Best Results Organizing

I don’t know about you, beloved readers, but 2023 has been a rollercoaster.

In January, someone rang my doorbell late at night to tell me they’d hit my car in the parking lot; in August, my car was stolen. And in November, just ten days before she was set to join us for Thanksgiving, Paper Mommy fell and fractured her pelvis in two places, and then developed pneumonia 48 hours later, and complications after that! (As of this weekend, she’s finally home and recovering.) 

I’m a positive person, but when the TV ads promote stage productions of Annie and the music swells for “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow,” I’ve been struck by a powerful urge to throw the remote through the screen. 

Professionally, 2023 was a mixed bag. I’ve maintained and added wonderful clients to my roster, and had a dazzling variety of in-person and virtual speaking engagements. But I was also saddened when a cherished elderly client passed away, and I must confess to not having made any headway on a passion project I’d wanted to write.

This is the traditional time to look back and pack away the prior year and set the tone for the one to come. 

Letting go of what’s awful or unnecessary comes as second nature to professional organizers; it’s almost therapy to us. For example, I’m not much for Black Friday, but I used the opportunity to replace almost all of my socks with snazzy new ones and jettisoned the old, sad ones. I’m ready for a new foundation, literally and figuratively.

Evaluating and state of a hosiery drawer and replacing all of hole-y socks is easier than doing a deep dive into how we’ve lived our lives over the past year and designing change for the coming one, but they are similarly life-affirming and necessary.

Editor’s Note: if you want to feel doubly-good about getting new socks, consider Bombas, which donates a pair to unhoused individuals for every pair you buy, or John and Hank Green’s Awesome Sock Club, where 100% of the profits go to a charitable organization working to decrease maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.

LOOK BACKWARD AND EMBRACE THE PERSONAL ANNUAL REVIEW

There are myriad ways to reflect on your past year, with multiple purposes. The main categories you might want to consider are:

• Health — Please don’t focus merely on weight, but consider stamina and strength, lab results, mental health, and health-related habits (both positive and unsavory).

If you don’t know how you’re doing in these areas, calling to make appointments with specialists and getting a handle on your numbers and benchmarks is a good place to start in the new year.

Don’t have a primary care provider or dentist or OB/GYN? Behind on your immunizations or age-appropriate health screenings like mammograms or colonoscopies? Make 2024 the year to catch up on your adulting! (In 2022, I finally got my overdue tetanus booster, an important one for professional organizers. We never know when something sharp is going to jump out and bite us!)

• Finances — Your bank balance doesn’t tell the whole story.

Did you stay within your budget? (Do you actually have a budget?) Are you comfortable with your rate of savings over the past year? Did you make good or bad investments (or avoid signing up for that 401K at work because you didn’t understand how it worked)?

Is your credit score trending up or down? Are there mistakes on your credit reports, or have you not even checked AnnualCreditReport.com since before the pandemic…or ever? 

Dollars Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

• Professional Development — If you work for someone else, prepare for your company‘s annual review (likely done on  your work anniversary) by asking:
  • What were the top projects I worked on this year in terms of financial return or impact? Am I happy with my contributions? Did I meet expectations? Exceed them? 
  • What achievement am I most proud of? Where did I fail to hit the mark of expectations, either my own or the company’s?
  • What do I wish I had known or done earlier in the year to have improved my performance? What training, skills, knowledge, resources, or support do I need to make my performance next year better?

• Business — If you own your own company, business development means all of the professional development category, plus a much more detailed analysis. Look at all of your goals, not only to see if you achieved them, but to understand how you can improve their specificity, measurability or relevance the next time around.

Do you know where your clients or customers came from? Do you know how satisfied they are with your service or products? What are your metrics for sales, followers on your social media platforms (and interactions with those followers), newsletter subscribers, and your standing in the community?

Competition doesn’t matter as much as client satisfaction, but neither matter if you have no idea how your company (of one employee or one thousand) is trending.

• Relationships — Nobody can tell you what your relationships should be, but if you’re not feeling loved and supported most of the time in your interactions with your partner, family, and friends, it probably won’t get better on its own. Organizing relationships matters!

