Psychological | Best Results Organizing

Paper Doll Springs Ahead with Three Empowering Concepts

Posted on: March 11th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 22 Comments

SPRING HAS (ALMOST) SPRUNG

After a long, dark winter, we’re finally seeing some sure signs of springtime.

For example, we just set the clocks forward an hour. However you feel about Daylight Saving Time (and there are arguments on both sides), it’s likely you enjoyed having more daylight hours in the evening, even if it was just to complain about how tired you were from “losing” that hour the night before.

Depending on where you live, you may have started to see signs of nature’s transitions. Here in Tennessee, the Bradford pear trees started flowering about ten days ago, meaning that about five days ago, a rain and windstorm plastered white petals all over our front doors and our cars.

(Bradford pear trees smell like fish. Some say rotting fish. Allegedly, this scent attracts pollinators; apparently spring is not only the time when a young man’s fancy turns to love, but a young bee’s fancy turns to the delights of rotting fish.)

Spring Cleaning the Stuff

This time of year also brings to mind spring cleaning. First, there’s a tradition of literal spring cleaning. There’s no agreement on how this ritual began, though there are theories that it relates to either cultural-, religious-, or climate-related histories.

Some people place the tradition of spring cleaning at Nowruz, the Persian New Year, which coincides with the first day of spring. Practitioners observe whole-house cleaning called khaneh tekani, or “shaking the house.”

In Judaism, as the days advance toward Passover, homes are rid of “chametz” (anything leavened, usually meaning bread, but more generally any food item that rises or expands, the eating of which is forbidden during the holiday); at the end of the literal cleaning, there’s a ritualistic cleaning with a feather, a spoon, and a candle!

The night before the first seder (a dinner and reading of a book about the exodus from Egypt), observant Jews perform the Bedikat Hametz, one last symbolic check for anything leavened. Instead of using a vacuum, broom, or Swiffer, practitioners shine the light of a candle in corners and crevices, dusting any microscopic crumbs into a spoon.

As Passover and Easter are generally close on the calendar, it’s no surprise that Eastern Orthodox and Catholic families practice cleaning rituals (in the home and at church) at varying points during Lent.

Meanwhile, in Europe and North America, before wall-to-wall carpets and Roombas, early spring bridged the chasm between the cold, windy winters and hot, buggy summers; springtime let people open the windows and doors to fresh air, sweep out the schmutz of lamps lit by whale oil or kerosene and home interiors darkened by coal soot, and generally avoid too much of the yucky aspects of nature coming in. (Oddly, there’s no historical record of people rejecting spring cleaning because of the scent of fishy pear trees!)

Decluttering is closely aligned with cleaning, spring or otherwise. The more you have, the more your space (and your energy) is blocked. Sensibly, then, spring is a common time for people to face the excess around them and set it free. The warmer weather and additional sunshine doesn’t just find us shrugging off our hibernation habits, but combing through closets and drawers to see what can be winnowed away.

Spring Cleaning Our Minds

Spring cleaning (and spring in general) calls to mind letting go of tangible stuff, but also giving ourselves a second chance (the first having been New Year’s Day) to let go of unpleasant, unhealthy, or unfortunate habits. As I wrote about in Organizing A Fresh Start: Catalysts for Success, there are a variety of ways to make fresh starts for ourselves, whether to coincide with new years, new quarters, new months, or holidays.

There’s one other fresh start I like to practice, and that’s tying spring cleaning to my birthday (which falls later this week). Letting go of what isn’t necessary (or useful), whether physical or mental, and clearing out the cobwebs in my mind, as I approach a new year of selfhood, helps me feel better about my next approaching cycle around the sun.

Benjamin Franklin said that “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” If Ben had been Bettina, she certainly would have written about the certainty of wrinkles (what the cosmetic companies delightfully call “fine lines”) and the unkindness of gravity, but using the days around the onset of spring and my birthday to declutter and refresh my life makes me feel a bit more empowered to fight the onslaught of age-related dilapidation.

To that end, and especially after 2 1/2 months straight of posts about serious topics covering the tangible (master classes on paper management, organizing blended libraries to keep domestic peace) and the scary (unplugging to avoid the physical and mental health dangers of being always-on, avoiding being the victim of a scams), today’s post is designed to declutter the bits and pieces I’ve been saving in my head. They’re scraps and remnants, too good to be discarded unused, but perhaps not large or fancy enough to stand on their own.

MAKE THINGS EARN A PLACE IN YOUR LIFE

Brazilian novelist and lyricist Paul Coelho is most famous for his book The Alchemist.

In addition to his books, Coelho is known for several super-positive quotes designed to uplift, including:

When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.
It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.

However, the Paul Coelho quote (in full) that keeps coming back to me is, “I think it’s important to realize that you can miss something but not want it back.”

The Paul Coelho quote that keeps coming back to me is, *I think it's important to realize that you can miss something but not want it back.* Share on X

Whoa. There are so many different ways to think about this. Professionally, I’m inclined to take this literally. So often, clients have stuff — lots of stuff — that doesn’t fit their bodies, their lifestyles, their values, or their goals. We then work to let go of the tangible things that don’t serve the person they are now, or the person they are trying to become.

But the “something” that is missed may not be clutter — it may be a person, a relationship, or an experience. It can be hard (but so enlightening) to recognize that we can feel a powerful enough connection to something from our past to miss it, but still acknowledge that we don’t want it back, either because it’s not good for us or possibly just because we’ve outgrown it.

You may be wistful about something from your teenage years, but I doubt very much that you’d like to be fifteen again for longer than the duration of an idle daydream.

Set aside your memories of lazy afternoons doodling your initials and those of a certain special someone on the paper bags you fashioned into book covers. Instead, spend a moment recalling the scent of the high school cafeteria’s chipped beef on toast, the taunts of “mean girls,” the inability to control almost any aspect of your living situation — or for any of you not significantly younger than I am, the complete absence of coffee culture or Google. I’ll stay this age, thankyouverymuch!

Often, when I work with clients, the thing holding them back from letting go of tangible clutter is the imagined life that clutter represents. As I talked about in The Boo-Hoo Box: Organizing Painful Clutter, “Letting go of your college boyfriend’s tacky breakup letter won’t absolve him of the pain he caused you. But it will set you free from the cycle of pain you experience every time you re-encounter it.”

Letting go of your college boyfriend's tacky breakup letter won't absolve him of the pain he caused you. But it will set you free from the cycle of pain you experience every time you re-encounter it. Share on X

There are aspects of our lives that we miss — even the painful parts — because we knew them well, we understood them and they felt as much a part of us as the freckle on the back of our wrist. It’s understandable that we miss the things that helped make us who we are today — the good and the not-so-good — but if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really want them back.

I try to encourage my clients to ask themselves whether something has earned the right to be in their lives, whether it’s a tangible item, an obligation on their schedule, a thought they struggle to let go of, or a personal relationship.

I’m not sure how Paul Coelho would feel about knowing I triangulated Scandal‘s Fitz and Olivia (whom I truly hope are now making jam at that house in Vermont) with his quote about missing something and wanting it back, with things having to earn a place in our lives, but all of these have been taking up space in my cognitive closet, and it’s time to set them free.

FIND THE ESSENCE

The next quote is a more recent one from James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter. Clear wrote,

“The simplest way to clarify your thinking is to write a full page about whatever you are dealing with and then delete everything except the 1-2 sentences that explain it best.”

This reminds me of a beloved story about Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. (You may know him by his first name, Michelangelo. He’s like Cher in that way.)

His famed marble sculpture David was carved from an 18-foot high marble block that even Leonardo da Vinci had determined was of inferior quality and thus unworkable. David took Michelangelo the better part of four years, finishing in 1504.

Four years, the amount of time it takes (or is supposed to take) to finish college. Do you wonder if Michelangelo’s mother worried about the future of his career as an artist? Do you think she fretted that he should at least learn accounting for something to fall back on?

But I digress.

When asked about his process in creating this work of timeless genius, Michelangelo is reported to have said…something.

