Make It Fun

Is fun missing from your life? I know I feel sometimes that life has become more drudgery than anything else. And the truth is that you need to find ways to bring real fun back into your life. Although I might be able to help inspire you to find some fun in general, right now, I want to talk about bringing a little fun to the various things that we need to do in our homes. If we can make our chores less tedious, we’ll be more likely to get them done.

I encourage you to brainstorm your own ideas for making things more fun. Therefore, to help get those creative juices flowing, I’ll share some of the ideas I’ve used and ones that have worked for others. Use them for yourself if they interest you.

I’ve mentioned before that I am not an avid cleaner. I also record TV shows to watch at a later point, often enjoying the ability to fast-forward through commercials. I now use those commercials as a perfect time to get some vacuuming done. I look up periodically to see when the show starts again. That is my cue to stop for the moment. I then use that time to move things either out of the way, or back into place. Our rooms are small, so the whole room is easily vacuumed within two commercial breaks. It doesn’t necessarily make it fun, but it does help it feel less tedious. It also stops the task from feeling overwhelming; I work at it for a limited amount of time and then stop for while.

Teamwork is a great way to make tasks more fun – even having company can help tasks feel more fun. This can work in several different ways – from the actually doing the work with someone else to simply working in the same area on different tasks. Another way to apply this idea is to have a phone buddy. Before starting anything, you talk on the phone, sharing what you’re each going to tackle and agree on a time to call back. You then hang up and begin your tasks. You can imagine what they are doing and can look forward to talking later. The key here is that if one of you doesn’t actually work on those tasks, you wait to talk.

I often play music while working on the various things around the house. I’ve heard back from clients that this has helped them as well. (It of course varies depending on the person.) Going through papers are one of the most tedious tasks, and surprisingly draining. One woman found that if she had music playing, she could sort papers for longer periods of time as it made it more enjoyable. As my music tastes are quite eclectic, I vary the type of music – considering my mood as well as my task.

Be sure to have different tools for bringing fun to your tasks, so that our fun things don’t become routine! Then it’s not fun anymore. Mix it up, have alternatives, and explore what works for you.

Of course, anytime we can make our tasks enjoyable, the more likely we are to get them done and feel good about it. I hope you will find ways to make your tasks fun – let your creative juices flow in finding ways that work for you. The holidays are here, and if we can employ ways to make the things we do more fun, it can only help us enjoy the holidays even more.

Only Handle It Once

I’ve spent time cringing at promoting this to most people! If we take the idea literally – when you grab the mail, you will spend time attending to each bill and making separate trips to the filing cabinet or shredder each day as you deal with each piece of mail. Doing a web search on those terms several hits talk about the myth of Only Handle It Once (O.H.I.O) while others talk about how helpful and important it is. Yet all of these articles, whether “debunking a myth” or using the system, really boil down to the same thing – it’s really about your level of efficiency.

It requires that you don’t try to apply this literally to every situation. There are times to handle something only one – junk mail and spam e-mails are good examples. Is there really any reason to have this cluttering up your space and not getting it into the trash (physical or electronic) quickly? It does also rely on your definition of junk and spam – for example, if you are in the market for a new credit card, those offers might be worth examining.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are plenty of things you aren’t going to handle only once, at least in the literal sense. If we think about “handle” more loosely, as in moving the item to a temporary “home” until it is time to attend to it, you can eliminate any worries it could cause by knowing you will complete later. You are handling it once – in that you are moving it along in your system.

Therefore the key piece here is to have some systems that work for you, where you’ll put the things in the meantime. It needs to be the same place each time and not cluttered with unrelated items. This means that you can create different areas for phone calls, bills, scheduling (parties, social events, etc.) and focus on each one independently of the others, or if it works for you, keeping this all together. Regardless of how you choose to set it up, you need to use it and make time to deal with those items.

