Best Results Organizing

Welcome to GO Month 2022! This is the annual celebration of our attempts to eliminate chaos and help our world make a little more sense. For members of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO) this is our 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, and pretty much every other holiday all rolled into one. We invite you to celebrate with us!

Chances are good that when you read last week’s post (you did read last week’s post, right?), Review & Renew for 2022: Resolutions, Goals, and Words of the Year, you strengthened your resolve (if not actual resolutions) to get organized, be more productive, or do something to further your dreams. Today, we’re going to look at 22 tips to start 2022 in ways to help you get closer to your dreams. 

CLOSE OUT THE HOLIDAY SEASON

1) Purge your holiday cards. While you’re taking down the tree and putting away decorations, collect all of the greeting cards you’ve received in one pile and do a reality check. So many people save all of their cards, boxed up, and never look at them again. Not you, not again.

Read the cards one last time. If Hallmark did all the labor and there’s only a short message or a signature, give yourself permission to toss and recycle the cards. If there’s no deeply personal message that makes you laugh or cry, let it go. After all, you don’t transcribe your holiday phone conversations and keep them forever. 

2) Let go of other people’s greeting card pictures. And those cards that are just collages of the families of people you worked with 20 years ago? You’re allowed to let them go, too. You don’t have to be the curator of the museum of other people’s family photos.

3) Update your contacts. As long as you’re tossing holiday cards, check the return addresses on the envelopes and update the information in your own personal database, whether that’s in the contacts app on your phone or in an ancient Snoopy address book.  

PICK AND PREP YOUR PLANNER

4) Buy your new planner. Now. And then make a note to buy your 2023 calendar by Thanksgiving next year.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

Are you still scribbling appointments on those extra, orphan, three-lines-per-month “planning” sections at the back of your 2021 planner? If you don’t have a planner that will make sure you honor all of your commitments, now is the time to do it! Consider these concepts:

• Choose a planner that lets you see a month at a glance. Daily and weekly views don’t offer enough long-range details to let you plan your life over time.
• Select a planner that has enough space for you to write. Paper Doll has sprawling, messy penmanship, and I know a pocket-sized paper planner would cramp my style, literally and figuratively. Note that even when you’re looking at a monthly view, digital calendars tend to hide most of the details.
• Use only one planner for your business and personal appointments. If you keep one calendar for your doctors’ appointments and schedule for your kids, and another for work, you’ll never know if your child’s recital conflicts with a major client presentation, or if you’ve scheduled yourself to attend a work conference the week your kids have school vacations. I’ll admit this is where digital calendars like Google’s have an advantage, as you can, with the click of a box, layer or remove different calendar views.)

As a professional organizer, I think the key to organizing your life is being able to visualize your time, whether that’s the hours in the day or the projects in the year. As Paper Doll, I think the best way to do that is with a paper planner.

But if you’re a digital devotée, you do you! However, a digital calendar makes it a little harder to flip back and forth between last January and this one, last February and this one, etc., to make sure everything is as it ought to be. (Yes, in a perfect world, you’d put people’s birthdays in as recurring dates and meetings that used to be every 2nd Tuesday would continue thusly, but with digital planners, there’s a lot of extra fiddling to do to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.)

5) Update your calendar by filling in all the details.

Go through last year’s planner and copy over everything that recurs on the same dates (like birthdays and anniversaries).

Then add in the things that happened last year and are already scheduled to happen again, but not on the same dates (like conferences, work retreats, mammograms, medical appointments, etc.).

6) Use last year’s calendar to help prompt you to make a list of everything you need to schedule or add to your long-range tasks, like setting an appointment with your CPA to discuss tax issues. 

7) Commit to a planner system. Commitment to your calendar is like having Jeeves as your butler. If you pay Jeeves poorly (and try to use a 12-page stapled calendar from a local funeral home) or don’t feed him (and forget to enter your appointments as you schedule them), such neglect will yield one insolent, neglectful butler (or a calendar of conflicts, illegible notes, and missing appointments). Not every butler is as loyal as P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves or Downton Abbey’s Mr. Carson.

