comes easily."
Hoffman concurred with this need to practice, saying that when you start a new behavior, be it opening the mail when it comes or putting things back in a file after you have used them, it takes about a month to ingrain this behavior as a habit.
But the rewards, I've been told, are worth the work.
"The benefits are that it saves you time during your day, and gives you more time to do the things you want to do, instead of what you have to do," Hoffman said.
"Understand that when you are making changes in the outer area of your life, you can't always see the spillover effect in other ares," Green said. You'll find increased confidence and energy. Getting organized will change your life."

Julie Anne Jones (Formerly Julie Weitz) is a professional coach and trainer. A sought-after motivational speaker, she is the owner of the company Outward Image (www.OutwardImage.com) which offers organization and training for individuals with careers in the home party plan industry.

Christa Green is a recognized expert in the fields of personal branding and productivity/organizing. She founded the franchise business, Organized for Life. Named to the Top 40 under 40 list of outstanding young professionals, she is the author of "Get Noticed. Be Remembered: Creating a Personal Brand Strategy for Success."

Carleen Eve Fischer Hoffman is the owner and operator of The Clutter Doctor, Inc. A local authority on the subject of organization, she has received the prestigious Golden Circle Award from the National Association of Professional Organizers. In addition to her consulting business, she teaches classes on organization at Springfield Technical community College and has written articles on organizing for magazines and newspapers. Her web site is www.clutterdoctor.com

Organizing quick tips

By Debbie Gardner
PRIME Editor

A prescription for getting organized
Here is The Clutter Doctor's three- step prescription for getting organized:

1. Examine your space.
Take a good look at what you have to work with and decide what this space will be used for.

2. Diagnose your clutter.
"Go through your things and decide what will stay and what should go," said Fisher-Hoffman.
She stressed that this sorting process should be done in "small increments of time - a half-hour to an hour."

3. Prescribe a treatment.
"Now that you have gone through everything - and you know how much you have go out and get buckets and bins," she said. "Then decide how things are going to get stored and where."

Potential "homes" for your unwanted things
Sure, you can take your unwanted stuff to one of the major donation centers, but here are some other places that might think your trash is a treasure:

Senior Centers (Books and arts & crafts supplies - but call first!)

Daycare Centers (Children's books and CDs/Movies; some art materials again call first)

Libraries - books, CDs,Videotapes and DVDs.

The Survival Center in Indian Orchard - Household goods and clean, usable clothing.

The Springfield Rescue Mission- good, clean, usable men's clothing

Women's Shelter Campanaros old cell phones (clear private data first!)

Themed Museums - toys, collections, etc.

Also check with local churches to see if they are collecting certain types of goods for a specific cause.

A three-step plan
for staying organized

Once you've made the commitment to getting organized, how can you keep from backsliding?
The Clutter Doctor offers these three simple tips:
1. Remember that everything has a home.

2. When you take it out, put it back!
"It may take time for this to become automatic," Fisher-Hoffman said. "Remember, it takes 30 days for a conscious action to become a habit."

3. Respect your newfound open space.
"Now that you have a clean space, don't feel you have to clutter it back up," she said. "It's OK to have open, free space!"

Local Support Group

The Clutter Doctor facilitates a free monthly support group for clutterers at the Chicopee Library:

Date: Second Thursdays
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: Chicopee Main Library 449 Front St.
Contact: Carol Bagley 413-594-1800 x108