If you are able to make a specific home for things and when the time is right, focus on them, you are still handling it only once since your brain is not continuing to “handle” it between when you got it and the time when you need to deal with it. Sometimes this is where things break down for people; they don’t have working systems. This is a different issue, as it isn’t handled only once.

This applies to e-mails as well, if you deal with it promptly, you will not keep re-reading them over and save yourself time. In truth, it applies to many things. If your dishwasher is not actually getting your dishes clean the first time through, you have to handle them repeatedly – hence why some people will almost wash the dishes before putting them in. If we can streamline the laundry and get it put away, we’re not handling our clothes over and over again.

The truth is that even I still struggle some with thinking about this phrase as not literal – when I hear it, when I talk about it – I still cringe inside. I’m afraid people cannot take it more figuratively – and from much of what I’ve seen and heard, when people talk about it, they use it literally. Yet, if we can shift our thinking about the term handling to being about moving things along in the process, we’ll become more efficient. As well as we’re simplifying things in our lives.

Evaluate While In the Moment

I recently visited Concord, Massachusetts where the Transcendentalist movement took off. Many places had merchandise with the words “simplify” and other variations. I could not help but smile. Yes, simplify! One of the things that I find myself looking at is how efficient things work – is there a way to make it easier? And who doesn’t want things to be easier? As technology tempts us more and our time feels so fleeting, there are steps we can take to be more effective in how we use our time and energy – to simplify.

In a previous post I talked about being “in the moment” as we do things. As we do our dishes, we can focus our mind on what we are doing. It forces us to do a good job and save us time by not needing to do it again. Yet there can be more to this process, as we focus on the task we’re doing, we can think about whether there is another approach that might move it along more smoothly.

We’ve probably all seen the commercials that talk about washing the pots and pans last. This makes sense from more than one perspective, not just from dirty water. Those pots and pans are larger and often can rest easily on top of other dishes as the last things to get washed. In loading the dish rack, making it easy just helps the whole process along. There is no need to take time to rearrange things or throw things in haphazardly.

Each dish rack is different, as are your needs and situation. Making an evaluation of how smoothly things work as you are working in it can be a sort of meditation on the very task. In many ways it becomes systematized, you get into a “flow” and it all happens easily and with little thought, yet it’s done well.

I’ve applied this to mowing the lawn as well. I focus on what I am doing – mowing the lawn, in this case, and find the rhythm of it. As I follow that rhythm, I consider if there would be a more efficient approach. When we first moved into the house and I started mowing for the first time in my life, my energy was a big factor. I noticed that my energy changed depending on whether I started with the front or back yard, so I made sure to start with the back yard since I had more energy when I was done. These days energy is less of an issue, yet I’m still evaluating if there are ways to be more efficient. Am I backtracking to get at that weird area off to the side? Or when I mow in that direction, cut grass does not cover the sidewalk, so it looks nice and doesn’t take more time.

This can be applied to any activity you do – from the routine tasks to those you do infrequently – and it will help you be in the moment while you’re doing them. You can save yourself time, energy, and increase your productivity! All these tasks, which we all have, can become easier – and we can all appreciate that. 🙂 It might sound too simplistic, yet each small step we take can help us.

What can you do with your tasks to simplify them?

Seasons of Decorations

With Halloween just around the corner, I started thinking about decorations. Although there are many holidays that you can have decorations for, we have three big ones close together over the next 3 months: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I’m certainly no Martha Stewart, but I do love putting out decorations to celebrate these and other occasions. This can create more work, more things to track and figure out what to do with – yet there are ways we can make this easier.

One of the things with decorations is that they spend most of their time in storage. I have some seasonal decorations, and even those are in boxes 9 months out of each year. For holiday decorations it is even more time since we don’t typically leave those out for much more than a month.

To start with, those decorations need a dedicated box or bin just for themselves. It might be tempting to group more than one type together in a box, but this only adds to your work when it is time to use the box: whether to pull out or to put away those decorations. You might need only one, Easter or the 4th of July, often do not exceed one container. On the other hand, Christmas can often fill many containers!

