Best Results Organizing

A little over a week ago, I left Paper Doll HQ bound for New Orleans, Louisiana, land of bayous and beignets, for my annual pilgrimage to the National Association of Professional Organizers Annual Conference and Expo. It’s like a university semester crossed with a high school reunion, with a liberal dash of food tours and luggage envy. More than 630 attendees, hailing from nine nations, helped make this event a thrill yet another year. (This was my twelfth consecutive NAPO conference. I can’t wait until next year to make it a baker’s dozen!)

In coming posts, I’ll be sharing the intriguing products and services I spotted at the expo, but for now, know that your trusty reporter worked so hard (ahem) and spoke so much (no surprise!) that she completely lost her voice. By the time Saturday dawned, six full days after I arrived in NOLA, I was communicating with raised eyebrows, flapping jazz hands, and squeaks that must have confused the native Gulf Coast fauna.

To that point, a big shout-out goes to colleague Liz Jenkins, CPO® of A Fresh Space in Franklin, TN, who played virtual assistant and returned telephone calls to prospects on my behalf when I was unable to squeakingly do so.

Liz is president of the NAPO-Nashville chapter as well as chair of our 2016 conference in Los Angeles. Yes, we organizers plan far in advance. See Liz here, pictured with Help A Reporter Out founder Peter Shankman, who spoke with the Golden Circle veteran NAPO organizers early the final day of conference about How The New PR is Spelled “Customer Service.” 

Peter then closed out our conference with his stirring keynote on Reinventing the Art of Networking, focusing in part on how (in my words, not his) being a mensch is good for business. Peter’s hefty new book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over — And Collaboration Is In, was likely responsible for more than a few “excess weight” luggage fees! (OK, it would have been, except professional organizers are clever and probably just wore extra layers of clothing while flying in order to make room in their suitcases.)

Of course, there were other big names in attendance at our New Orleans festival of productivity.

Our opening keynote speaker, hoarding specialist and psychologist Dr. David Tolin, presented Unmask the Potential in Your Clients: Helping Mainstream Clients Get Unstuck – Lessons Learned from Clinical Psychology. The loud (but tidy) throng of organizers settled down just enough to hear the practical essentials that dovetail with encouraging motivation, including developing a sense of client autonomy, challenging thinking errors, and problem-solving training. Later in the conference, Dr. Kelly McGonigal presented The Willpower Instinct, based on her book of the same name, with cutting-edge research and practical applications for promoting the development and nurturance of willpower.

The brilliance didn’t stop there. The always-entertaining Dr. Ari Tuckman taught two breakout sessions of incredible material for professional organizers to use with their clients and their own occasionally overwrought selves. One, Motivation to Climb the Mountains, had attendees buzzing, and I’m already putting the lessons from How To Remember to Remember into practice…even in the writing of this post!

And be assured that the multi-year love-fest between NAPO members and Maine’s own Rich Brooks of Flyte Media (seen here with your swooning reporter) continued apace:

Rich presented sessions on Mobile Marketing for Professional Organizers and Turning Likes Into Paying Clients.

Of course, fellow NAPO fellow members taught compelling pre-conference and conference sessions that had tweeters and Facebookers thumb-wrestling themselves to share the genius. To even make it to the conference, Monica Ricci‘s partner-in-crime for Speak Up!: Crafting and Delivering Killer Presentations, Lisa Montanaro, had to battle planes, pains and automobiles, showing her commitment to the subject, and to us.

Other sessions ranged from the purely practical, like Tackling an Estate Clearance and Organizing: Eyes Towards Re-Design, to the technological, like Technology Solutions for Happier Clients, Digital Filing Systems: Smart Organizing, and Google: Tools to Organize.

Yours truly even got to share the stage with the outgoing and incoming Board of Certification for Professional Organizers presidents, Audrey Lavine and Helene Segura, respectively, for our presentation on BCPO Certification: You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!

It’s a little fuzzy, but at this juncture, we were either exploring the finer points of Continuing Education Units Arithmetic 101 or debating whether payment in chickens counts as remuneration. (We were slated at 7:45 in the morning. Can you imagine the entertainment factor if we’d been in Prime Time?)

For a complete sense of all the things that kept your favorite professional organizers busy, from Maximizing Productivity for Business Clients to Understanding a Student’s Organizing Style, just take a gander at the chock-a-block program schedule.

Yes, we were busy learning, but be assured we were playing, too. Look at the fun my NAPO-Georgia chapter had, just trying to organize a lunchtime photo shoot when the official photographer didn’t show up!

In case you want to see us looking a little classier, the official photo, and all of my other shots of conference and the expo hall can be seen here:

NAPO 2013: Pre-Conference Photos (taken during joint NAPO and Board of Certification for Professional Organizers board events)

NAPO 2013: Wednesday

NAPO 2013: Thursday

NAPO 2013: Friday

NAPO 2013: Saturday

For more perspectives on NAPO 2013, I refer you to the brilliant Deb Lee of SoHo Tech Training, who created a page for Live Virtual Coverage of the events. (Deb’s also responsible for ensuring that this post didn’t look like an addled fourth grader was set loose in WordPress Land! Thanks, Deb! It takes a village, and you’re my Mayor of Technology.) And to keep it all in the family, check out what The Clutter Princess, Janice Simon, said in her guest post on Deb’s Organize to Revitalize blog — it’s called 630 Organizers Walk Into a Hotel.

And finally, lest you think (even after looking at the above photo) that we professional organizers were dull girls (and a few boys) with all work and no play, you should know that we had plenty of fun socializing on Bourbon Street and dining (and sometimes, dancing) into the wee hours. For example, here (with my conference roomie, financial organizer Nanette Duffey, PDMM, and UK-bound, Professional Organizers of Canada immediate past-president Jackie Hollywood Brown), we prepared for a lovely dinner at Muriel’s off Jackson Square:

before attending to the reason for the whole evening:

delicious beignets at New Orleans’ famed Café du Monde. A good time was had by all.

Next time, we’ll begin exploring all the fascinating and fun organizing tools and services presented at the NAPO expo. (And yes, there were some absolutely fabulous paper-related productivity solutions that I already covet.) I can hardly wait!