The Weekly Simplifier #13 – Key Elements of Being Organized
Welcome to The Weekly Simplifier, brought to you by…
Contents:
1. A Note From Lance
2. Quote of the Week
3. Article: Key Elements of Being Organized
4. This Week’s Simplification Tip
5. In the News & On the Web
6. Featured at ProjectSimplify.com
7. Keep Smiling
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1. A Note From Lance
Hi folks,
This issue marks one quarter-year of The Weekly Simplifier, and we close out our first 13 weeks of publication with a look at the fundamentals of an organized life. There’s only a few you need to really focus on, and they are so small and simple they’d fit in the palm of your hand. Or in a nice colorful diagram, like the one in this week’s special multimedia Article. :-)
The Tip this week was carved right out of Shawn’s workshop for parents, but it should prove useful for anyone who feels like their mornings tend to get the best of them. {Points finger at self.} Our In The News section is full of practical tips, from how to de-work your vacation time, to how to tame your basement. Speaking of basements, our Keep Smiling section has some grin-inducing photos from what passes for my basement. {Points finger at floor…and at dog (?).}
Featured at ProjectSimplify.com highlights a page you’ve probably heard about, but haven’t officially been introduced to yet. And this week’s Quote simply affirms that, like most great things, simplicity starts right…here {Points finger at your brain.}
Enjoy!
Lance Brown
Co-Editor, The Weekly Simplifier
2. Quote of the Week
“Simplicity is a state of mind.”
-Charles Wagner
3. Article: Key Elements of Being Organized
By Shawn Tuttle
In a special “multimedia” article this week, we’d like to share this illustration of some of the key elements of an organized life. If you work to abide by these main themes in your life, you will de facto become more organized! The mini-elements provide some ways to make the bigger elements more bearable and easier to manage. Beneath the diagram we’ve included some notes of clarification, and provided links to other Project Simplify resources that are available on these topics.
Click here for a larger version of the diagram as an image file.
Click here for a larger version as a PDF file.
Main Elements:
Visualize priorities
How do you want to feel going through your day? How do you want to react in situations? How do you as your “best” self feel? What do you want your space to look like? Take a few moments to visualize this. By visualize I mean: relax, paint a visual image representing your ideal, explore what it feels like, make it a part of you. Why is this powerful? Being in touch with your best self, and knowing what your goals are provide the “compass” to navigating the unexpected terrain of life with meaningful results. A great time to do this regularly is during Planning Time (see below). It also helps with scheduling.
Be Pro-active
Do what you planned, when you planned to do it. It won’t get done by itself! Tip for pro-active clutter busting: Never set something down to “take care of later”. When you have something in your hand, only put it down where it is supposed to go.
Planning Time
Planning Time has come up twice in recent Project Simplify articles: “Planning Time vs. Doing Time” introduces the concept, and “Plan to Prevent Overwhelm” digs deeper into the benefits of making effective use of planning.
A place for everything
The full organizers adage: “A place for everything and everything in its place.” Clutter often is the result of not knowing where to put something and not wanting to deal with finding a place for it. Evaluate what is out of place, (be pro-active!) take a moment to determine where the best home for that item is.
Scheduling
Such a wonderful pro-active tool! How to make sure family outings happen? Schedule them in! Make it a habit to work backwards to determine when you need to leave in order to get to an appointment 15 minutes early (yes, 15 minutes early! See Time Realism below). Having people over on Friday? Work backwards to see how you can spread out preparations over a several day period. After you’ve broken a big project into sprints (see Small Steps below), work backwards, to sprinkle these sprints into your schedule.
Mini-elements:
Small Steps
Break big projects into small steps. Do super short sprints rather than marathons. Marathons are too easy to put off, and once you get going, too easy to get distracted from. During your sprint, establish a time limit and mono-task, put on blinders!
Mono-task
Mono-tasking is the opposite of multi-tasking, and was the focus of The Weekly Simplifier # 9. Word on the street (and in more and more studies) is that multi-tasking is not as great as we’ve been led to believe. You may get more done if you try mono-tasking. Read more here.