Nurture your commitment to your planning system…every day. If there’s so much going on in your life that you forget to mark appointments in the first place or fail check your planner until it’s too late, upgrade your accountability:

• Set an alarm on your phone to ring at around 5 p.m. daily to remind you to check your calendar and tickler file for the next day and the coming week.

• If you have an assistant (especially if you are both working remotely) schedule time each day to talk and review newly-added appointments and obligations.
• Have a family meeting on the weekend to make sure every appointment and school pick-up is covered.
• Schedule your next appointments before leaving anyplace you visit intermittently (doctor, dentist, massage therapist, hair or nail salon, etc.) — but only if you have your calendar with you. Otherwise, ask them to call you. Never agree to any date without your planner nearby.

MAKE 2022 THE YEAR YOU YOU ARE A VIP WITH YOUR VIPs

8) Get your vital documents in order.

Longtime readers know how I feel about making sure you have all of your VIPs (very important papers) in line. From tornados and hurricanes to the recent wild fires in Colorado to everything the world has experienced with the COVID pandemic, it’s never too soon to get your papers (and affairs) in order. Check in with these posts for step-by-step guidance to making sure you’re covered.

How to Replace and Organize 7 Essential Government Documents

How to Create, Organize, and Safeguard 5 Essential Legal and Estate Documents

The Professor and Mary Ann: 8 Other Essential Documents You Need To Create

Protect and Organize Your COVID Vaccination Card

9) Clean out your wallet and make an inventory.

It’s been a long time since I wrote my creaky 2008 series on what you should and shouldn’t keep in your wallet, but the advice in What’s In Your Wallet? (Part 3): A Little Insurance Policy boils down to the fact that you need to keep an inventory of the licenses, insurance cards, and debit/credit cards you have in there and all the information contained on them.

Back then, I advised wallet protection services, photocopying or scanning the fronts and backs of your wallet contents, or logging a digital database in a spreadsheet. Nowadays? Unless you have a scanner at hand, just pull everything out of your wallet, make two columns of cards on the table, and take a photo with your smartphone. Then flip each card over in the same position, and photograph the back. Finally, password-protect the document on your phone or in your cloud back-up, secure in the knowledge that your info is safe.

MAKE SENSE OF YOUR MONEY, HONEY!

10) Create a Tax Prep folder.

If you do nothing else this month, setting aside a safe place to collect tax information will at least prevent essential financial paperwork from building up or getting lost. You’ll save time (in CPA or TurboTax hours) and money (in CPA dollar-hours and tax deductions).

Starting near the end of January and continuing through mid-February, your mailbox, email inbox, and digital financial accounts will be filled with lots of weirdly named and numbered forms. (For some idea of their significance, review Paper Doll’s Tax-Smart Organizing Tips: 2021, though this will be updated once the IRS releases more information for the new tax year.) Just pop them in a manila folder in your financial files or in a dedicated holder like the Smead All-in-One Income Tax Organizer.

11) Know what you owe.

Let 2022 be the year you figure out what’s going on with your money. As your bills and statements come in, make a list of all of your credit cards, loans, and other debts, as well as their balances and interest rates. Seeing it in black and white in one place is the first step toward taking control of your future.

12) Don’t get buried; stay on top of your money.

In a perfect world, everyone might still maintain a reconciled checkbook register. (If you’re a younger millennial or Gen Z, go ask your mom.) But in a world where most people’s money doesn’t just flow from one checking or savings account to everywhere else, but instead involves PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, Zelle, and even those crytpcurrency wallets, no one little paper register is going to cover it.

So, make this the year you embrace a financial dashboard and budget program, like Mint, Personal Capital, or You Need A Budget.

13) Seek out financial wisdom and organizing support.

If you don’t know the difference between an NFT and BBQ, and when you hear people talking about 401Ks and IRAs, your eyes glaze over, consider sitting down with a fee-only Certified Financial Planner. You pay for their expertise, and they give you unbiased advice because fee-only CFP’s don’t get any commissions on the investments you make.

If thinking about investing seems impossible because you need strategies for getting your bills paid on time, every time, there’s help available. There are NAPO members who are financial organizers; you can also find a Daily Money Manager through the American Association of Daily Money Managers (AADMM).

GATHER YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRESERVE YOUR LEGACY

14) Find your perfect notebook.

In 2021, I regaled you with nine posts about all the different types of notebooks, from waterproof to hybrid to magnetic. Stop writing your notes and ideas down on the backs of envelopes; start embracing a notebook made for your needs.

Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 1): Re-Surveying the Landscape
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 2): The Big Names in Erasable Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 3): More Erasable & Reusable Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 4): Modular, Customizable, Disc-Based Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 5): Customize with Magnets, Hooks, and Apps
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 6): Get Smart (Notebooks)
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 7): Stone Cold and Super-Strong
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 8): Waterproof Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 9): Epilogue and Updates

Instead of making the same lists, over and over, but never getting anywhere on them, having one central repository for everything meaningful to you will help you be more organized, more productive, and so much happier.

15) Make 2022 the year you safeguard and preserve your photos.

Digital photos mean we can have multiple forms of inexpensive backup without taking up more space in our homes. But what about all the old Kodachrome snapshots and negatives, fading away a bit more every day?

You needn’t be overwhelmed. Find a NAPO member specializing in organizing photos, or visit The Photo Managers (formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers) to find experts trained to organize and care for your family’s photographic history.

And once you get your photos together, you (and everyone else) will probably want to know what was going on in them. So once again, I give you my pitch for Hazel Thornton’s new What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy.

(You can read my review here.)

EMBRACE PAPER DOLL‘S KEY PRINCIPLES ABOUT ORGANIZING

16) Follow the Ice Cream Rule.

I tell my clients, “Don’t put things down, put them away.” The word “away” assumes you’ve already got a location in mind. But good organizing systems have two parts: the where & the how.

When you bring groceries home, you put the ice cream away in the freezer immediately to keep from having a melted, sticky mess. It’s pretty rare for someone to put away the toilet paper or breakfast cereal before the frozen foods. The freezer is the “where” but putting the ice cream away first is the “how.” It’s so innate, you don’t even think about. But for most of your stuff, including papers, you do have to think about it.

Whatever comes into your space, when you go shopping, or even when things are free, decide on a home before you bring it in.

Once it’s in your space, build fixed time into your schedule for how/when you’ll deal with maintaining it or getting it back to where it lives. When will you do laundry? When will you file financial papers? What will be your trigger — when the laundry basket or in-box is full, or will you put it on your calendar?

Remember: “Someday” is not a day on the calendar.

17) Everything should have a home, but not everything has to live with you.

Prospect clients are often so focused on organizing what they already have that they ignore a key truth: not everything you own needs to stay with you forever. If it’s broken and you’re not willing to spend the time or money to repair it, let it go. If you’re sentimentally attached to something that’s broken, outdated, or takes too much space or effort to keep, take a photo of you holding it or wearing it. Then set it free!

If you have piles and files full of magazine clippings and articles you haven’t looked at in years, you’re not alone. 80% of what gets filed is never accessed again. Trust that the internet is a vast storehouse of everything you’d want to look up, and if the paper you’re holding has nothing to do with you, personally, or reflects information you’ve long since learned by heart, recycle it and give yourself space.

18) Don’t fight clutter with more clutter.

I love The Container Store and all the office supply stores as much as every other professional organizer. (Really!) 

But buying oodles of storage containers – bins, boxes, tubs, and shelves – can only help you organize if you pare down to what you need and want.

Photo by Lia Trevarthen on Unsplash

When you see a great outfit at the store but it’s not in your size, you shouldn’t say, “Hey, I’ll buy this now and then lose (or gain) 30 pounds to fit into it.” Even if you do declutter the personal poundage, you never know from where, exactly, that weight will disappear. It almost certainly won’t be a perfect fit.