By one account, he is alleged to have stated, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” which seems quite poetic, whether spoken in Italian (“Ho visto l’angelo nel marmo e l’ho scolpito finché non l’ho liberato”) or English.

By other accounts, Michelangelo is said to have replied, “It’s simple. I just remove everything that is not David.”

In all likelihood, the great artist probably said nothing of the kind, in any language. We can’t be sure. (However, we do know that he probably spoke Tuscan Italian with a Florentine accent, so we’re at least able to read the remnants of things we’re sure he said, or at least wrote, unlike others of his era who spoke different dialects of the city-states that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire and before Italian unification. Remember, Italy has only been a country since 1861, so “Italian” has only been one particular language since then!)

Whether we’re looking at the actual quote from James Clear or the (likely apocryphal) quote from Michelangelo, the truth is that at the heart of the matter, what’s important is in there, somewhere, under all the clutter.

With all of the writing and talking that we professional organizers and productivity specialists share about decluttering what isn’t essential and prioritizing what is, I’m not sure the concept could be conveyed any more clearly than what we get from the Clear/Michelangelo idea.

At the heart of our homes, there are spaces that give us comfort, and to find them, we need to keep sifting away the detritus of daily life — the junk mail, the plastic shopping bags, the empty cereal boxes, the broken earphones — until we find clear surfaces to sit comfortably with our loved ones and talk about what’s important.

In our workspaces, the digital desktops covered with different versions of the same files (ImportantProject.final.version7.reallyfinal) and actual desktops piled high with documents we will never file (and if we filed, would never actually read) all distract us from the brilliant work that is within us, if only we could find our way clear.

And, as always, it’s never just about the tangible stuff. Our schedules are filled with meetings that should have been emails, and so many projects that should have been cues to realize we belonged in entirely different careers. Our heads are full of so many good ideas, but they battle it out with fears, doubts, and self-recriminations such that there’s no quiet space in our brains to focus on those great ideas.

Which brings me to the last quote cobweb that’s been hanging out in my head.

STOP WAITING ‘UNTIL’

I’ve been reading Jon Acuff‘s Finish: Give Yourself The Gift of Done, which proposes ways to achieve your goals by removing the kinds of pressure that perfectionism places on us.

In Finish, Acuff talks about “noble obstacles,” dark and twisty things perfectionism causes us to put in the path of our success. One example he gives is the concept of “until,” wherein we can’t start on anything until we do the thing that comes before it, and we can’t do the thing before that until we do one task prior.

Acuff says:

“Until” is a hurdle you throw up on your track until the lane is so clogged you couldn’t possibly get started today. Look at all those obstacles. Today’s not the best day to go.

The tricky thing is that “until” often wears a cloak of responsibility. It pretends that it’s not about being lazy but about making sure everything is in order before you start. It would be foolish to come up with a great invoice system until I really know what my business is about. Once I have a core mission, the rest of the pieces will fall into place, but until then, it would be wasted effort.

Until I know why I have an issue with food, I can’t walk around the block at a brisk pace for more minutes today than I did yesterday.

Until I know what my entire book is about I can’t write the first hundred words.

Until I know where all the stuff in every room of my house is going to go I can’t clean this one room.

Until is sneaky, so you have to be sneaky, too. If perfectionism keeps you (like it keeps almost everyone) from moving forward out of a fear of making a mistake, try the opposite approach.

Intentionally make a mistake. Or, at least, don’t try to put forth your best effort. Yes, really.

You can’t edit a blank page. Don’t sit down with the intention of writing a masterpiece or a pitch-perfect presentation.

Instead, spend 30 minutes emptying your thoughts onto the paper or screen. You don’t have to know what the finished version will look like. You don’t even have to write complete sentences. But get all your bad ideas out in the open and you may find that some of them are workable. One might even be that angel Michelangelo set free from the marble. But you’ll never know if you don’t start. Don’t wait for “until.”

You can’t get fit waiting until you find the perfect exercise routine. Whatever you hope to accomplish, whether you want to be able to run a marathon or just fit into your pre-pandemic clothes, you don’t need to wait until the right class opens at your gym or until you find the cutest athleisure outfit.

Just go for a walk or a swim or do an exercise video or take a class. And if you don’t like it, do something different tomorrow. And something else the next day. Sure, at some point, consistency in some kind of program will probably help you hit your goals faster and with increasing skill and confidence. But waiting “until” something before you start means you’ll probably never start.

You can’t get organized by waiting until you have entirely free weeks (or months) to address your clutter. Prospective organizing clients will call and explain their goals, but say they have to wait until they have time to complete the entire project.

Nope. Organizing doesn’t work like that, either. You need to purge a little, organize a little, and then live with your systems for a little while to see what you need to tweak. People want to wait until the perfect time, but there is no such thing.

We all find ourselves stuck in the mud of “until.” As Acuff says, it wears that cloak of responsibility, making us think we’re protecting our time and effort and money by doing the right thing. But we might very well wait until…forever.

As 19th-century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev said,

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything, is ready, we shall never begin.”

Happy springtime, and I have three wishes for my birthday for all of you:

May you feel the difference between missing something and actually wanting it so you can demand something earn its right to be in your life.
May you find the essence of your space and your schedule so you can focus on what’s truly important. And,
May you start something — anything — unencumbered by that “false responsibility” of waiting until all your game pieces are in position. Just start.

Celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging

Posted on: February 26th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

From the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you finally nod off at night, do you experience over-stimulation? Do you suffer from over-availability, whether to your boss, colleagues, or clients, or to everyone who wants to talk to you about their political campaigns or your auto warranty?

Even if you’re overly connected with the world via glass screens, do you feel a lack of connection — with your loved ones, nature, or even your inner self?

Have I’ve got a holiday for you! From sundown this Friday, March 1, 2024 until sundown on Saturday, it is the Global Day of Unplugging!

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL DAY OF UNPLUGGING?

The Global Day of Unplugging is an annual campaign to bring attention to the importance of taking a break from 21st-century technology, whether that’s your computer, your cell phone, or your brand new Apple Vision Pro. The goal is to embrace person-to-person connection, the kind where you can see deeply into someone else’s eyes because you’re in the same space at the same time.

It’s not that digital engagement is bad, per se. Zoom meetings and remote work means we reduce our overall carbon footprint from work-related road trips and airline travel. Cell phones (even if people mostly communicate by text) let us know when our friends are running late or if the kids need someone to pick them up.

But being on-all-the-time keeps us from ever refreshing. When it’s our boss that keeps us connected, that’s toxic, as we’ve discussed previously:

I mean, we could move to France, as covered in the first post above, or to Australia, which has just voted to allow workers to ignore after-hours phone calls and email from their companies. That could help reduce any employer-related tethering to our devices.

But we do this same damage to ourselves! Like a digital pacifier, we reach for our devices when we’re bored or anxious: in line at the grocery store, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, on the other end of the couch from our kids or significant other.

Technology is pushed on us from above and from all sides, but it has the potential to become an addiction that pushes us further away from our loved ones.

Wouldn’t you benefit from a little escape? For one 24-hour period starting on Friday, people from all four corners of the globe (yes, I know globes have no corners), will intentionally walk away from their digital lives and meet IRL (in real life).

WHY UNPLUG?

Let’s look at the dangers of the attention economy, which treats our eyeballs (attention) as a scarce commodity. We can prevent some of the problems by decluttering our digital spaces; other parts require concerted efforts at unplugging.

Distractions

Our computers and devices bring so much digital clutter to our attention. Some of it involves what other people want us to pay attention to, things we may or may not find important. But other distractions we bring on ourselves by clicking our way into deeper and deeper rabbit holes, directing us to an article online or a video on TikTok, but then we stay, enraptured and forget what we were doing.

These distractions take our focus off where we intend it to be. Intention is how we make sure we handle what we prioritize and not someone else’s priorities. Decluttering minimizes those distractions.

When we’re organized in our homes or offices, the clutter and inefficient systems make it hard to find what we want when we want it. Digital clutter is more insidious because we don’t even realize that we’re being distracted — we’ve become so used to it, and because nobody else sees our digital clutter they don’t call attention to it.

