Best Results Organizing

I can’t imagine that 2020 was anyone’s favorite year. A global pandemic, a contentious election cycle, civil upheaval undergirding fights for justice, and unpredictable macro- and micro-economies were not on anyone’s wish list. Indeed, even the idea of a wish list seems preposterous now, as Robyn Schall explains: 

This has absolutely finished me off I love her pic.twitter.com/6DaI0gxDEe

— wap rem x (@jackremmington) November 15, 2020

The year had other dashed hopes, disappointments, and dark moments. The National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals had to cancel April’s annual conference with only a few weeks’ advanced warning. A “girls’ getaway” to Ireland vanished. My inspiration to write disappeared as well, as writer’s block was my sole visitor in 2020.

Certainly the worst of all, Paper Mommy fractured two vertebrae just a few weeks into quarantine, leading to months of agony. I miss my mom, I miss my clients, I miss seeing people’s smiles. If anyone asks, tell them Paper Doll says this year has been yucky.

IS HINDSIGHT 20/20 IN 2020?

Many of us in the productivity realm encourage our clients to pick a word or phrase for the coming year to help guide our mission. I’ll admit, I’m as guilty of magical thinking as the next person. I had feared that “Abundance” could bring an abundance of negative things. In retrospect, then, my choice of “Ample” seems almost absurd. (I’d even developed a funny social media tagline. “Ample: It’s not just for bosoms anymore!”) This year had an ample supply of absurdities.

Being a professional organizer and productivity specialist involves working from a position of positivity. Indeed, as we approach Thanksgiving, we’re all supposed to focus on gratitude, on the experiences and people who made the prior year worthwhile. 

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been finding it hard to reflect on this year and find positivity. Maybe it’s the same for you?

Some years seem best dealt with by offering a Viking funeral. “Set 2020 aflame and put it out to sea,” I often thought as March 243rd dragged on. However, my accountability partner and awesome colleague Dr. Melissa Gratias recently wrote a post called Taking Inventory of 2020 with Duct Tape, Henry the VIII, and Forrest Gump that put her own year in perspective. For her, this was an exercise in silencing her inner critic.

Read Melissa’s post, then come back and sing some Herman’s Hermits before you spend the next 5 weeks hearing nothing but Jingle Bells and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

We’re often quick to criticize ourselves for all that we did not get done; this is even more true in 2020. I touched on this in my favorite post that I wrote this year, The Now Normal: When the New Normal Changes Quickly. There, I said simply that “It’s OK to not be OK.” It’s OK if you’ve had eight months at home with no commute and you still haven’t written the Great American Novel or downsized your closet into a capsule wardrobe.

Similarly, Melissa reminds readers in her post that our days, our years, and our lives are not merely the lowlights and highlights, but the a rich tapestry of everything that happened. To that, Paper Mommy would add that it’s important to consider all the things that didn’t happen, but not in a “my trip got canceled” way. In response to the question, “Tell me something good that happened today,” Paper Mommy has been known to respond, “Well, nothing bad happened today.” She’s not damning with faint praise. That’s her brand of positivity.

In response to, 'Tell me something good that happened today,' @PaperMommy has been known to respond, 'Well, nothing bad happened today.' She's not damning with faint praise. That's her brand of positivity. Share on X

So, to echo Melissa’s efforts, I thought I’d share some of my activities. (That said, my inner critic cuts me a lot more slack than hers. I’m just amazed we’ve made it to Thanksgiving week!) 

TALKING (LITERALLY) ABOUT ORGANIZING AND PRODUCTIVITY

For much of this year, I’ve been unable to visit with my clients. I’ve touched base by phone and email, making sure they’re healthy and supported, and I’ve added virtual organizing and productivity services to my offerings. But the main way I’ve been able to share my thoughts has been via the internet.

Ray Sidney-Smith is a productivity/technology/management triple-threat consultant and trainer. I met him when we trained together as Evernote Certified Consultants, and he has become a bigwig in this area. In October, he asked me to be a panelist on the Anything But Idle podcast he hosts with Augusto Pinaud, bilingual productivity coach and all-around sweetie. Here’s the video, but you can listen at the episode page and subscribe via the links on the sidebar. Don’t be too surprised when I geek-out about paper planners.

Although my Halloween costume as a Work-From-Home solopreneur wasn’t quite as creative as Ray’s or Augusto’s, you won’t doubt my enthusiasm. Plus, my co-panelist was Penny Zenker, Focusologist, motivational speaker, and (Halloween) pirate. Thanks to meeting her on the Ray and Augusto’s show, I’ve now been a guest on two upcoming episodes of Penny’s Take Back Time podcast. (Watch this space for official scheduling.)

Earlier in the year, I was also guest on Maria White‘s Organize Your Stuff podcast, where Maria and I had a long talk about one of my favorite paper organizing topics, tickler files. (You do know about my ebook, Tickle Yourself Organized, right?) 

Listen to my episode on Maria’s show here, and be sure to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your juicy podcast goodness.

WRITING ABOUT ORGANIZING AND PRODUCTIVITY

As I mentioned, I had a pretty severe case of writer’s block this year. Or, actually, multiple cases, as it tended to come and go. Thus, I did not write the second edition of my first book, or the first edition of my second book.

However, when I was asked by others to write guest posts, ghostwrite, or contribute advice, I did manage to shoo the writer’s block away. Often, what I was asked to write was about organizing things other than paper, which helped clear the cobwebs. For example:

I wrote about how to keep kitchen pantries clean and organized in Home Organization: Tips from Professional Organizers for Porch.com.