Identify areas of improvement, like better communication or ways to nurture one another and connect. Maybe you just need to cook and eat meals together, which a recent study has found leads to well-being. 

Perhaps you need to consider whether this relationship has outworn its welcome. Just as with clutter, people buy into the sunk-cost fallacy; instead of throwing good money (or time) after bad — whether it’s an outgrown/defective car, gadget, or relationship — sometimes the best thing we can do is break free of inertia and let it go! (Cue Frozen!) 

• Intellect and Education — What did you learn in 2023? What did you read or listen to that made you better at what you do or in terms of who you are? Students get report cards; as adults, it’s harder to evaluate our intellectual growth.

Try writing reviews of the books you read or tracking them in a notebook, or online in an app like Goodreads. (With only two weeks to go, I doubt I will hit my Goodreads Challenge goal of 39 books this year; I’m at 28 and will probably only finish two or three more. But that’s probably more than I’d finish if I didn’t keep track.)

• Personal Growth — What’s different about you now versus last January? Have you grown in any way that’s discernible to your others or yourself? Did you embrace any new hobbies or skills?

If you’re happy with your life, huzzah! But if you feel like there was something missing in 2023, or if you participated in activities that no longer float your boat, now’s the time to explore and set some goals with actionable benchmarks for enriching your life. Make time for hobbies and passionate pursuits, and make room in your schedule for serendipity to offer you surprises!

• Community — Do you have a community outside of your work? Whether it’s social, political, charitable, spiritual, or otherwise, do you feel like you were involved in something bigger than yourself this year? How (and with whom) do you want to move forward next year?

WHAT TO DO WITH WHAT YOU LEARN FROM YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW

Knowing how you did is only the first step. Next, focus on three activities: Celebrate, Acknowledge, and Grow!

Celebrate 

When I worked in television, I had a wonderful general manager who used to say, “One ‘Aw, <bleep>!’ wipes out ten ‘Atta-boys!'”

While his salty statement was designed to address public perception, it also calls to mind that even if we celebrate our successes in the moment, when we sit down to evaluate how we’ve done, we tend to focus on our failures and our shortcomings. With the perspective of weeks and months, we can revisit the areas of our lives where we’ve done well (or at least we did better than circumstances might have otherwise allowed).

Go through your calendar, emails, and task lists and find the wins! And because we can be unreliable narrators of our own lives, ask your partner, closest friends, mastermind group, and/or colleagues. You may be delightfully surprised by the successes you’ve forgotten while focusing on the day-to-day or even the fumbles.

Acknowledge 

Yes, we do fumble. At work, with our families, with our promises to ourselves. We fail to aspire by believing we cannot succeed in organizing our spaces or our time or our lives, or we aspire without realistic planning, writing checks our overwhelmed future selves can’t cash.

The point isn’t to get mired in where we’ve fallen short, but to cash in our reality checks, measure our ending points against our starting visions, giving ourselves credit and then acknowledging what we must do differently. Do we need new goals and aspirations, or do we need to seek professional help,  comradeship/support, and different tools?

Grow 

There is little point to looking back as a pure exercise unless we plan to sit on our laurels or self-flaggelate. Instead, we should use the knowledge of our past year to determine what we want our next year to reflect. Often misquoted or truncated, there’s an excellent quote by Dr. Maya Angelou:

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

After evaluating your year, ask yourself how you want to do better. Do you really want to lose weight to hit an arbitrary number on the scale, or do you want to feel more comfortable and more confident in your clothes? Do you want to jump on the fitness trend everyone else is trying or do you want to explore something that fits your needs and workout style?

I recently learned that our ability to get off the floor by ourselves, without using our hands, is highly correlated with longevity. So, even though I start every year wishing I were good at yoga (and not both klutzy and bored to tears by it), for 2024, I’m looking at continuing my 10+K walks, getting back into Pilates, and exploring functional workouts designed to help improve stability and strength. I’m also giving myself a benchmark date by which if I haven’t gotten into a regular routine beyond walking, I’m going to hire a coach to guide me on functional aging skills.