When we eliminate digital excess and distractions and create new, more efficient pathways, we feel calmer and more in control. When that happens, we’re in the zone, better able to do deep work and get into flow, with less wasted time searching for whatever we want — or what our boss or client wants.

However, of all the ways digital addiction hurts us, perhaps the distractions and lack of productivity are the least important.

Physical Health

Digital overuse is bad for our physical health. We develop bad posture from shlumping at our desks, gripping our phones, and hyperextending our necks.

Tech Neck is an informal term for the medical condition we experience when we use our devices. We flex our necks and shoulders, causing strain strain on the muscles and joints; the more we do it, the greater the build-up of tension, leading to muscle pain and headaches. Some research even suggests that overusing mobile devices can cause bone spurs to form at the nexus between the neck and head!

Additionally, exposure to the blue light emitted by phones, tablets, and computer screens can cause insomnia and decrease the quality of our sleep, which can further impact our ability to focus. Of course, when our attention span is decreased (whether due to sleepless nights or being trained to think in tweet-length chunks of language), it takes ever more effort to interpret complex material or be creative.

And, of course, repeated digital interruptions from our devices leads to higher rates of exhaustion and stress-induced ailments.

Stress

Speaking of stress, staying plugged in messes up our psyches in multiple ways:

Information overload leads to overwhelm — To borrow a movie title, it can seem like we’re dealing with everything everywhere all at once. Your work, your children’s homework portal, national disasters, politics — it’s all so important.

The problem with everything seeming like a priority is that eventually nothing is a priority. All issues, large and small, compete on a stage the size of the planet, the form of your smartphone, and the synapses in your brain simultaneously.

The problem with everything seeming like a priority is that eventually nothing is a priority. All issues, large and small, compete on a stage the size of the planet, the form of your smartphone, and the synapses in your brain… Share on X

Overwhelm leads to increased anxiety — Think about the last time you were trying to juggle multiple problems at the same time. I bet you were trying to give your attention to so many interested parties that one last, small request (“Honey, where’s the Costco card?” “Mom, can you take me to the mall?”) made you feel like your limbs where going to fly off in different directions.
Use of social media leads to a variety of emotional dysfunctions. Over the last decade, social media use has grown; in 2022, the average person spent 2 hours and 27 minutes on social media per day. Why is that worrying?
- The more we connect online, the more we experience FOMO (fear of missing out).
- We more see other people having fun (attending parties, going on vacation, celebrating life milestones), the more likely we are to feel lonely.
- Comparing one’s own life to other’s highlight reels can lead to lower levels of self-esteem. If you judge your own self-worth by comparing yourself to others, social media may make you feel like you’re failing.
- As people — particularly younger folks — spend less time developing in-person social interactions and more time on social media and dating apps, there’s an increase in social awkwardness when they finally do meet face-to-face. This contributes to more social anxiety. Additionally, the social relationships we do have tend to fray without positive, in-person interactions.
- Social media makes it easier for people to exhibit bad behavior. Bullied teenagers used to have a respite from their cruel classmates once the school day was over; now, it follows them home on their phones and social gaming sites. And we all know about rude online treatment of anyone who dares to have a differing opinion on anything, whether politics, sports, or music, or has a different religious, national, ethnic, or other kind of identity.
- More nuanced unkindness online occurs in the withholding of likes or social approval, which again, when we compare our “performance” and “appeal” to that of others, can make us feel like we’re lacking.
- All of this can lead to depression.
We can lose the ability to ability to self-soothe when we’re constantly tethered to our digital pacifiers. On the plus side, our devices can distract us from very real things that, well, suck. But when we become dependent on that kind of distraction, our former life skills dissolve. We used to be able to make polite conversation with strangers in line or read books for extended periods of time. We could go to sleep without an hour of scrolling. Now, we’re often unable to tame our thoughts unless we allow the internet to do it.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO UNPLUG?

Every app and the whole on the internet is purposely designed to keep you coming back.

There’s a scientific explanation. Every time we use our devices, it reinforces the pathways taken by dopamine, a happy-making neurotransmitter at the base of our reward-seeking behaviors. Just like the bells and blinking lights on a Vegas slot machine condition us to pull the lever or push the buttons one more time, the notifications, “Breaking News” headlines, daily streaks in apps, and aforementioned “likes” draw us back in.

Godfather Goodfellas GIF from Godfather GIFs

Worse, as with other addictions, when this neurotransmitter pathway doesn’t get reinforced, we actually experience something very similar to a chemical withdrawal. Have you ever found yourself without your phone, feeling jittery and unable to tame your mood?

It’s not your fault. You have to use modern devices for work, and you really do want to have access for many of life’s convenience. But you will feel better if you can lessen your dependence.

HOW TO UNPLUG FOR A DAY

To celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging, you can look for a community event near you. There’s everything from a musical chairs event in Charleston to Yoga and Sound Healing in Gainesville, from a Family Bonfire & S’Mores in Star, Idaho to something called a Disco Get Down-Dog in San Diego. And this truly is global, with events from Denmark to Bolivia, Virginia to Switzerland!

The Global Day of Unplugging organization has listed over 200 ideas of what you can do instead of being plugged in!

The idea isn’t to become a Luddite, but to find ways to feel less isolated or disconnected (whether from others or yourself). Ideas range from the tame (unclutter your pantry, take a hike, do some gardening) to those that indulge your inner child (build a living room fort, blow bubbles, put on a puppet show).

Create art (decorate a lantern, have fun with origami) or go on a quest (create a scavenger hunt or go on a Gnome hunt)! And while I’d be hopeless at crocheting for a cause or going on an ice-block slip & slide, all of these events would definitely be healthier for my brain, heart, and soul than scrolling through the curated slime-fest some platforms have become.

You can also support the global unplugging movement by making a donation or purchasing “merch,” but even joining at the free plan lets you download their “I/We Unplug” signs.

If you enjoy the Global Day of Unplugging, consider taking a tech sabbath as described by Tiffany Shlain in 24/6: Giving up Screens One Day a Week to Get More Time, Creativity, and Connection or doing a digital detox on a more regular basis, so you and your devices take a real break from one another.

TRY BABY STEPS TO GET MORE COMFORTABLE WITH UNPLUGGING

Nobody is saying that you have to become an in-person social diva overnight and join with others. If you’re more the “lone wolf” type, there are many ways to make it easier to unplug.

Make it less convenient to access your phone when you should be doing something else. At work, put it in a drawer; if you work from home, take it to another room. When out and about, put your phone in your purse or work bag, inside a zippered compartment. Add friction!
If you can’t keep your hands off your phone, use the accessibility functions to turn your phone to “grayscale.” When the display is limited to black, white, and grey, your brain gets fewer dopamine hits and you’ll be less compelled to reach for it.
Use positive reinforcement. Doodle a message (like “UNPLUG!” or “Put me down!”) to yourself and take a photo (or create a graphic in Canva) that reinforces your goal on your locks screen.
Silence notifications when you need to do focused deep work (but set expectations so co-workers or family trust you’ll get back to them).
Don’t use your devices in the bedroom, at night or in the morning. Remember, the blue light from devices detracts from your ability to get recuperative sleep (meaning you’ll be distracted the next day), and using them first thing in the morning keeps you from starting your day focused and intentional. Don’t get sucked in to what’s trending.
Don’t text and drive. Don’t dictate and drive. Don’t let your phone read texts aloud. Unless you’re getting directions or there’s an emergency, put your phone away.

And if you’re worried about your family, remember: it’s hard to limit screen time for kids and teens when you don’t model healthy digital hygiene yourself. Work together to support alternatives to an always-online life.

Ironically, the more technology gains a pernicious hold on our attention, the more we may need to consider technological solutions to untether.

For example, there’s an increase in apps to make it easier to not use apps! ClearSpace claims that 97% of its users reduced their screen time in the first week of use. It uses a minimalist design to block and limit distracting apps, reduce time spent doom scrolling, train attention through screen time challenges, and provide screen time accountability and reporting.

Similar apps for helping reduce screen use include Forest, Space, Off the Grid, and Elqi.