With Christmas and potentially other holidays if you have more than one box for, you can also separate types of decorations together within containers – like the tree ornaments going largely into one container and other décor items into another.

It is helpful to label them or choose color coded bins for storage so you know which box you want when you go to get them and not need to open multiple ones to find the one(s) you are looking for.

Since these decorations spend most of their time in storage, you also need to decide where you will keep them. Ideally you want the space to be relatively easy to access. If you store them in a hard to access area, it’s more likely you’ll procrastinate getting them out or putting them away. Considering that you don’t use them that often, it is tempting for them to get buried amidst other things or stored out of the way in hard to reach areas. If you truly want to use them each year, you need make sure they are relatively easy to get to.

It is also helpful if you decide when you want the decorations to be put out. We often think it’s tacky to have Christmas decorations out before Thanksgiving or after the middle of January – or whatever your thoughts are on this. Figure out for yourself when you would like them to be put out, and then put some time into your schedule to do it. The same thing applies for putting them away – figure out when you want them boxed back up by and schedule time for it. I recommend deciding and putting it into the schedule as a repeating event. That way, even if I’m distracted, my schedule reminds me that it’s time to put out/away the decorations.

The final step is to evaluate whether any of the decorations need to be purged. Unfortunately damages happen, and as you are putting them out or putting them away at the end of the holiday, it is the perfect time to get rid of some that have outlived their purpose.

If you create specific containers for the different holidays, find an out of the way yet still easily accessible place to store those containers, and schedule time for yourself to pull them out and to put them away, and each time cull some items you no longer need — your decorations will perform their duty perfectly – to brighten your home and help you celebrate the holidays in the ways you choose.

Tweaking Systems for Yourself

Is there a “right” way to organize something? If you’ve been reading my blog for any time, you’ll know that my answer to that is a passionate NO! The most important question is whether it actually works for you. If you and the people who need to use it are successful, that is all that matters. Often it is challenging to find the systems that will work for you. Goodness knows there are so many “solutions” offered – from books to the Internet, maybe even your mother!

As people promote their solutions, it frequently falls into two categories: the direct outlining of a “do it this way” approach or the more vague “figure out how to do it your way.” Of the two, I’m certainly more of a fan of the later, though this can leave the person searching for those solutions feeling no better off than when they started looking.

Yet we can use those “do it this way” approaches as a place to start. If there is one that draws you – for its simplicity or its logic, whatever it might be, begin thinking about how this would apply in your situation. Then alter it to fit you and your situation better. One of the keys to doing this is to keep it as simple as possible. The more complex we make things, the more likely they are to break down.

I was working with a woman who had found a system for paperwork – break everything down into five categories. I’ll admit this was one system that I’d never heard of and the categories suggested did not completely make sense to me. In my mind I saw a fair amount of possibility of overlap and hence potential trouble in retrieving papers.

Yet the question is not whether this system made sense to me (never mind that I was unfamiliar with it!), it was about whether it worked for that individual. When I talked about setting up filing systems, I’ve been a fan of having some broad categories. What those specific categories are can vary from person to person. If you liked four of those five broad categories, go with only those four. Or even change the fifth to something entirely different that applies to you.

I mention FlyLady to clients sometimes. They come back and talk to me about this or that part of it. They find parts irrelevant or even dislike parts. When we are looking at ways of handling things, from cleaning the house to getting organized, we need to feel like we can follow our own path. FlyLady stresses many different aspects of things: from shining your sink to wearing your shoes to routines for parts of your day. If some don’t make sense for you, ignore them or alter them to mesh with your life.

As you search for the solutions to your organizational challenges, make sure first and foremost that you don’t overwhelm yourself searching through all that’s out there! You could do that for a long time while getting no closer to your own solutions. Next, embrace the idea that you take those specific solutions others’ promote and change them to fit you. There is truly no one right way of being organized and tweak systems until they work for you.