If you aren’t happy about (or aren’t feeling informed on) your finances, start by gathering intelligence. Your credit cards likely have a dashboard that sorts your expenditures into categories you can evaluate, like restaurant service delivery or monthly fees for apps you’re no longer using. Look for “spend analyzer” or “year-end summary” on your financial account apps to note trends. If you’ve been using Mint as an independent financial dashboard, note that Intuit is suspending it and moving some (but not all) of its functions to Credit Karma, so you may need to find an alternative.

PICK YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW STYLE

I know from experience that I flounder when trying to do a free-form annual review, so over the years, I’ve embraced Year Compass, which I learned about from Janet Barclay. Year Compass is free, downloadable and fillable, printable PDF. (It’s available in translations to dozens of languages.)

Just print the booklet version and fill it out by hand. (Be sure to set the page to US English to get North American paper measurements.) Alternatively, you can type your answers directly into the digital version. (My penmanship gets more unwieldy each year, but I think we all feel more connection to the past year’s version of ourselves if we hand-write responses.)

Explore the innovative questions to generate a thorough evaluation of how your past year turned out and how to approach the coming year. Do this on your own or with a group of friends or family after a yummy at-home brunch.

In last year’s post, Organize Your Annual Review & Mindset Blueprint for 2023, I talked about the importance of evaluating your year based on your personal values, as well quantitative and my own list of qualitative questions, which I’ll share again:

The Good

• What challenges made me feel smart, empowered, or proud of myself this year?
• What did I create?
• What positive relationships did I begin or nurture?
• Who brought delight to my life?
• Who stepped up or stepped forward for me?
• What was my biggest personal highlight or moment I’d like to relive? 
• What was my biggest professional moment I’d want to appear in my bio?
• What’s a good habit I developed this year?

The Neutral

• What did I learn about myself and/or my work this year? 
• What did I learn how to do this year?
• What did neglect or avoid doing out of fear or self-doubt?
• What did I take on that didn’t suit my goals or my abilities?
• What was I wrong about? 

The Ugly

• What challenges made me feel weaker or less-than?
• Whom did I dread having to see or speak with this year?
• Who let me down?
• Whom did I let down?
• What did I do this year that embarrassed me (professionally or personally) or made me cringe? 
• When did I hide my light under a bushel?
• What am I faking knowing how how do? — Instead of pretending you know how to do something but are choosing a different path, ask for help. Make decision about what to do from a position of strength rather than weakness.
• What’s a bad habit I regret taking up or continuing?
• Where did I spend my time wastefully or unproductively? (It’s social media. For all of us.)
• Where did I spend my money wastefully or unwisely? (Target? Let’s take a poll. Was it Target?)

WHY LOOK FORWARD?

Unless you’re a fourth grader watching the clock tick down until recess, time moves too quickly. We have little opportunity to savor the good, and before we know it, the years have flown by. If I don’t plan for how I want to live my future, time will go by without achieving what I want. To remind myself of the brevity and value of each day (without getting too maudlin), I use the simple but motivational app Life Clock.

Life Clock, available for iOS and Android, envisions a lifetime as the equivalent of a 24-hour clock. You feed it limited personal information and it extrapolates your life expectancy (though you can always adjust the number). It then identifies, for the given date, what “time” it is in your life.

Gulp!

Life Clock shares mini-facts about how to extend your lifespan (and notes what shortens it), and details historical trends and where traditional benchmarks (like graduating and moving out of your family home) fit on the clock of life. Each minute of your “life clock” equals about 20 days in real life.  

We don’t need to “optimize” every bit of our lives; we deserve downtime. But we only get 1440 minutes in a real day, so let’s not waste a single one of our life clock minutes on things that aren’t good for us and don’t make us happy.

Nobody gets to decide for you what matters most. That said, it’s hard to stay focused on what matters to you when kids and world events and who Taylor Swift is dating all get in the way.

RESOLVE TO GIVE UP RESOLUTIONS

As I’ve written for many years, I don’t think resolutions work; they lead to disappointment and frustration. Why? 