There’s even a new phone, the Minimal Phone, designed to make essential work easier but social media use less appealing.

The Minimal Phone uses an E-Ink display that’s supposed to reduce eye-strain and promote healthy sleep. The claim is that it’s “designed to discourage prolonged social media use, while still being perfect for essential tasks like emails and texts.” It’s higher tech than a flip phone, but less inviting than a typical smart phone.

UNPLUG TO ACHIEVE SILENCE

We tend to think of unplugging as it affects our eyes, but our ears get overstimulated, too.

The Sounds of Silence

Even 65 years ago, individuals were trying to unplug from the experience of audio overload, as The Restorative Pause of Silent Record Week and the below video both explain.

(Learn more about the phenomenon of “silent” records in Spin Magazine’s Silence is Golden and Music Weird’s The Sounds of Silence: A Brief History of Silent Recordings.)

A study entitled Is silence golden? Effects of auditory stimuli and their absence on adult hippocampal neurogenesis, published in 2013 in the journal Brain Structure and Function found that, for mice at least, silence can be “a proactive catalyst for neurogenesis.” In other words, silence can stimulate the creation of new brain cells. Stepping away from the pings and buzzes might not just make you calmer, but smarter!

And it’s not just the one-way silence that might benefit us. Last year, researchers found a problematic aspect of video conferencing. When we chat in person, we respond to yes-or-no questions, on average, within 297 milliseconds; on Zoom, it’s 976 milliseconds! We may not perceive the delay, but the slowdown interferes with the neural mechanisms regulate human conversation? Our physiological response? (Zoom) fatigue.

And one study found that two minutes of silence interspersed with, or after, relaxing music increased the calming power of music on cardiovascular, cerebrovascular, and respiratory systems. Silence combats the negative aspects of our online life.

You may find these trends toward silence intriguing enough to consider other ways you might unplug.

Silent Reading Groups

Silent Book Club has over 500 chapters in 50 countries. There’s no assigned reading, and you can meet, eat and drink, and read silently for an hour along with others equally craving silence. (They do socialize after the reading time.)

Carving Silence from Chaos

Earth FM offers a search engine to find the quietest places in the word’s loudest cities. Unplug from your devices, then escape the high decibels of your city and enter peaceful gardens, parks, pools, and arboretums.

Los Angeles Ornamental Japanese Garden, photo by Glen Bowman (CC 2.0)

Silent Salons

In many beauty salons, you can request a silent appointment or silent chair. It might seem contradictory to the idea of unplugging from the digital realm to have more one-to-one interactions. But sometimes, a person is overwhelmed by all auditory experiences. It’s OK to unplug from conversation, too.

Silent Travel

Unplugging is hard. Most of us would feel accomplished enough if we could put our phones away for an entire day. Given that, I’m fascinated by a new trend of traveling unplugged.

Silent travel is designed to be restorative and mindful, so when you return, you don’t need a vacation to recover from your vacation. Options include:

Silent meditation retreats — Monks and nuns may be the best-known practitioners of silent meditation, but interest grows every year. A colleague has attended multiple silent retreats over the years, each scheduled in proximity to her birthday. The experience gives her the opportunity to focus on her thoughts and feelings, and do some self-analysis, things that would be very difficult amid the FOMO and constant contact inherent in carrying the internet around in her pocket.

Quiet and silent nature reserves — Nature is not silent (though I wish the tree frogs outside my suburban home would considering hushing themselves.) Animals are, however, unlikely to buzz or ping or otherwise carry on a loud one-side conversation with a fellow creature halfway across the country. Organizations like Quiet Parks International promote awareness of listening to nature and our inner voices, reduce the impact of noise pollution, and foster the benefits of experiences that allow for embracing silence and the sounds of nature.

Silent walks and walking tours — We already knew that walking was good for us, and silent walking didn’t begin with the TikTok trend, but it definitely increased in popularity as a result. However, reaping the emotional and cognitive benefits of walking is difficult when one’s phone is buzzing; walking while checking email (or stalking exes on Instagram) defeats the purpose.

For those of us who struggle with traditional meditation, especially the kinds that require sitting still, silent walking sans devices are an anxiety-busting revelation. Several organizations support such efforts by identifying locations and providing advice, including SilentWalks.org, Sharing Nature, and Ideas for Educating.

Sleep tourism has become a whole thing in recent years, with the hospitality industry investing deeply in wellness options like specialized in-bed therapies, guided meditations, in-room essential oil infusers, and other treats. Sleep retreats offer options to modify sounds, aromas, temperatures, textures, surfaces, and experiences.

Bed in the Clouds Photo by Mo Eid

Escaping the negative effects of your phone is just the beginning; even the most middlebrow of hotel stays now include combination alarm clocks and sound machines so that your business trip dreams can be accompanied by the sounds of rushing water or birdsong.

If you’re a light sleeper, quiet hotels help unplug from other people’s conversations and devices. Quiet Hotels and QuietHotelRooms can help you find quiet spaces is noisy cities.

As you unplug from the digital world and sensory inputs, consider silent options.

Blending Libraries: How To Organize Books with Your Sweetheart

Posted on: February 12th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 18 Comments

Did you know that in addition to February 14th being Valentine’s Day, it’s also International Book Giving Day and Library Lovers’ Day? As someone who’d much rather receive a bouquet of books than flowers, this makes sense to Paper Doll. And February 20th is Clean Out Your Bookcase Day!

The literary and the romantic will always be tied together. I mean, watching or hearing someone declare their love is nice, but being able to read (and reread) the declaration more than two hundred years later? Jane Austen knew what she was doing when she had Persuasion‘s Captain Wentworth’s write this to Anne Elliot.

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant…

Reading can be romantic. But let’s face it, there’s nothing romantic about organizing books.

Or is there?

What could be more romantic than your sweetheart making sure you don’t fall and break your neck tripping over their pile of unread books? What could be a finer proof of your love than moving your books off of the kitchen counter so your darling can actually make lunch?

Other than commingling finances, what could require more love and trust than combining your personal libraries?

ORGANIZE YOUR PERSONAL LIBRARY FIRST

Organizing, downsizing, and protecting your personal library (and your reading time) involves a great deal of thought and planning, as I’ve written before in various posts over 17 years, including:

Ask Paper Doll: How And Where Can I Donate Lots of Books?
Book ’em, Danno! Organizing Your Beloved Books
12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 1 (When, Where, What, With Whom)
12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 2 (Reading Lists, Challenges & Ice Cream Samples)
Organizing Your Reading Space for More Reading Time (which includes links to six super-classic Paper Doll posts dating back to 2010!)
Paper Doll Cleans Out Her Backpack: Book Lover Edition
Paper Doll To the Rescue: How To Save Wet Books & Documents
Shhhhh… We’re organizing the library…

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. For example, you could read what Martha Stewart and her favorite peeps have to say about How to Organize Books in a Way That Works for You.

Conversely, you could review what the Washington Post says in How to Organize Your Books, According to People with Thousands of Them.

And, of course, even though I’m a professional organizer, I’m a reader first, and I know that there’s much more to a personal library that just arranging books. To that end, I invite everyone to read Freya Howarth’s How to Nurture a Personal Library.

If your own book collection is sprawling, full of duplicates and titles you’ll never read again (or read at all), outdated college textbooks, or other book clutter (did you gasp at “book clutter”?), you can find ways to hide your biblio-addiction in your own, private space.

That works for hermits. However you choose to organize your own books, organizing books when you live with your significant other adds multiple layers of complexity.

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN BLENDING PERSONAL LIBRARIES

First, you have to decide whether you’re going to try to blend your books, or keep them separate. Then you have to embrace the difficult work of culling your collections. (If you came to blows trying to figure out whose air fryer or toaster oven you’d use, that was mere child’s play.)

When friends ask me if they should blend book collections with their sweethearts, I say, “Don’t. Books are intimate. Mixing your books is like mixing your toothbrushes. Blech!”

When clients ask me the same question, I am more sanguine, or at least more practical.