When Redfin asked me to talk about how to tame the chaos in your child’s room for How to Get Your House in Order without Buying Anything New, I wrote more than they could fit, and now I’ve got a chapter for a book I hadn’t even anticipate writing when the pandemic began.

For Realtor.com, I held forth on 4 Types of Clutter: How Many Are You Hanging Onto?, including sentimental clutter, painful clutter, “sunk cost fallacy” clutter, and all that clutter related to one’s self-image. 

And I was especially proud to have my advice appear in four different issues of Real Simple Magazine this year in pieces penned by Leslie Corona. If you’re a subscriber or picked these issues up on the newsstand, or if your public library is offering holds on magazines, you can find these articles in your print issues:

Organizing Challenge: Stow Your Purses and Totes in the February 2020 issue, pages 52-53, also appears in truncated form online as 3 Smart Ways to Keep Your Handbags and Totes Organized. Researching this topic was so much fun, it inspired me to write Organized Purses? It’s In the Bag!

For Real Simple’s big May 2020 “Get It Done” section, I contributed to Get it Done: Refresh Your Medicine Cabinet, page 58. Though the advice pre-dated COVID, it ended up being timely.

The most involved Real Simple piece was Your Road Map to a Tidy Garage, found on pages 58-60 in the October 2020 issue, and I was delighted to be tagged as a Real Simple “expert” along with NAPO colleagues Scott Roewer and Lisa Zaslow!

Long before the pandemic, Real Simple had asked me to weigh in on advice and products for organizing technology for travel. Travel soon became a hazily recalled habit of the past, like visiting malt shops or riding street cars, and that article never saw the light of day. Happily, a bit of the advice found new life as November 2020’s Organizing Challenge: Down to the Wires on page 50.

HELPING SOMEONE ELSE BE PRODUCTIVE

As I mentioned at the end of The Now Normal post, one of the things I did after lockdown began was edit Melissa Gratias’ book, Captain Corona and the 19 COVID Warriors. My role was small (Melissa is already a great writer) but satisfying, especially as the book took off. First local newspapers picked up the story, then People Magazine. A smile still spreads across my face when I hear Akil Jackson narrate Captain Corona.

And finally, even with writer’s block refusing to pack its bag and go, I feel really good about the blog posts I wrote this year, whether I was sharing advice for getting through a global pandemic or guidance for organizing time to read, or eliminating “tolerations” by using a shower curtain hook shaped like Marlo Thomas in That Girl. 

LEARNING A LITTLE SOMETHING

In March, nobody could have imagined how much of our time would be spent tucked away at home, but I did anticipate that client work would be delayed for at least a few months. At first, my enthusiasm for continuing education was boundless, and I took a wide variety of NAPO courses and independent classes on:

Productivity — Oh my goodness, there were so many classes on productivity systems and tools, including the Getting Things Done rubric and using Evernote. (I watched so many webinars presented by my genius colleagues Stacey Harmon and the aforementioned Ray Sidney-Smith!)

Special topics in organizing — Like most of America, I found myself locked in multiple Zoom rooms a day. I took live classes like Color and Space Planning In Organizing: Personality, Autism, and ADHD, and Making Your Memorabilia Meaningful, and watched recordings of classes I’d abandoned live when technology failures amped up my stress level. (Was any sentence used more often than “You’re on mute!” this year?)

Higher Self coursework — I watched a recording of a NAPO University class called Bringing Meditation and Mindfulness Into Organizing and Productivity. By this point, probably late May, around the time I should have been in Ireland, my patience for Zoom coursework reached a low ebb. I was failing at being at all meditative or mindful! Hence, like Melissa (and half of the people I know), I took the exceptional (and free) Yale course, The Science of Well-Being, reinvigorating a passion for learning positive psychology (if not an interest in meditation).

Personal development — Although I’ve been studying Italian through Duolingo for two and a half years, by the time the pandemic started, I’d fallen into the habit of practicing all the lessons that came before everything got really hard.

Let’s just say, it was more fun translating “Non puoi finché non finisci la cena” (i.e., “You can’t until you finish your dinner” and “La mia scimmia mangia perché ha fame” (i.e., “My monkey eats because he is hungry”) than it was to push myself into learning the present perfect and past imperfect tenses.

I realized that even though people were quoting The Now Normal back to me, my embrace of “now” didn’t have to mean I only spoke in the present tense!

I also became a little paranoid as Duolingo started feeding me sentences that hit a little too close to home:

• Noi mangiamo molti tipi di formaggio. (We eat many types of cheese.)
• Ho una cucina; però non cucino. (I have a kitchen; however, I don’t cook.)
• Io mangio il formaggio fritto. (I eat fried cheese.)

When you stop interacting with actual people, it feels a little sad when your language learning app knows you so well.

GIVING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE

There’s still a little more than a month of this year. I don’t know whether to expect sea monsters or fireworks. I still believe that “It’s OK to not be OK,” and think we all deserve credit for making it this far. If you’re having trouble remembering your accomplishments, ask a friend or two. Chances are that they’re much more observant – and less critical – than your (or Melissa’s) inner critic.

Finally, just in case Melissa’s discussion of Ghost and my clip of Herman’s Hermits wasn’t enough, no reference to “I’m Henry VIII, I am” is complete without this rendition from The Patty Duke Show, the best darn program about identical cousins ever made!

Until next time, I wish you a happy, healthy, and safe Thanksgiving.