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What are you teaching your kids?

11/1/2021

In my practice as a professional organiser, I often come across a particular issue that I believe to be of huge importance for raising your children with a tool that will allow them to thrive better than without it. That tool is ‘the gift of being organised’.

Let’s take a couple of steps back here: if there is one thing that raises my alert levels during a first visit to a potential client’s home, it’s finding items in places they don’t belong, and especially if I find similar items in several places. We are talking about used plates with crumbs or leftover food sitting on ledges, shelves and the lounge table, or paperwork being visible from every spot in the flat. Those two are the classics, but this can easily be expanded to finding toys everywhere, or clothing, shoes, … you name it, it could be one of those items.

Fear of change

21/12/2020

We all seem to have something in common: feeling comfortable is associated with predictability, with things staying the same. Change is associated with danger, an instinct that probably dates back to proto-human existence where anything that moved was a potential danger. Another one of those remnants that we have not been able to shake, and I presume it’s been serving us well in dangerous situations. It is keeping us safe when we walk in unfamiliar territory, and it makes us feel more comfortable in general.

Case study 1

7/12/2020

I’ve talked and written at length over the years about ideas to help you get your stuff sorted. What I have not done so far is really talk about specific situations and how I work with my clients to find solutions that work for them and that they will be able to maintain on their own, going forward.

Sometimes what appears to be a lot of clutter is – in fact – a question of organisation skills rather than a sign of neglect. Here’s the tale of a client I worked with a couple of years ago.

How much do you really need?

23/11/2020

I find that a lot of my client’s problems are a result of their inability to balance their sense of “what they need” with “what they want”. It’s hard to distinguish between those two things, especially if you are susceptible to the regular drip-feed of marketing and advertising that we are exposed to throughout our waking hours.

Just walking through your part of town, you’ll come across billboards next to the roads and at bus stops, enticing images in every shop window and on flyers. TV and radio shows are regularly interrupted by advertisements that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the show, you’ll be exposed to constant popups and hidden advertorials on your social media.

Decluttering after a death

9/11/2020

Decluttering a home can be hard work. This not only means hard physical work, shifting boxes or sifting through a lot of small and large items, but it can also turn into devastatingly difficult emotional work on occasion.

One of the reasons for accumulating clutter and having a hard time with letting go of any of it is the emotional value we assign to items in our possession. This is a typical element in all decluttering, but especially so the older my clients are. Of course: they had a lot more time to experience important moments.

Does your life fit your rhythm?

26/10/2020

Irrespective of the situation you live in, be it in these taxing times of Covid-19 and limited possibilities or not, if you work from home or elsewhere, if you live on your own or with partner or family, one thing is for certain: your life rhythms are determined to some degree from the outside.

Either way, you do have a certain level of control over how your day is being structured, even if you may not always be aware of it. Let’s have a look at what exactly you CAN do to adjust your daily routines to serve you better.

Christmas is coming... again.

12/10/2020

Sign up for the workshop!

You may be thinking “What? Christmas is months away!” But the sad truth is this: what feels like an eternity in terms of months is really closer than you think: you have little more than 10 weeks left to get everything organised and ready to rumble.

There: 10 weeks sounds a lot shorter than ‘months away’. This is the kind of bias we always bump into when it comes to planning ahead: not only does ‘months’ sound like a huge amount of time, but also we tend to underestimate just how long it takes to get things done in the runup to the big event.

One of the main culprits here is that just looking at what you need to do in terms of shopping, pre-cooking, invitations, cards, decorations, setup, cleaning, etc. does not give you the whole picture. You may be feeling that these actions are not all that time-consuming, but what you keep forgetting is this: all those things need to be done on top of what you have to do every day anyway. And that changes things quite a bit. While those preparation on their own may only take you a couple of days of rigorous planning and running around, if you add your regular work schedule, school runs, doctor appointments, yoga class, meeting up with your friends, work Christmas dinners (and your partner’s, too, of course), the state of affairs is a lot more dire!

Once you realise that all the Christmas stuff needs to be slotted into the few free moments you may liberate in your regular schedule, Christmas turns out to be much too close for comfort.

In these difficult times of Covid limitations, all this has the potential to take a lot longer even: waiting outside to be let into a store, and/or having to wait at home for a delivery that will otherwise end up in a pickup spot 20 miles away will keep you busy for much longer than you would think! It’s hard to get everything organised without getting frazzled at the best of times, and 2020 has most certainly not been ‘the best of times’, right?

My advice is simple: don’t wait any longer and get yourself sorted NOW rather than later. Make a plan. Get started sooner rather than later. Do what you can do ahead of time. Stay level-headed and make sure YOU can enjoy Christmas as well rather than spending all of December in a state of panic, and Christmas time in the kitchen.

If you know that time has always tended to get away from you, here’s something to help you get everything done in time: I am offering an online workshop to get you started on the right foot, and I promise that at the end of the workshop you’ll have the makings of a personalised plan to ensure that your Christmas will be a relaxing one.

Have a look here and sign up for the planned workshops!

Young men

28/9/2020

Talking about younger men and their relationship with clutter and lack of organisation is a tricky subject, even without going into desperate attempts at avoiding gender stereotypes. Leaving aside any effects of being brought up in a household that retains levels of gender typical association of mom or dad with particular tasks, there are some differences in the way young women and young men associate with things they surround themselves with. There also appear to be some differences in the way they react to how others see them, as far as I can tell from professional experience with decluttering clients.

What difference does it make to employ a PO?

14/9/2020

You may be wondering what a Professional Organiser or a Decluttering Specialist can add that you wouldn’t be able to do on your own. To be honest, you wouldn’t be the first person to ask that question! At first sight, most people appear to have the abilities necessary to clear their space, shift items around, look at things and make decisions, etc., so why pay for someone to help you out? Isn’t this an unnecessary expense when you could do it all yourself?

This appears to be common sense, but ask yourself if it actually holds true for you?

Is there such a thing as a 'womancave'?

31/8/2020

Despite efforts to eradicate differences between men and women when it comes to behaviour, social connections, education, upbringing… there are clear differences in all those and many other fields of interaction with others still. We may have made some progress on this particular road, but we are far from equal in oh so many respects.

What interests me mostly is not so much the social differences as such, but the way they affect how men and women deal with their environment, the choices they make when it comes to accumulating things and dealing with their possessions.