When friends ask me if they should blend book collections with their sweethearts, I say, 'Don't. Books are intimate. Mixing your books is like mixing your toothbrushes. Blech!' When clients ask me the same question, I am more… Share on X

Space Invaders — Introducing One Library to Another

We love our book collections. Our personal libraries say something about who we were, are, and hope to be. Exposing our private collections may be awkward or embarrassing, less like when your parents share “baby on the bearskin rug” photos and more like when they show photos of you, all braces-and-bad-perm, at the junior prom.

So, let’s imagine that you and your beloved have just decided to cohabit.

Are they moving into your space?

How will you keep from feeling like your terrain is being invaded? If you’ve previously shared an apartment with a friend or just a sub-letting housemate, it’s probably been very clear whose space belongs to whom. Perhaps the division was congenial and you easily divided everything equally; perhaps not.

Will you resent reducing the space available for your carefully curated collection?

It’s one thing to give up space in your closet, bathroom cabinet, or even your underwear drawer, but if you guard your bookshelves fiercely (as most avid readers do), how will you welcome your sweetheart and fellow reader into your space?

Are you moving into their space?

Any time two people move in together where one has already been residing, there’s an implicit turf war. How will you feel at home in a home without adequate and fairly representative space for your books, which you may love as much as someone else loves their Labradoodle! You don’t want to feel like an invader, but neither do you want to feel like a guest in what should become your new home.

Divide Without Conquering — How to Share a Space When Both of You Have Custody of Books

Maybe you’re moving together to a new home and get to start fresh. Or, it’s possible you’ve been living together for a while. Whether the two of your are married or otherwise, your home has the potential for a “yours, mine, and ours” problem in the book department.

Separate but Equal, or Joint Custody?

Even couples who enjoy a hot romance may prefer a cool detente when it comes to blending books. You might decide to keep your personal collections completely separate, or only blend books related to your mutual interests or things related to the family as a whole.

If you decide not to mix your collections, you’ll need to at least designate space for who gets which bookcases and shelves. But this leaves questions:

How do you achieve fairness?

Do you opt for parity?

Your instinct may be to just start unboxing your books wherever you’ve identified as a good space for you, like how the first college student to arrive picks the bed and gets the nearest shelf. That’s fine in a dorm room, where each item has its mirror image, but whose apartment or house has truly equal (and equally appealing) space?

If you decide to choose parity, is the solution equal shelf space or equal number of books? What if one person has hundreds of thin volumes of cozy mysteries but another has far fewer titles but they’re all thick and leather-bound?

You may scoff, but I’ve seen married couples who otherwise seem sane and satisfied in their love come to verbal blows over one having more books taking over their joint space. Leaving aside that all but the mildest scuffles might be better suited to the marriage counseling couch than the organizing session, it’s better to anticipate the problem and talk out the solutions.

If you do blend your collections, either partially or in total (notwithstanding your bedside table To Be Read piles), you’re still going to have a lot to consider.

How do you deal with duplicates?

First, there’s the issue of when the two partners own the same book. In the name of organization, Sweetie may want to keep the pristine first edition of The Sun Also Rises, but Darling has a bent copy with every margin filled with the wisdom gleaned from a much-loved college literature course (when Darling went through a beret-and-Gauloises-smoking phase).

Typically, when professional organizers work with clients who have duplicate skirts or screwdrivers or spatulas, we focus on what’s in the best condition. However, weighing the value of something that is “the same but different,” like a book that has financial value vs. one that has sentimental or intellectual value, is more difficult.

Before shelving, Sweetie and Darling need to decide how they’ll move forward. Will they purge based on monetary value or let sentiment win?

As Emily Dickinson said, the heart wants what the heart wants. If one partner pushes to purge by discounting sentiment, what will the other partner’s heart want if forced to give up too much?

This doesn’t even take into account when one member of the couple has what the other considers an excessive number of duplicates all on their own. Maybe Sweetums has a copy their first sweetheart gave them, then a refined leatherette copy, and maybe even a 50th anniversary edition? Whether it’s Stephen King or F. Scott Fitzgerald, you’ll have to come to terms regarding how much one “gets” to keep.

What organizing system will you use?

Will you shelve randomly, just getting everything out of boxes and onto your bookshelves, figuring you can always organize them later — or perhaps one of you doesn’t care about organizing them at all? (Yes, that was Paper Doll you just heard go, “eek!”)

Will you be systematic, perhaps by author or title or genre? Is it enough for you to separate your fiction from your non-fiction? Or must fiction be chunked into historical eras and then by author, with non-fiction classified by Dewey and his (sexist, racist) decimal system or Library of Congress?

What if you want to organize by genre and your Honeybunny painstakingly orders (and reorders) books in the order HB intends to read them? Readers have quirky preferences. In Anne Fadiman’s famous essay Marrying Libraries (linked below) she proposed to organize American authors alphabetically by last name, but put British authors chronologically, and then their works chronologically by their publishing date!

How to organize books is hotly contested. A You.gov survey a few months ago asked more than 29,000 Americans how many books they owned and how they organized them. The results shows a variety of preferences; what’s the chance your Romeo or Juliet organizes books exactly as you do?

(I’d like to refrain from judgement, but — have you met me? I understand the 28% who don’t organize their books, but the 5% who don’t have books? Please, dear readers. Don’t fall in love with serial killers or people who don’t have books.)

What role should aesthetics play, particularly with books in public spaces (like the living room or den)?

Should crumbling (but well-loved) books go on the home’s fanciest library shelves? What if one person wants to organize by color, while the other is nauseated by anything too removed from the Dewey Decimal System?

If you share a library with someone who organizes books by whether the cover is red or purple, will you start re-thinking your commitment to the relationship?

What about rules for home library organizing? If you (like Paper Doll) are the type to bring all books up to the edge of the shelf, how will you share your library with someone who pushes books all the way back of the shelf so that the fronts aren’t smooth and picture frames and knickknacks get piled in front of them, or worse, overflow books get double-layered in front of the books in the back and … OMG, I’m hyperventilating!

What about the inherent public-facing messages related to content?

What if your partner is embarrassed by your middlebrow tastes? (Maybe they shouldn’t be such a snob about your collection!)

Perhaps you’re cringing at the political leanings reflected by your partner’s books? (You might start wondering if you shouldn’t be with someone whose politics give you “the ick.”)

How will you organize the finances of growing your mutual libraries?

This is part of a larger discussion in your household. If you’re “just” cohabiting, then you may each buy whatever books you want with your own money. But if you’re married, this is a whole other marriage counselor/financial advisor/professional organizer triple-threat conversation. Will you have “yours, mine, and ours” bank accounts and purchase books accordingly from those accounts?

What about digital purchases going forward? Having one unified Kindle account can be a mess, not only for organizing your digital libraries, but for dealing with ownership if the relationship sours.

The Ugly Truth

The sad truth is that not all relationships last. The Gotye song Somebody I Used to Know is heartbreaking and universal, especially when he says,

No, you didn’t have to stoop so low
Have your friends collect your records and then change your number

Nobody wants to think about the end of a relationship — of pre-nups and post-nups and dividing community property. But other than personal photos (and the alluded-to music libraries), what could be harder to disentangle than a couple’s library of books?

How will you de-blend your book collections in case of a breakup or divorce?

In the mid-1990s, I lent my (now-former) boyfriend my copy of Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy.

The end of the relationship stung. Time heals, but I still seethe over the loss of the book.

Which is more misery-inducing? Haggling over whose signed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird this is, or playing keep-away and refusing to take ownership of The DaVinci Code or Atlas Shrugged or Eat, Pray, Love?

If you do blend your libraries, perhaps take the precaution of putting your initials on the inside cover of your books. Maybe that little insurance policy that you won’t lose your books will give you the confidence to keep working together through the tough times?

BLENDING BOOKS: THE ONGOING DEBATE

This post was supposed to be about love, and now I’ve shared all the troubles I’ve seen in my professional (and personal) capacity. Maybe you’d like someone else’s take?

This 2018 piece from Minnesota’s Star Tribune, Bookmark: Should newlyweds combine their book collections?, offers a sweetly messy take.

