The Organized Goddess Gets Organized

Last weekend I had the organizing push nobody really wants to get...a burst pipe and minor flood in the basement. Like so many people, I always say I will get to purging things in my basement, when I have the time. The truth is, there is never going to be time and because not only is most of my stuff neatly organized in a storage room, it is always out of sight and out of mind. Whenever I have a spare moment, I can always come up with something a lot more interesting things to do. Even cleaning the toilet sounds more appealing at times, which is a pretty lame procrastination excuse. Well, there's nothing like a flood to get you motivated, not to mention having my mom in town helped tremendously. Yes, sometimes even professional organizers need help getting organized. It's not that I needed assistance in the actual organizing process. It was more having someone to not only help me get and stay motivated, but to have someone there to say "it's OK to get rid of that 20 page research paper you wrote in college."

I ended up getting rid a wide array of items varying from unused serving dishes to college papers to SIX boxes of teaching material from my former days as an elementary school teacher. Let me tell you, the latter was really hard to let go of. I started off by saying, "I'll just thin the files out," but after hours of peering through files, I finally decided to let it ALL go. I donated some items to my daughter's classroom and school and recycled the rest. Believe me, I completely understand how hard it is to let go, especially of items that had a lot of time, hard work and love put into them.

These pictures are only a fraction of what I got rid of. This was the first round of donation and it doesn't include all of the trash and multiple bags and boxes of recycling.

I don't know if I will ever teach again, but I was holding onto the boxes "just in case." It was scary to let go, but once I did, I felt tremendously lighter. It made me realize that even if I did teach again, I would probably want to create new lessons and would be using material from new texts; ones that probably wouldn't correspond to what I was using in Virginia almost 8 years ago.

After all of my past-profession cleaning, I got really motivated and even got rid of my "skinny" and "heavy" clothes. Having clothes that don't fit now but may fit someday (in the positive or negative) is a major comfort zone that was difficult to let go of. I just decided that if my weight fluctuates, that just means it's time to go shopping and buy something that I feel good in now, in the moment.

Basically, it comes down to this: you could say for just about anything, "I can't get rid of it. I might need it someday," but if that were really the case, you would never get rid of anything! Holding on to items "just in case" does nothing but create clutter and energetically it sends the message that you aren't ready for anything new. It's just another way of holding on to the past which can take up a lot of space, both physically and mentally.

Here are a few basic item-purge reminders:

1. If you have a lot one type of item that is sentimental, just hold onto one and chuck the rest.


2. If you are on the fence about getting rid of an item, put it in a box and out of site for six months. If you don't notice it after that time has passed (you can make a note in your calendar to check 6 months in advance), time to say good-bye.


3. When in doubt, think about "what would I really miss if my house burned down? What wouldn't I be able to replace?" Or a little nicer way, if you had to pack and move in one day, would you really want to carry that box of National Geographic magazines from 1984?

So, there you are. The Organized Goddess got a swift kick in the rear to get organized. Even if you can't hire a professional organizer, having someone aiding your organizing efforts really does help, whether it's your mother, close friend or whoever. Organizing can get emotional and overwhelming so it's best to get help, even if only for moral support.

Angering the Computer and Technology Gods

As I sit at my computer mortified by the amount of time that has flown by since my last blog, I realize that sometimes there is a frightening aspect of being too dependent on technology. Yes, it is here to help make our lives easier, but a majority of the time, it seems to do the opposite.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly on my computer systems, until all at once my desktop crashed, leaving me to rebuild the hard drive from scratch; my PDA decided not to accept daylight savings happening early, switching all appointments to an hour earlier at will; and my laptop wouldn’t recognize its own CD/DVD drive. Not to mention that on top of all of this mess, I managed to lockout my website and webmail from my home computers. Of course all I could think, as I screamed out several long lists of cuss words, was what have I done to anger the computer gods?

After taking many deep breaths throughout the two-week debacle, I realized I hadn’t angered anyone or anything; rather there was a lesson that I apparently needed to learn. And thus, today’s organizing tip: BACK-UP YOUR IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON YOUR COMPUTER!!! When you are done doing this, back it up again; and after that, at least one more time. It is so important to have you files stored in several different places. It doesn’t need to be every little thing on your computer, but the more you have stored in a safe place, the easier it will be to recover anything that gets erased.

• Make a list of files that you can’t live without (some of mine include all documents, photos, quicken accounts, music and website favorites).

• If you don’t have one, buy one or more external hard drives (Costco has great deals on little portable ones).

• Back-up data at least once a week. Financial data such as quicken should be backed-up daily or when new data is entered).

• Keep all program files and/or discs in an easy to locate place. These programs could include the Windows disc that came with the computer, or the Apple equivalent, MS Word, quicken, Photoshop, iTunes, etc. That way when you spend hours on the phone with your friendly computer techie, you will be able to locate these programs at ease if they need to be re-installed.
  

At the risk of sounding to Boy Scout-ish, always be prepared!!! I have had my hard drive erased twice now; the first time I didn’t have anything backed-up and the second time, I was ready for it. Lesson learned; it is much easier and less stressful to recover data when you know where it is and that is somewhere safe! Technology can be helpful as long as we still remember what to do when it fails us.