Being Organized is Not Necessarily being Clean and Vice Versa

Do you want to know a secret? It’s not something I’m proud of – I dislike cleaning. I love organizing and always clean as a process of organizing. There’s no better time to get everything spic and span than as you set up new systems. Sometimes clients will ask me, “Of course, your house is always clean, right?” There is a big difference between being organized and being clean, though both flourish with being part of a routine.

Do you know anyone whose house is always immaculate, yet if you get a glimpse of one of their drawers, it is overflowing with stuff? Or there is a room that is off limits, while the rest of the house is pristine? Then there’s our house – you will probably see fuzz balls in corners and décor items will not pass that white glove test! Of course, there are people who have both or neither mastered.

Dusting every week is something I just don’t want to do. As I looked at my behavior and feelings, it occurred to me that I was trying to make myself do the cleaning like my mom had me clean – each week we’d clean the house, all in one day. Here we are back to the idea of finding what works for you, we can change the ways we do things to fit with our personality.

First, I looked at where I cleaned easily. I get the dishes done regularly, though not the way my mom would do it. It works for us. Vacuuming certain areas of the house – where the cat hair dominates – is done fairly regularly. I congratulated myself for the things I do well, even in the realm of cleaning.

Then I examined my preference for cleaning as part of having things cleared out. A great time for cleaning the bathroom was when I washed the towels. The bathroom was cleared of them then and was a great time to dig in and get everything spic and span before I put the fresh towels back in.

Next, I found FlyLady and she presents the idea that we can do a little bit of cleaning each day and break the house into zones. In the way she developed this system, over the course of a month your house is actually cleaned more thoroughly than if you set aside a day for cleaning each week. I tweaked her set up to fit with our house and my style, but the idea of doing a little every day I could actually enjoy doing! For those who need it, she includes de-cluttering in her system.

Have I mastered cleaning? Nope, but it is a process and in setting up new systems, it takes time. Also, I continue to look at what is not working, with curiosity, to see if there is another piece I could tweak.

Maybe you do not struggle with cleaning, though this is an example of how to approach whatever you might struggle with and discover an approach that will work for you. Make sure you recognize where you succeed and give yourself a congratulations. When you identify how things fit for you, you can develop systems for getting a handle on those things you’ve struggled with. If you can limit the self-criticism, you can keep an open mind about finding solutions, as you need them.

No ONE Right Approach

Occasionally when I go to a new client’s home, after I’ve walked in and seen what they are struggling with, that they ask me to tell them what to do. This is perfectly understandable; they’re frequently frustrated. They have tried to find a solution and have only called me because they’ve gotten overwhelmed and need that answer. Yet this is not the way I work. I cannot tell someone what the solution is; what I can do it talk about the options. In organizing, there are so many different ways of doing things.

I was trying to think of a comparison – one idea I came up with was the way we choose to handle our money. A good financial advisor is not going to tell you to invest in a high-risk stock without talking to you about your personality. My dad talks about how when he started investing, he got obsessed with checking the status – often several times a day. It became apparent to him that this was not the way he wanted to spend his energy. Nevertheless, there are many people who are comfortable investing without the need to check it compulsively.

Just like organizing – there are a variety of approaches to staying organized. It depends on your personality, your style. If you can find what you need, when you need it – it doesn’t matter how it’s done. Here are some examples:

I think I’ve mentioned it before; I worked with a woman who used accordion folders for all her paperwork – the monthly one, with numbered slots for each day, which she used for the current month’s bills. Then once the month was finished, she moved the relevant things to a yearly folder with monthly tabs.

A client had researched different ways of organizing papers and found one suggestion to break everything into 5 categories, and put your papers into one of those categories.

In organizing media, you can subdivide into genres. I knew one woman who broke her CD’s into genres while others just alphabetize everything. And others who just throw everything onto the shelving.

When I was working with a woman who needed periodic breaks when we were together, I started organizing her books during that time. As I presented different ideas about how it could be done, she loved the idea of little organization of them. The idea of going to one of the shelves and being surprised by what she found captured her imagination. She eventually decided to have some minimal organization since she was inadvertently buying duplicate books, so we broke her books by authors (not even including genre). This way she could easily see what she had by author and avoid getting those second copies.

Organizing your closet by style of clothes – work, casual, and eveningwear – is another example. While others group by type – long sleeved, short sleeved, long dresses, short dresses, etc.

The list could on and on – I could have even expanded the examples within the specific item being dealt with; yet it all comes down to finding a way that makes sense to you. You need to be able to maintain it; you have to like it – it needs to fit your personality. It might be easier if there were ONE way to organize things, yet we’re all too different. Finding the system that works for you personally is the only way to make a difference in the long run. Discover the system that makes sense to you.

Those Deep Cabinet Shelves

I should expect it at this point, when I go into another house, to see more badly designed cabinets. Somehow, I am still shocked at these “spacious” cabinets that are barely functional. How can anyone think these are useful? Or functional? Then what do you do when you are stuck with them? I wish there were better answers, though here are some ideas.

There are many shapes and varieties of these weirdly designed cabinets. I’m not sure if there is one that I dislike more than another. What I am talking about today is specifically those deep shelves.

Those deep shelves boggle my mind, how can that back area be functional? Then in many kitchens, there is a half shelf above in the back! I think I get the idea of it, but it’s typically the lower shelves and then even more inconvenient. Here is a picture of my own kitchen, with this exact set-up. It functions, though is not great – as you can see from the stacks in front as well as some precarious balancing (that remarkably does not fall!). For us it works because the things in that back half, both on the shelf and below it, are things we rarely use. Therefore, if it’s an option, put things used less frequently behind those things you do use.

There are companies that allow those shelves to pull out. I worked with one woman whose lower kitchen cabinets had those for the upper shelf. She had not been pulling them out. This ended up adding to the disorder, and after rearranging she agreed to practice pulling them out. The last time we talked about it, it was working well. Yet this is something we don’t always consider, pulling out a sliding shelf is more work. Not necessarily a ton of work, but it is a bit of a shift, our behavior has to change to accommodate this new feature. If you do not uses the feature, it can add to the mess.

Back to the idea of putting less used items in the back, can work in a linen closet or other such deep shelving, though sometimes with more difficulty. I have another picture from my own home, where some of the shelves are deeper than is truly useful. Some of the shelves you cannot see are being redone. One of the things we’ve done is to stack things two deep – on the left are the towels and washcloths. We work from the front, and when those stacks are empty, what is behind them are easily accessible. This is also a place where less used items live farther back.

Another way to work with deep shelving is to use containers. Here we used them to help with two issues, the high shelving as well as the deep. There are two containers; each has a grouping of items, typically used together. She can grab the lip of one and pull it down, use the items, in this case cleaning supplies, and when she’s done, put the container back up. On a different shelf, we used containers behind, they were used infrequently, but were used together, so she could clear a path for the container to come out, use it, and return it, with minimal chaos. This works best if the frequently used items in front are larger, so when you need to access the containers in back there are less items to move.

You might have noticed that much of coping with less than ideal shelving focuses on storing less used items farther back. The real dilemma occurs when there is so little space that those back areas are important for frequent use. Some people use the idea of staggered tools, so the items in back are higher, and this can work, though I think of all the wasted space under those gadgets. As is so often the case, much depends on your own personal setup and preferences.

Prepared for an Emergency

September is National Preparedness Month. This was apparently started by FEMA, though I am more aware of it as something that NAPO promotes. I was fortunate to attend a webinar last year on this very subject and there is another one being held later this month, hosted by our local NAPO chapter.

Being prepared can be a scary thing. We are preparing for the worst. It is something easy to avoid, putting off since it can be uncomfortable to tackle. Not unlike writing a will! Yet, getting those important papers in order, finding a safe place to keep them is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves and our loved ones for that potential emergency situation.

I was just commenting to a client the other day that it was wonderful she had all the important papers together and knew right where they were. Her comment to me was that she’d probably not even remember to grab them on her way out the door. We went on to talk about the idea of having photocopies with her and the originals in a safe deposit box. She did not completely give herself credit for having those things altogether.

The first step is to gather the important things in one place – make a kit. This is more than gathering just those important papers together, it is also the supplies you might need. Living in the Midwest, though certainly not limited to here, as the season change and the cold sets in, I look at the car supplies. I am talking about the blankets and snack bars that will live in the trunk until the weather warms up again. I know this one hazard and am taking steps to be safe if something would happen.

Yet, this is not the only thing to be prepared for, as we have the potential for flooding and tornadoes. If we are faced with needing to leave the house fast, we need to have supplies with us when we go. This is why it is a good idea to have a kit ready to go, or almost all ready, then we can grab it as we head out.

The second step is to make a plan. This means that every member of the family knows the person to contact in case of emergency and how to find each other. The last thing you want when dealing with some emergency is to not know whether everyone is safe or how you will find each other.

The last step is to be informed. This also means confronting your fears, finding out what risks there might be that you are unaware of – apparently there is a place in California known as “Tornado Alley.” I lived in California for a total of 12 years and just recently found this out!

It can be hard to prepare for an emergency. We all want to think that it will not happen to us. It is certainly not something that demands our attention. If we don’t do it, nothing bad is necessarily going to happen to us. On the other hand, if we do it, we can rest easy that it was handled the best possible and reduce the stress from the event itself. Now, I need to go find a backpack to set aside for the water and a whistle to put into our kit.

Organizing the Closet – Clothes, Jackets, and Accessories Oh My

A little while back, I talked about pulling everything out of a small space as you work on it. This applies to that entire closet of clothes – whether the front hall closet with the jackets or your bedroom closet. Dealing with clothes in general can be a challenge, who really wants to face those things we no longer fit into, or the things we bought with the best of intentions yet still have the tags hanging off them? Imagine though, opening the closet next week and seeing only things that fit and you actually wear. It makes life so much simpler and even happier!

Choose the closet you will dig into. Open the door, reach in, and pull out an item. Look at it and decide whether it’s something you want to keep. Hopefully you’ll already have some containers ready for trash and donating – and you can put it into one of those right now if you’re not keeping it. If you are keeping it, set it aside, into a pile of the things you want to keep.

Reach into the closet again and pull out the next item. Make a decision of where it will go. Continue this with each item in the closet. I’d start with the hanging items and clear the entire rod. Then move onto any other items living in the closet. Pick it up and decide whether you are keeping it or letting it move on.

You might see that you’re avoiding certain items, you see it, but you repeatedly grab something else. There is no problem doing that, as long as you deal with it by the end. The idea is that the entire closet will be empty at one point. This is a great time to clean it – vacuum the floor and wipe any shelving down.

If you have the space, you could make piles of similar types of clothes with the ones you’ve decided to keep. One of the guiding principles of organizing is to keep like things together. Now, you can see if you have 8 black sweaters that meet the same need. Or 9 black pants. Or whatever.

As you pick up each item to put it back into the closet, evaluate it again. Yes, again. Consider whether you’re making up reasons to keep it. If you’re simply attached, but never wear it, make a special box where you keep those precious items. I don’t believe you have to part with everything, but keep the space in the closet for things that you use regularly.

If you’re like most people, you’ll find some random things from emptying out your closet. Some of these might end up with those other odds and ends from drawers and shelves. As you examine the various items figure out where the really need to be kept – storing them close to where you use them. I’ll address those odds and ends in a future post. For the time being, put away what you can. Find a place to store those things that are pending.

When you pull everything out of the closet before you are done, you’ll have to look at everything. It’s too easy to skip things when you just pull things out willy-nilly! It’s simple to avoid those items we dread unless we aim to get everything out before we’re done.

Dig in and have fun! Enjoy the happiness of going to your closet and only finding what you enjoy wearing, since it fits and you like it.