The truth is, though, there’s no one right answer. Even the popular blog Book Riot can’t agree. In 2012, Book Riot published How to Say “I Do” to Shared Bookshelves Without Ruining Your Relationship; nine years later, it published, Don’t Merge Book Collections.

The thing is, they were both right.

The earlier, more optimistic post focused on the how-to advice: work together to create a new, joint organizing system; display your books so you and your partner can operate from a position of strength and wisdom; “Leave your Judgy McJudgerton pants in the closet” (which is quite possibly my favorite piece of organizing advice, ever); and compromise. The author, Book Riot’s Chief of Staff Rebecca Joines Schinsky, acknowledged that if things got hot (and not the good kind) over the discussions, you might just decide to blend everything except books.

But Schinsky ends with, “Like committing to a relationship, merging your bookshelves is an exercise in hope.” She eschews the idea of an exit strategy.

A different Book Riot author, Associate Editor Danika Ellis, was less optimistic in 2021, giving four reasons not to blend books: personal libraries are a reflection of our unique, personal selves; our sorting systems are similarly personal; our systems should work for us; and, as I’ve already noted, relationships end. More cynical than her colleague, Ellis ends with:

Your books will outlive you, and they’ll certainly outlive your relationship, no matter how charmed. So make the right call: prioritize your books. You’ll thank me later.

ORGANIZE BOOKS (WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER) WITHOUT BLOODSHED

Romantic or cynic, you can’t keep the books in moving boxes piled up around you. (Well, as I’ve seen with many clients over the years, you can, but I don’t advise it.)

A few years ago I wrote Paper Doll’s Pop Culture Guide to Decluttering with Your Valentine. It reflected my definitive approach to organizing with the love of your life. Before you think about organizing your mutual libraries, read that. (But I’ll now always look at my comment, “Purge the judgement and toss the guilt,” and wish I’d written, “Judgy McJudgerton pants.”)

Beyond that, communication is key. You may have a history of long, romantic discussions over favorite books, authors, and genres, but have you ever talked about organization? Go through the issues I raised above: about resentment over invasion or not feeling at home, about parity and systems, about aesthetics vs. function, about finances. And yes, about how to have an insurance policy so the books don’t suffer if the relationship doesn’t make it.

Compromise is hard. I advise creating a system that requires as little compromise as possible. The best relationships are the ones where you are able to maintain a sense of your personal identity as you grow a mutual identity in a couple. You will face enough compromises in other areas of your relationship; do what you can to keep your relationship from impinging on your reading comfort.

Pare down your individual book collections, and then start with them separate — your shelves and their shelves. You can always create shelves with books for family-specific topics like travel, cookbooks, or household care, and if you grow your family, books for any tiny humans who come along.

That said, be open to reversible experimentation. Getting rid of out-of-print books is hard to reverse, while a new organizing system causing confusion is easily remedied.

Look for helpful alternatives. If you’re both willing to blend libraries but not willing to cull duplicates, consider putting them on a bookshelf in your guest bedroom. Your guests can easily find something to read on sleepless nights.

Create a library inventory. There are so many apps and online options, like Libib, Goodreads, Library Thing, for documenting what books you own and where you’ve organized them. Just scan your books’ bar codes and the information will populate in a database. Most let you create a field for who brought it into the household (a high-tech version of penciling your initials inside the cover). It will also help you identify duplicates if your collections are large and sprawl across rooms or even floors of the house.

LOVING ESSAYS ABOUT BLENDING LIBRARIES

No Valentine’s Week post on the romantic blending of libraries would be complete without sharing two seminal essays on the topic:

Marrying Libraries by Anne Fadiman, excerpted from her excellent book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. (My favorite essay in the collection is My Odd Shelf, but the whole book is a reader’s paradise.)

The Books by Alexander Chee for The Morning News with this:

It’s hard to explain how moving it was to me to sit down with Dustin’s books on the night I combined our fiction. It took me completely by surprise. I had truly thought it was an ordinary exercise. But it never is with books, I know now.

I began by carefully lifting them off the shelf, dusting them and taking them into the living room.

In some way that wasn’t apparent to me before they sat on the side table, waiting to be sorted, I could see these were the books that had kept him company in those years before he knew me, the books that had helped him turn into him. This hadn’t quite been apparent to me before I took them down to move them.

but also this bit about duplicates, which sums up the whole discussion:

You don’t keep the doubles because you believe you may not stay together. You keep the doubles because the one you own, that’s your friend. The one he owns, that’s his. To only have one, it would be like sharing an email address.

Not everything can be shared. And that isn’t a crisis. It’s how it should be.

If you share your home with a sweetie-pie, how do you organize your mutual book collections?

Recapping Paper Doll’s 2023 Posts — Which Were Your Favorites?

Posted on: December 25th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 5 Comments

With one week left in 2023, have you taken time yet to review your year?

For the December Productivity and Organizing Blog Carnival, Janet Barclay asked us to identify our best blog posts of 2023, and I had a tough time.

“Best” is subjective, and Janet let us have free reign as to which post fit. Some bloggers chose their most popular posts in terms of readership; others, the ones that garnered the most comments. Some of my blogging colleagues picked their most personal posts, while others selected what they felt would have the most impact on people’s lives.

The problem is that picking just one means leaving the others behind, and I wrote forty-two posts this year! Eventually, I narrowed the selection to half a dozen posts, and then turned to colleagues and friends who were almost evenly split, bringing me no closer to a solution. In the end, I picked Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination because it served as the foundation for so many other posts, but also because I’d been lucky enough to find some great visuals, like this one from Poorly Drawn Lines:

so much to do pic.twitter.com/fiSm7Y2Erg

— poorly drawn lines (@PDLComics) December 21, 2022

Beauty, like clutter, is in the eye of the beholder. To that end, here’s a recap of everything we’ve discussed in 2023, with a few updates and tweaks along the way. My personal favorites are in bold, but I’d love to know which ones resonated the most with you during the year!

ORGANIZE YOUR INSPIRATION

After uploading last week’s post, Toss Old Socks, Pack Away 2023, and Adjust Your Attitude for 2024, I got to thinking about all the different ways we can take our word, phrase, or song of the year and keep it in the forefront of our minds.

I’d reviewed the traditional methods (vision boards, posted signs, turning the song into your wakeup alarm), but felt like there needed to be something that stayed with you, independent of your location. Only being reminded of your goal to be a leader when you’re standing in front of your fridge doesn’t really help you in your 1-to-1 meetings at work. (I mean, unless you’re the Queen of the Condiments or King of the Crisper Drawer.)

Only being reminded of your goal to be a leader when you're standing in front of your fridge doesn't really help you in your 1-to-1 meetings at work. (I mean, unless you're the Queen of the Condiments or King of the Crisper Drawer.) Share on X

Serendipitously, within minutes of thinking about this, an ad came across one of my social media pages. (Normally, I ignore ads, but this one had me thinking maybe “serendipity” would be a good theme word for some year!) The ad was for Conscious Ink, an online temporary tattoo retailer specifically for creating body art to help you mindfully connect with your themes and messages to yourself, disrupt negative self-talk, and promote the healthy habits you’re trying to embrace!

As Conscious Ink’s About page explains, if you want to keep something top of the mind, why not try something that keeps it “top of the body?” Whether body art is your thing or you haven’t experimented since your Minnie Mouse temporary tattoo at summer camp <mumble mumble> years ago, this is a neat trick!

There’s even research as to how a temporary tattoo can support permanent emotional and cognitive transformation and improve mindfulness and focus on things that uplift one’s higher self. And that’s the point of a theme word, phrase, or song, to keep you focused on what you want rather than what you allow to drag you down! Manifest what you want your life to be.

Conscious Ink’s temporary tattoos use non-toxic, cosmetic-grade, FDA-certified, vegan inks. Each one lasts 3-7 days, depending on where you apply it, your skin type and activity level, and (I suspect) how many life-affirming, stress-reducing bubble baths you take. Categories include mindset, health and wellness, spiritual/nature, relationships, parenting, celebratory, and those related to social causes. Prices seem to hover at around $10 for a three-pack and $25 for a 10-pack. There’s even a Good Karma Guarantee to make sure you’re satisfied.