Time Realism
The average person schedules 18 hours of appointments and tasks into a 12 hour day. Some people can realistically guess how long a task will take, but then completely disregard preparation and clean-up times. Appointments: Sure it only takes 15 minutes to get there, but what about the time it takes to load the car, take a final “potty” run, get gas, and really, who budgets time for parking? (Time realists, that’s who!)
Bio-rhythms
Scheduling with your bio-rhythms means doing the right activities at the right time for you. It was dealt with in greater length in TWS #5 as our Tip of the Week, and it’s now a blog entry of its own in our Time Management section.
—
Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify
4. This Week’s Simplification Tip
Use the night before to open up your mornings
Do you function better at night? Are your mornings compacted and rushed? Get your day rolling more easily by making use of the night before.
The following are some ideas of things that can be done… What else can you get in the habit of doing the night before?
- Pack lunches
- Pick out your and your kid’s outfits
- Unload the dishwasher in the evening so that you have a place to put dirty dishes in the morning
- Pack up your kid’s schoolbag and your bag/briefcase
- Set the breakfast table
- {For home offices} De-clutter your desk and set it up to welcome you in the morning!
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5. In the News & On the Web
If you know of something in the news or on the web that should be featured here, let us know!
In The News
Leave work behind while on vacation (CNN.com)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/h7qjw
This article talks about how to make sure your using your vacation time as play time, not as work time. Best tip? If you have to connect with work while on vacation, do it early in the day, so the rest of your day is truly free.
A Place for Everything (Los Angeles Daily News)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/fy6mp
In this article, TV organizer Peter Walsh is consulted on how to get closer to that key organizing ideal “a place for everything” in your home. Lots of good tips ensue.
Boxed-In Basement? No Sweat! (Detroit Free Press)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/f8gdh
During the brutal July heat is just the time to descend to your nice cool basement and straighten it up, says this article. If you agree (and if I had a cool basement, I would), it’s got a comprehensive guide to help you out with the job.
6. Featured at ProjectSimplify.com
Our Newsletter Archive Page
There has been a little whispered note pointing to our newsletter archive page at the beginning of each newsletter for several weeks now, and it’s mentioned when we announce new issues on the site, but it hasn’t been formally introduced yet. Until now…
Please allow me to introduce you to our Newsletter Archive page: http://projectsimplify.com/newsletter-archives
There you will find a listing of all of our past issues of The Weekly Simplifier, with a brief summary of the contents for each. You can click through from there to read any of our back issues in full. If you missed one or more, now’s your chance to check them out! (Now, or later…whenever, really—that’s the whole point. :-)
You can find a link to the newsletter archive near the top of the sidebar at ProjectSimplify.com. It’s listed as “Newsletters” under the Main Menu section.
7. Keep Smiling
Peababies
(written by Lance Brown)
For a personal touch this week, I thought I’d share a few photos of some things that have been keeping me smiling in recent weeks.
The peacocks that live at my place (they’re a little too independent and wild to call them “mine”) have been hatching chicks—three different batches. Well, technically, the peahens have been hatching chicks—the peacocks are mostly chilling out, now that their competitive mating games are over with. I don’t bother much with the official nomenclature though…to me, it’s peamoms, peadads, and of course, peababies!
Now, everything these chicks do at this age is cute and very smileworthy…
(Awwww…)
…but most still photos can only convey a tiny bit of that.
There are exceptions though…like yesterday, when the peamom led her kids under my house…
…where my dog Cali likes to sleep during the day…
…and some of the peakids didn’t know enough to be afraid of him…
…luckily, they didn’t actually need to be afraid!
(Yes, that chick is lightly pecking my dog’s face.)
If you want to check out more pea-pictures, there are a whole bunch in my
online photo album here. (<<--Not a Project Simplify site.)
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Thanks for reading – see you next week!
Publication Information
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The Weekly Simplifier is published by:
Project Simplify
P.O. Box 597
Nevada City, CA 95959
phone: 530.205.5775
web: www.projectsimplify.com
e-mail: newsletter@projectsimplify.com