• People set unrealistic expectations. Resolutions are often overly ambitious and fail to account for the time and effort you need. 
• Not all goals have to be SMART goals, but if your resolutions lack specificity (“get out of debt” or “get it shape,”), you have no actionable steps to take. 
• Most resolutions have no real plan of action and no method for achieving accountability.
• Far too many resolutions have no intrinsic motivation. If your resolutions are designed to make someone else happy (whether that’s your mother-in-law or society) or compete (with a societal ideal or another individual), you’re bound for misery. I prefer SMARTY goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based, and most importantly, yours.
• Too many resolutions are made and evaluated with all-or-nothing thinking. Success based on perfectionism is demotivating. Give yourself grace.

Instead of resolutions, focus on changing your habits. I’ve written about this at length, including in Organize Your Life: The Truth About Resolutions, Goals, Habits, and Words of the Year back in 2019 and earlier this year in Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker.

So read those two posts, and for real, meaningful change, read Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business 

and James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.

We don’t change who we are just because we decide to. We need a game plan. I will never embrace brevity in talking or writing. I will never be a morning person. But, I can change my habits. And so can you.

PROMOTE YOUR 2024 PLAN TO YOURSELF

Along with habit changes instead of resolutions, I believe in boosting your mindset so you can remind yourself, regularly, that you want to live a certain way, and why. 

In the annual review/forward-looking posts I’ve linked to throughout this post, I’ve done deep dives into ways to keep the motivation and energy of your “why” alive. You can read about them in detail, but they include:

• a word of the year
• multiple words (like a trio of words) of the year 
• a quote or motto or mantra of the year
• a song of the year

Whatever you pick, this word or phrase or song is your personal theme for the coming year. It reflects what you want to remember about your goals and your attitude. We all know that advertising works, so whatever you pick, or however you combine these ideas, use your (organized) space to keep your attention on your intention for the year.

Promote your theme word or phrase or song — to yourself — on a vision board to reflect and encompass any or all of your motivating words, phrases, and songs. Post your message to yourself on your bathroom mirror, your fridge, the inside of your front door — anywhere that it will give you a boost! Change your wakeup alarm on your phone to your song theme!

PAPER DOLL’S WORD OF THE YEAR FOR 2024

Some years, I do better than others with my word choice. In 2020, I picked “ample” and embracing the phrase “Ample: it’s not just for bosoms anymore.” I’ve carped about how the “ample” opportunities for experiencing a global health crisis weren’t appreciated, but upon years of reflection, I did grow the virtual organizing and productivity coaching side of my business.

2021’s “delighted” kept me seeking opportunities for delight, but I never managed to find a word that fit well for 2022. This year, I chose “fulfilled,” and it was a guiding principle behind work and life choices.

So far, I have two contenders for 2024.

One option came to me mid-summer in a flash, so I wrote it on the December page of my calendar so I wouldn’t forget. The word is UPGRADE.

I have a habit of overthinking a word’s unintentional implications. (Like how the year I picked “resilient,” I ended up with too many things from which to bounce back.) 

Upgrade, though, has real potential. While there might be a slight implication of expense — having to replace things — I really feel the vibe of improvement. This isn’t about upgrading tangible things (socks notwithstanding) but about the quality of my experiences. 

But “upgrade” has a quirky competitor: PRONOIA.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it. Honestly, the first time I heard the word, I assumed it was made up. It’s opposite of paranoia; a person experiencing pronoia believes that the world around them conspires to do them good. Obviously, taken to extremes, it might seem like psychological or spiritual irrationality. 

But Buddist principles haven’t been working for me, I’m still trying to get a handle on the Stoics I talked about in Toxic Productivity Part 2: How to Change Your Mindset. I feel the pull of a bigger change in my life, and I think “pronoia” dovetails with the idea of a life upgrade.

Thus, I keep coming back to the Carly Pearl song in which I first heard the word “pronoia.”

While song is about psyching oneself up after a heartbreak, there’s something in the lyrics (and Pearl’s intonations) that I find inspiring.

You ever heard the word Pronoia?
It’s the opposite of paranoia, pronoia
The belief that the world conspires in your favor
Honey, it’s a game changer
It’s a cherry lifesaver

When I feel like everything is breaking down
It’s the dip before I hit the higher ground

(©2023 Carly Pearl, Renee Hikari, and David Baron)

How do you feel about the year that’s ending? What word or phrase or song is emblematic of what you want in 2024?