Whether you go with Conscious Ink (which is designed for this uplifting purpose) or seek an alternative or custom-designed temporary tattoo (through vendors like Momentary Ink or independent Etsy shops), it only makes sense if you place it somewhere you can see it often.

After all, if you place a temporary tattoo reminder to stand up for yourself on your tushy, it probably won’t remind you of much. For most of us of a certain age, putting it at our wrists, covered (when we prefer) by our cuffs, will give us the most serene “om” for our buck.

If you place a temporary tattoo reminder to stand up for yourself on your tushy, it probably won't remind you of much. Share on X

Along the same lines as my advice on adjusting your attitude for 2024, you may want to consult Gretchen Rubin’s Tips for Your “24 for 2024” List. Rubin and her sister/podcast co-host always have an inspring Happier Trifecta: a year-numbered theme, along with with a challenge and a list.

PRODUCTIVITY AND TIME MANAGEMENT

This was a big year for productivity discussion. I’m a firm believer that keeping your space and resources organized is key to being productive. However, it’s hard to keep the world around you organized when outside influences prevent you from being efficient (doing things well) and effective (doing the right things).

We continue to see the value of body doubling, whether through friendly hang-outs, co-working (virtually or in person), or professional organizing services, whether you want to conquer garden-variety procrastination or get special support for ADHD.

Partnering for Success

Paper Doll Sees Double: Body Doubling for Productivity (I almost submitted this post to the carnival. Accountability and motivation for the win!)

Paper Doll Shares 8 Virtual Co-Working Sites to AmpUp Your Productivity

If you’d like to explore the body doubling or co-working experience, friend-of-the-blog Deb Lee of D. Allison Lee is offering a no-cost, two-hour Action Day event on Tuesday, January 9, 2024, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.

This event is designed for her clients and subscribers, but after a cheery holiday conversation, Deb said it was OK to let my readers know about the opportunity.

Deb describes an Action Day as “personal training for your productivity muscles!”

An Action Day (especially as Deb runs them) is a stellar way to narrow your focus and start taking action on your goals. (And what better time than at the start of the new year?) You’ll get to connect with others who are also working on goals and habits with the support of Deb, a productivity coach I admire and adore.

Just bring your top two or three priorities, and you can conquer anything, like:

organize your workspace
write your book outline
clean up your digital files
test a new productivity app
send out client proposals
anything!

You’ll videoconference with a small, select group via Zoom. Share your goal and tasks, work for the bulk of the two hours, and then take time to debrief and share your successes!

Moving Yourself Forward

Getting anything done involves figuring out what you have to do, knowing what’s kept you from getting started, making it easy for you to begin, and celebrating even the smallest wins. These next three posts were where the magic happened this year!

Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination (This is the post I submitted to the Productivity & Organizing Carnival.)

Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done

Use the Rule of 3 to Improve Your Productivity

Dealing with the Pokey Times

If you’re overwhelmed by all you’ve got going on during late December and early January, you can skip onward. However, if your workplace closes down during the holidays, or your professional and personal lives just feel like they’re kind of in a slump right now, you may find some inspiration in two pieces I wrote for the summer slowdown.

The weather outside may be frightful (unless you’re reading from Australia), but if you are looking for ideas to pump you up when everyone is in a post-shopping/meal/travel haze, these posts may stir your motivation:

Organize Your Summer So It Doesn’t Disappear So Quickly

Use Your Heart, Head, and Hands to Organize During the Slow Times

Try To Do It All (And Knowing When to Step Away)

Maybe you did your annual review and found that you’re feeling burned out. If so, you are not alone. It’s easy for your groove to turn into a rut, and for all of your drive to accomplish come crashing down because you never take your foot off the gas all year!

If you missed these posts earlier need a second shot at embracing the importance of variety, small breaks, and actual vacations, here’s your chance to read some of my absolute favorite posts of the year:

Paper Doll Says: Don’t Get Stuck in a Rut — Take Big Leaps (Be sure to watch the diving board video!)

Was baby Paper Doll burned out? In a rut? Just pooped?

Take a Break — How Breaks Improve Health and Productivity

Take a Break for Productivity — The International Perspective (This is the post that introduced the Swedish convivial snack break, fika!)

If you had any doubts about what I said about the importance of taking breaks in your day to refresh your body, your brain, or your spirit, a new report just a few weeks ago confirms that we need that late afternoon break if we don’t want our productivity to turn to mush! And the more we push ourselves beyond work hours, the greater our decrease in productivity!

If you’re desperately in need of a full break, but are suffering from decision fatigue and don’t have the energy to begin planning a whole vacation, there are options to make it easier for you. In the BBC’s piece, Why 2024 May Be the Year of Surprise Travel, you may find some rousing options.

Need a little inspiration to spend your holiday gift money on experiences rather than tzotchkes? Check out Time Out’s 24 Best Things to Do in the World in 2024 to envision where you could take long breaks to refresh yourself. Those vintage trains in Italy are calling to me, but perhaps you’d prefer the immersive “Dream Circus” in Sydney, Australia, or Montréal en Lumière’s 25th anniversary?

(Never mind, I know. Everyone wants to go on the Taylor Swift cruise from Miami to the Bahamas. Just come back with good stories instead of memento clutter, OK?)

TOOLS AND IDEAS FOR GREATER PRODUCTIVITY

Sometimes, rereading my own posts reminds me how many nifty things there are to share with you, and how many are still to be discovered.

Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker — So many people have requested a follow-up covering digital habit trackers, so watch for that in 2024.

Paper Doll Presents 4 Stellar Organizing & Productivity Resources

Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity — From the Eisenhower Matrix to Jefferson’s design for the swivel chair, from limiting wardrobe options to understanding the difference between being busy and being productive, we’ve had presidents who have known how to get more (of the right things) done. With an election year in 2024, I’d love a debate question on the candidate’s best tips for staying organized and productive!

Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

Highlights from the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit

3 Simple But Powerful Productivity Resources — Right in Your Browser Tab — The offering that got the most attention this year was definitely Goblin.Tools. I’m sure that as we head into 2024 and beyond, I’ll be sharing more resources that make use of artificial intelligence.

Let’s just remember that we always need to give precedence to our own intelligence, in the same way we can’t follow GPS to the letter if it directs us to drive in to a lake. In fact, like all organizing and productivity guidance, remember what I said way back in 2020 in The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing: there is no magic wand.

AI and other solutions, tangible or digital, and even professional organizers, can make things easier, but the only way to get the life you want is to embrace making positive behavioral changes.

RESOURCES FOR ORGANIZING YOUR WORK AND TRAVEL SPACE

Privacy in Your Home Office: From Reality to Fantasy — It’s interesting to see that privacy, and not just in home offices but in communal workspaces, has become a priority again. Check out this recent New York Times piece, As Offices Workers Make Their Return, So Does the Lowly Cubicle.

Paper Doll Refreshes Your Paper Organizing Solutions

Paper Doll Organizes Temporary Papers and Explores Third Spaces — Do you have systems for dealing with your “temporary papers,” the ones that you don’t need to file away but aren’t triggering an immediate action?

Paper Doll Organizes Your Space, Money, and Well-Being While Traveling

Paper Doll is Clearly Organized — Translucent Tools for Getting it Together

Paper Doll Explores New & Nifty Office and School Supplies

Organize Your Desktop with Your Perfect Desk Pad

No matter where I go in 2024, be assured that I will be keeping my eyes open for solutions for keeping your paper and work supplies organized.

My Thanksgiving weekend shopping trips brought me a variety of intriguing options. At Kohl’s, I saw 30 Watt‘s Face Plant, a way to keep your eyeglasses handy while refreshing the air around you (and keeping you perky) with greenery. The 5.5″ x 6″ x 5.25″ ceramic planter holds a plant, gives you a place to rest your glasses (so you won’t misplace them under piles of paper on your desk), and is dry erase marker-friendly! (It’s currently on sale for under $14.)