I’m not saying never to acquire storage containers (adorable or otherwise), but don’t do it first. Once you pare down, pick colorful, fun containers that suit your needs, space, and tastes.

19) Take baby steps. Declare small victories. 

When it comes to clutter, it’s not the space it takes up in your house, it’s the dent it puts in your life! If you’re late every day because you can’t find your keys and your kids can’t find their homework, it’s a much bigger deal than a cluttered guest room closet or drawers of old birthday party pictures that haven’t been scrapbooked. 

Focus on your biggest daily stressors, break them down into small, actionable steps, and solve those first. You don’t need to do it all at once, but if you develop a habit of doing a little bit at a time, once your space is straightened up, maintenance will feel natural.

20) Declare bankruptcy on clutter debt. 

Give yourself permission to declare bankruptcy on the “debt” of unread magazines, charitable contribution requests that aren’t really your cause, unworn clothes three sizes too small, or email from last July.

Holding onto something just because you spent money on it, or because it was a gift, or because you feel guilty over it doesn’t make it any more valuable or useful; it just ends of costing you time (dusting or caring for it), space (that you could use for more important things), or money (spent on dry-cleaning or storage rental).

Holding onto something just because you spent money on it, or because it was a gift, or because you feel guilty over it doesn't make it any more valuable or useful; it just ends of costing you time, space, or money. Free up the… Share on X

If you’re overwhelmed with thousands (or tens of thousands) of unread emails, magazines, catalogs, or junk mail, check out the classic Paper Doll post, A Different Kind of Bankruptcy, to give you some action items to let go of paper and information.

21) Follow the buddy system and get some accountability.

Getting your space, time, and priorities in order can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to go it alone. Weight Watchers and 12-step programs succeed because they give people accountability and support. To help you reach your goals, buddy up with:

• Your partner – Trade tasks you don’t particularly love (like laundry for balancing the checkbook) and you’re less likely to procrastinate on doing what you enjoy.
• Your kids – Children love to “catch” adults breaking the rules. Tell them what you want to accomplish and have them keep you honest!
• Friends – Make organizing social. Invite a friend over for lunch or set up a Zoom to partner on organizing your closet or home office this weekend. Then do the same for your friend’s pantry or laundry room next week.
• Formal accountability — be willing to go virtual. Refer back to the posts I wrote last year on accountability: Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions and Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek.
• A professional organizer – As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I know how much my clients get out of having the support to make difficult decisions and develop systems to surmount those challenging obstacles. Find a professional organizer near you by using the NAPO’s search function. You may also want to consult with our colleagues in the Institute for Challenging Disorganization.

Yep. Hire a professional organizer. Whether you need to reinvigorate a closet, learn how to use Evernote to get your productivity zipping along, or downsize Grandma’s house so she can move to Boca, professional organizers can show you the way. We’re not just experts in organizing stuff, but experts in helping you figure out how best to organize your ways of thinking and living.

22) Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself some grace.

Being organized isn’t a contest. It’s not about whose home looks better, whose papers are more easily accessible, or who has the lowest clutter-to-house (or office) ratio. Being organized is about things being easier. More functional. More fun. It’s about having time and space serve you, rather than the other way around.

Jettison guilt. Remember, supermodels on magazine covers are airbrushed and photoshopped. They don’t really look like that. The same is true with the rooms you see in home and garden magazines. Nobody actually lives in spaces like that — those rooms were specially designed and curated to look “perfect.”

Even your friend’s Christmas card photos were carefully staged; once the photo was taken, they went back to their real lives. And nobody’s calendar is perfectly scheduled to eliminate stress. Almost everyone who seems to have a perfect life is like a duck, smoothly gliding above the water and furiously paddling below.

Give yourself and your family some grace, and take it day by day. GO Month is about getting organized, bit by bit. You have the rest of the year to work on staying organized.