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."