A stop at IKEA in Atlanta was so productive for organizing tools that you’ll be seeing posts with nifty names like Övning (for tidying a child’s desk accessories and creating privacy), Kugsfors (wall-mounted shelves with tablet stands for keeping books and iPads visible while working), Bekant (sit/stand desks) and more.

ORGANIZING YOUR FINANCIAL & LEGAL LIFE

Not everything in the organizing and productivity world is fun to look at, and that’s especially true of all the financial and legal documents that help you sleep soundly at night. Still, Paper Doll kept you aware of how to understand and protect your money, your identity, and your legacy.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t created your Apple Legacy Contact and your Google Inactive Account Manager, why the heck not? Use the power of body doubling up above, grab a partner, and get your digital life in order!

Lost & Found: Recover Unclaimed Money, Property, and Savings Bonds

Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Legally Changing Your Name

Paper Doll Explains Digital Social Legacy Account Management

How to Create Your Apple & Google Legacy Contacts

Paper Doll Explains Your Health Insurance Explanation of Benefits

DEALING WITH EMERGENCIES AND STRESSFUL SITUATIONS

Sometimes, I write a post I wish I’d been able to read earlier (like the one on preventing and recovering from a car theft). Other times, like when a friend had a health emergency, or when Paper Mommy had her fall in November, I’m glad the posts already exist. If you missed these the first time around, please be sure to read, share, and bookmark them; think of them as an insurance policy, and let’s hope you won’t need them.

How to Organize Support for Patients and Families in Need

Organize to Prevent (or Recover From) a Car Theft

Paper Doll Organizes You To Prepare for an Emergency

GRAB BACK OF INTERVIEWS, UPDATES, AND PHILOSOPHY

Paper Doll Interviews Motivational Wordsmith Kara Cutruzzula

You already know how beloved my friend Kara Cutruzzula‘s Brass Ring Daily newsletter and Do It Today podcast are at Paper Doll HQ.

After having read and enjoyed Kara’s Do It For Yourself — A Motivational Journal and her follow-up, Do It Today — A Motivational Journal (Start Before Your Ready), I had no doubt that I’d be jumping on her third when it was released in September.

If you haven’t already picked up Do It Or Don’t — A Boundary-Creating Journal, use that Amazon money you almost certainly got this holiday season!

One of the Paper Doll themes for 2024 will focus on setting (and maintaining) better boundaries to accomplish more of what’s meaningful, and I’ve got multi-color tape flags sticking out of Kara’s book from all the chapters to share her bounty with you.

What’s in a Name? “Addressing” Organizing and Productivity

Paper Doll Suggests What to Watch to Get More Organized and Productive — As we head into the new year, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for podcasts, webinars, and TV shows to help you keep your space organized, your time productive, your finances orderly, and your life joyous. Readers have been sending in YouTube and TikTok videos that inspire them, so please feel free to share programming that you’d like to see profiled on Paper Doll‘s pages.

Paper Doll on How to Celebrate Organizing and Productivity with Friends

Paper Doll and Friends Cross an Ocean for Fine Productivity Conversations

From in-person get togethers with frolleagues (what my accountability partner Dr. Melissa Gratias calls those special folks who are both friends and colleagues) to Friday night professional organizer Zooms, accountability calls, and Mastermind group collaborations, this has been a great year for staying connected and sharing the benefits of those conversations with you.

I also loved guesting on so many fun podcasts related to organizing, productivity, technology, and more. If there’s someone you’d like to hear me debate or banter with, let me know!

SEASONAL POSTS

Spooky Clutter: Fears that Keep You from Getting Organized

Paper Doll’s Thanksgiving Week Organizing and Productivity Buffet

Paper Doll De-Stresses Your December

Paper Doll on Clutter-Free Gifts and How to Make Gift Cards Make Sense

Are you stressed out because you haven’t gotten someone a gift yet? Maybe a good start would be to help an overwhelmed special someone take my advice about going on a travel break. Consider gift certificates for something like Get Your Guide, with opportunities to get guided tours of locally-vetted, expertly-curated sporting, nature, cultural, and food experiences. With 118,000 experiences in 150 countries, pick a multiple of $50 or set your own amount, and your recipient can pick the domestic or international travel experience that fits best.

If you know your recipient will be traveling by rail, consider a gift card for Amtrak or ViaRail in North America. Eurail doesn’t sell gift cards, but you can pay for a pass, or buy a gift card for a rail pass for more than a dozen specific European train lines. And if you’d like to help someone organize vacation serenity and secure a bundle of travel attractions for a given city, try TurboPass in Europe or City Pass and The Sightseeing Pass in North America.

HERE’S TO A MORE ORGANIZED AND PRODUCTIVE 2024

Whether you’ll be spending the next few days reading, traveling, or doing your annual review, I hope this last week of 2023 is a happy and healthy one.

To send you off for a cozy week, I’d like to share a Whamagaddon– and Mariah–free, retro 100-minute holiday playlist from the late 1930s through the early 1960s. It’s somehow easier to dismantle the tree and write thank-you notes to Guy Lombardo. (My favorite clocks in at 52:42 with “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”)

Please let me know your favorite Paper Doll posts from this year, and I’ll meet you back here in 2024!

Toss Old Socks, Pack Away 2023, and Adjust Your Attitude for 2024

Posted on: December 18th, 2023 by Julie Bestry | 20 Comments

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

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

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Archive for ‘Psychological’ Category

Paper Doll Springs Ahead with Three Empowering Concepts

SPRING HAS (ALMOST) SPRUNG

Spring Cleaning the Stuff

Spring Cleaning Our Minds

MAKE THINGS EARN A PLACE IN YOUR LIFE

FIND THE ESSENCE

STOP WAITING ‘UNTIL’

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging

WHAT IS THE GLOBAL DAY OF UNPLUGGING?

WHY UNPLUG?

Distractions

Physical Health

Stress

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO UNPLUG?

HOW TO UNPLUG FOR A DAY

TRY BABY STEPS TO GET MORE COMFORTABLE WITH UNPLUGGING

UNPLUG TO ACHIEVE SILENCE

The Sounds of Silence

Silent Reading Groups

Carving Silence from Chaos

Silent Salons

Silent Travel

READ MORE ABOUT UNPLUGGING

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Blending Libraries: How To Organize Books with Your Sweetheart

ORGANIZE YOUR PERSONAL LIBRARY FIRST

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN BLENDING PERSONAL LIBRARIES

Space Invaders — Introducing One Library to Another

Divide Without Conquering — How to Share a Space When Both of You Have Custody of Books

The Ugly Truth

BLENDING BOOKS: THE ONGOING DEBATE

LOVING ESSAYS ABOUT BLENDING LIBRARIES

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Recapping Paper Doll’s 2023 Posts — Which Were Your Favorites?

ORGANIZE YOUR INSPIRATION

PRODUCTIVITY AND TIME MANAGEMENT

Partnering for Success

Moving Yourself Forward

Dealing with the Pokey Times

Try To Do It All (And Knowing When to Step Away)

TOOLS AND IDEAS FOR GREATER PRODUCTIVITY

RESOURCES FOR ORGANIZING YOUR WORK AND TRAVEL SPACE

ORGANIZING YOUR FINANCIAL & LEGAL LIFE

DEALING WITH EMERGENCIES AND STRESSFUL SITUATIONS

GRAB BACK OF INTERVIEWS, UPDATES, AND PHILOSOPHY

SEASONAL POSTS

HERE’S TO A MORE ORGANIZED AND PRODUCTIVE 2024

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Toss Old Socks, Pack Away 2023, and Adjust Your Attitude for 2024

LOOK BACKWARD AND EMBRACE THE PERSONAL ANNUAL REVIEW

WHAT TO DO WITH WHAT YOU LEARN FROM YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW

Celebrate

Acknowledge

Grow

PICK YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW STYLE

The Good

The Neutral

The Ugly

WHY LOOK FORWARD?

RESOLVE TO GIVE UP RESOLUTIONS

PROMOTE YOUR 2024 PLAN TO YOURSELF

PAPER DOLL’S WORD OF THE YEAR FOR 2024

Paper Doll Post:

Like this: