Sometimes it is hard to focus on the task at hand, or even on whatever is waiting ahead of you to be taken care of. Our minds often do what they want and we need to find ways to keep them centred on what matters most at this time.

In many cases, that lack of focus is the result of a mindset that is bent on external things and has all but forgotten that there is an internal part as well.

Who hasn’t heard that cliché: A moaning woman in front of an overflowing wardrobe, proclaiming “I have nothing to wear”? It’s a cliché, of course, but there seems to be some truth to this strange occurrence. And believe me, it’s not limited to women at all, I have seen men’s wardrobes with exactly the same comment from their owners, if with a slightly different intonation and background.

What is this all about? I can imagine several reasons behind this strange behaviour.

Pretty much exactly a year ago, I have published a blog post on the subject of accounts and passwords, and boy, oh boy! never has the content been more relevant than in the times of GDPR compliance.

Last year’s post was all about supplying information when setting up accounts and using online services (and that includes facebook, linkedin, Instagram, snapchat, twitter, your online bank, subscriptions to groupon, amazon, ebay, asana, podio, … basically anything you sign up for) and the subject of password security (remember: use complicated passwords, different ones for each account and change them regularly). Let’s have a look at where we find ourselves today…

When I started out being a declutterer & organiser, I actually was more of an organiser, because I quickly focused on dealing with all manner of administrative things as a self-employed agent. Why? Because I got stuck in my comfort zone: ‘all things administrative’ was exactly what I had done as an employee for many years before and I felt confident enough to do this on my own (with added responsibility for finding my own clients, of course…)

Over time, I realised that I had lost sight of the residential decluttering side of my business and when I developed that side of my business, I found that I was uniquely suited to doing this as well, and my confidence started to soar. I also realised that I my involvement in personal development over the years had handed me a number of tools that came in handy for this line of work.

After all the theory, I thought I’d go with a little more practical for once. If this works, I might just do more of those little projects for you to marvel at. Yes, indeed, these are very small projects that take no more than maybe 15 minutes, but each of those may just make a huge difference to you.

Last week, I opened the cupboard under my kitchen sink to take out a measuring tape from the DIY bucket and thought to myself that this space could need a bit of updating. Quite apart from the fact that I have a DIY bucket, that is!

You have a read a lot about the subject of habits, how they affect your daily life, how hard it is to change them, what tools you could use to make changes, not the least on this blog. However, whenever you read about habits, it’s usually written to point out the bad ones and how to replace them with good ones, right?

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but many habits are good ones, and while they rarely get addressed, they are much more part of your life than you would ever have imagined…

These days, all you hear is talk of GDPR, how it impacts business, how it adds more work to business owners’ agenda, etc. It also highlights how little the person in the streets knows about where their data is stored and who has access, creating a level of anxiety about these things in everyone.

Let’s clear up a couple of questions and maybe change your perception a little bit from seeing GDPR as a treat, and rather treating it as an opportunity.

What’s one of the most common complaint with professionals these days? Lack of sleep and failure to fall asleep easily. I’m sure this applies to many of my readers, be they self-employed (like myself), employees (as I used to be) and not working at all (I wish!).

We all seem to be doing too much, wanting too much that will not only take up a lot of time to get done, but  y readers, self-employed, employees and not working at all.he mind't of the window.tant call to will invariably make us more nervous, making it even more difficult to find the calm needed to sleep properly.

I have been on a short vacation recently and had the opportunity to observe – once again – how many people’s minds seem to work when it comes to packing their luggage. As usual, there were a lot of backpacking travellers, but there were also a great many people with unbelievably large numbers and sizes of luggage.

I believe that we can all learn a lot about decluttering from simply observing the way we behave in an exceptional situation like packing for a vacation!

As human beings living our lives, we are confronted with the lure of consumerism on a daily basis. Sadly, there is a superlative version of this daily lure: taking a vacation makes this even more acute!

Not only are we more susceptible to extravagant shopping, but we are also exposed to many more situations where shopping becomes an activity to consider…