Best Results Organizing

It’s not that I don’t know how to walk; I get my 10,000 steps every day. But I was captivated by a portion of the introduction, where author Annabel Streets (yes, a book on walking by someone named Streets!) writes:

Nor is walking merely step-counting or “exercise.” Yes, good physical and mental health are happy by-products. But the joys of walking are infinitely greater than clocking up steps. Think of it as a means of unraveling towns and cities, of connecting with nature, of bonding with our dogs, of fostering friendships of finding faith and freedom, of giving the finger to air-polluting traffic of nurturing our sense of smell, of satisfying our cravings for starlight and darkness, of helping us appreciate the exquisitely complicated and beautiful world we inhabit.

However, had the title on the spine not seemed like a ready-made list, I’d surely have moved on without it.

The world has been conspiring to put lists on my mind even more than usual lately, and if you don’t mind the presumption, I’d like to share some of the thoughts I’ve had regarding list-making.

USE LISTS TO SET (AND MAINTAIN) BOUNDARIES

Last Thursday, I was reading James Clear‘s weekly newsletter. If you’re not familiar with Clear, I encourage you to read his excellent Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.

 While I’m careful to keep my inbox lean, I confess that I subscribe to many (perhaps too many) newsletters for inspiration for this blog and to find resources for my clients. Some are on organizing and productivity; others are financial. I enjoy many of the AARP newsletters, particularly Sisters from AARP, which celebrates and offers wisdom for Black women. And though they profess to be about mindfulness, mental health, and positive psychology, I realize that many of the newsletters are written for millennials and Gen Z. I’m voracious.

Clear’s 3-2-1 Newsletter avoids any and all of the excesses many of my other newsletters display; his is pared down to the essentials: three wise (tweetable) quotes from Clear himself, two quotes from others, and one question for the week. (Last week’s remarkable question, “What is a small but courageous choice you can make today?” has floated through my head for days.)

A short “list” itself, the newsletter is what I, in all my years of blogging, can never aspire to: brevity. But I do not begrudge Clear’s success because you, my dear readers, are often the benefactors of the concepts he shares. Last week, he linked to a tweet by Jenée Desmond-Harris, a writer, editorialist, editor, and the current Dear Prudence for Slate.

I started dividing my to-do list into 1) things I have to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do. Life changing! I often don’t get to 3 and I finally realized omg, is this what it means to have boundaries?! ???

— Jenée (@jdesmondharris) June 26, 2021

I loved this tweet. First, I always try to teach my clients that when they’re overwhelmed and overburdened by a To Do list that is more a Could Do list, they need to check to make sure what they’re doing brings them closer to their goals.

When you're overwhelmed and overburdened by a To Do list that is more a *Could* Do list, check to make sure what you're doing brings you closer to your goals. Share on X

And I’m sure you’ve heard me say that, more important than SMART goals (which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific) are SMARTY goals, where they Y represents values and ideals that are YOURS.

If you are constantly laboring toward goals that are not your own, but are your spouse’s, your parents’, or society’s, you will eventually come to resent the labor and the sense of obligation, and likely passive-aggressively (or just aggressively) rebel, possibly without even realizing it, but to your detriment.

Second, I appreciated this tweet because it dovetails nicely with a quote from one my colleagues. Four of my veteran professional organizing colleagues — Maria White, Yve Irish, Karen Sprinkle, and Nancy Haworth — and I are in a mastermind group. To help us achieve our goals, we start each week sharing our intentions; at the end of the week, we report back on how well we’ve done, and discuss our obstacles (and whether they’ve been internal or external).

Yve, famous for her enthusiastic Memojis when sending cheerleading texts, replied to one of my weekly emails with, “Woohoo Julie! Two great organizing sessions and they both booked follow-ups! I think you got all of the important things done. Much of the not-dones are items from someone else’s To Do list.”

Until then, I’d been feeling a little down about not having achieved everything in my (admittedly overambitious) list. But Yve was right. The things I hadn’t completed had not been, in the words of Jenée Desmond-Harris, things I had to do or things I wanted to do.

They were things someone else wanted from me, tasks for which I had not obligated myself. Without recognizing I’d done it, I’d practiced that mantra found photocopied and posted on assistants’ desks nationwide: “Lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

I was focusing on the important and urgent tasks on my own To Do lists. I was guarding my own boundaries.

When we make our To Do lists, perhaps we should consider dividing them into these categories, what we must do and what we want to do, and put the oxygen masks over our own noses and mouths first before attending to others (tiny humans notwithstanding). 

USE LISTS TO DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT FROM LIFE

Desmond-Harris, as well as my colleague Yve, got me thinking about the kinds of lists we create. We all have task lists, those To Do items, whether analog or digital, that get us through our days or weeks. At the micro level, these lists help us achieve our smaller, more discrete goals.

But what about our big ticket goals? Do you keep lists of those?

I went back to the post I wrote at the start of this year, Review & Renew for 2022: Resolutions, Goals, and Words of the Year to think about goals and visions. I found plenty of lists there, including Gretchen Rubin’s list of 21 things she’d wanted to do in 2021. Of course, she’s got a 22 in 2022.

When I got to the end of the post, I saw I’d linked to Jack Canfield‘s post on creating vision boards. About 16 or 17 years ago, Jack Canfield (of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books) was a guest speaker at a NAPO Conference. He’d just authored The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, and everyone heading to conference was buzzing about it.

It’s been enough years (I was still in my thirties!) that you’d think the book would not have had such a hold on me, but the “assignment” on page 28 has held a fascination for me ever since.

In the chapter “Decide What You Want,” Canfield suggests readers make an “I Want” list and delineate 30 things you want to do, thirty things you want to have, and thirty things you want to be — before you die.

Readers, I went to an Ivy League college. I have a Master’s degree. I started my own business. But I have to tell you, writing out these three lists was the most difficult intellectual experience of my life. I’ve carried this folded-up list in my daily planner all of these years, taking it out with some frequency, and occasionally adding something new or checking off an accomplishment. My inability to complete the lists sometimes makes me wonder if I need a therapist or a life coach!

I only managed to come up with 11 things I wanted to do, of which I’ve done three (including finally reading Anna Karenina last year); and though I got to check off visiting the UK, the most exciting things I’ve done since creating the list, visiting Italy and publishing my book, didn’t even make the list! My imagination was too confined!

Similarly, my list of (tangible and intangible) things I wanted to have only made it to item 15. I’ve only acquired three, but those three (including my little, red Kia Soul) give me joy each day. And my shortest list, of things I wanted to be, only reached eight items, of which I’ve only achieved one.

And yet, I’m happy with my life and with my lists. The things we want at any given time help shape the choices we make; but the choices we make can shape what we want next.

The things we want at any given time help shape the choices we make; but the choices we make can shape what we want next. Share on X

Sometimes, our lists (like the ones in my elementary school diary) may seem silly in retrospect; others show us how far we’ve come.

What would you put on Jack Canfield’s lists? What are:

• 30 things you want to do?
• 30 things you want to have?
• 30 things you want to be?

DO YOU NEED A NEEDLE LIST?

About a month ago, the Huffington Post published a piece by Kelsey Borresen called Want to Declutter Your Brain? Cross Something Off Your Needle List. I read it within a day or two of publication, agreed with the general gist, and went on about my life, not having given it much thought. Since then, there hasn’t been a day when it hasn’t shown up in one of those many newsletters to which I subscribe or appeared in my Twitter feed.

The article is needling me!

It’s easy to see why. I encourage you to read it in full, but the basic concept is that we all have these things on our To Do lists that we fail, repeatedly, to do. Usually, they aren’t huge projects, but fairly simple tasks that we avoid, over and over. And yet we cross them off today’s task list and dutifully put them on tomorrow’s, where they will fail to be attended to for several days (or weeks) hence. And they’ll continue to needle us.

Quoting an Instagram post of chef/author Serena Wolf, who coined the term, Needle Lists are filled with the small tasks that create that hum of low-level anxiety as we continue to fail to accomplish them. 

It’s the donation bags in our trunk (or worse, blocking the front hall) that haven’t been taken to charity. It’s the sink that’s full of dishes because the dishwasher of clean dishes hasn’t been unloaded. It’s the thank you notes that have gone unmailed (or unwritten). And for the past two weeks, for me, it was the oil change that I planned to get each day, but by the time everything else got accomplished, my mechanic had closed for the evening.

Wolf’s plan, simple but a bit of genius, was to set aside 30-60 minutes each Friday to tackle items on her Needle List. She notes, “Not only do I feel more relaxed on weekends, but it also makes me more productive during the week because I find it easier to focus with less mental clutter. The batching mentality also helps relieve any stress/anxiety when a new Needle List item pops up because I can drop it into Friday’s brain basket.”

Happily, this goes along with advice I’ve shared about time-blocking, here:

Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity

Struggling To Get Things Done? Paper Doll’s Advice & The Task Management & Time Blocking Virtual Summit 2022

Paper Doll Shares Secrets from the Task Management & Time Blocking Summit 2022

Time blocking basics are key to the Needle List. Wolf has a place to collect these otherwise needling, cringe-provoking tasks. 

She sidesteps the problem of there being no “Someday” on the calendar by scheduling these tasks for a fixed block, on Fridays. (For you, it might be a Saturday morning or a Monday afternoon or a Wednesday lunch hour.)  

And she goes through her week confident that a task won’t fall through the cracks, so she can stop constantly reminding herself that there’s something undone.

If you’d like to try making a Needle List and time blocking a part of your week to address these things in a batch, I’d encourage you to use a tickler file to its best advantage.

Let’s say, like Wolf, you’re going to block Friday afternoons to stop things from needling you. Why not write yourself notes (so you’ll think about what you have to do, in a nuanced way, rather than just constantly thinking of what you will do) and collect them with receipts, items to mail, etc., in that Friday slot of the ticker file. Anything left incomplete this Friday gets moved to the next Friday opportunity; it’s no longer hanging over you; it’s been rescheduled!

THE POWER OF LISTS

• Lists can be organizational — they create structure and boundaries.

A shopping list ensures that you purchase what you need, and assuming you don’t go into Target (because it’s impossible to leave Target with just what’s on your shopping list) you won’t buy what you don’t need. Gift wish lists (including wedding registries) make it more likely that people won’t waste their money on things you don’t want or need, that won’t mesh with your values or fit your physique.

A To Do list helps you do a brain-dump of everything you know you must accomplish, and then create lists of tasks, whether in the order you intend to accomplish them or batched in groups so that you can take them from list-mode on paper (or in an app) to time-blocking mode on your calendar. And if your lists are divided, as Desmond-Harris suggests, into what you must do and what you want to do, leaving those things others want you to do for last (or never), safeguarding your boundaries, how many more of your big-ticket goals might you achieve?

A packing list, and other travel-related lists, can ensure that you consider your needs and wants without last-minute pressure. (Take Paper Doll’s 5 Essential Lists For Planning an International Vacation, for example.)

Lists of books we want to read, movies and television programs we want to watch, and places we’d like to visit create structure and boundaries without greatly limiting our options. When we’re faced with an Amazon or Netflix full of titles, lists of recommendations can keep us from wasting time surfing or making mediocre choices.

• Lists can relieve anxiety.

Trying to remember everything you need and want to do is exhausting. It’s also untenable. That’s where lists come in.

A well-done, properly-approached list can prune the stress out of your life. A massive list written on both sides of piece of paper, with items you need at the market combined with 5-year-plan types of projects without distinct tasks is not a well-done list.

Neither is anything scribbled on the back of an envelope, or on 63 sticky notes on every vertical and horizontal surface around you. Lists that live in all the different in-boxes of your life, in email and Asana and Evernote, in the notebook in your bag and the whiteboard in your office, are too likely to discombobulate you.

Some people swear by David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which, when followed closely, is a love letter to lists. I appreciate GTD and teach it to clients whose style it fits, but find elements of it to be overly complex.

Others swear by list-based bullet journaling, created by Ryder Carroll, 

but which has long since taken on a life of its own, and which I (and many of my clients find intimidating in its modern form).

Personally, I’m a fan of the 1-2-3 list. I believe in the philosophy that if it won’t fit on a Post-it®, it won’t fit in your day, so I counsel overburdened clients to look through their master lists, brain dump lists, and inboxes, and for any given day, find one big task, two medium-sized tasks, and three small tasks which are their absolute must-do items for the day, the ones that if that’s all they complete, they’ll declare victory.

This is why, when I first teach clients how to use a tickler file (you have read my Tickle Yourself Organized, right?), I’m often discouraging them from piling too many things in any one day’s slot. I may write without brevity, but I coach others to embrace it!

• Lists can be aspirational.

As with Jack Canfield’s entries, not every list is designed to accomplish the things listed in that book I bought back in 1982. Yes, we need lists to tell us what to do, pack, and purchase. But for envisioning the possibilities in our life — and for reviewing with less embarrassment than reading our teenage journals — lists can help us imagine different lives.

Might you make a list of other careers you could have? Other cities (or countries) in which you might live? Other personal attributes you’d like to have, or habits you’d like to extinguish?

There are days (or years) where we feel boxed in, where it can be difficult to imagine a different “we” that we could be. Vision boards are highly touted for helping people imagine how (and as whom) else they might live. However, I’ve found that whenever I clip photos to create a vision board, they always end up being full of tall, lithe women with long ponytails, doing yoga with lush, green mountains in the background. Eventually, I learned that I don’t want to do yoga; I just want to be a tall, lithe woman with a long ponytail.

For me, vision boards don’t work for expanding my self-view, but lists do. Perhaps they will for you, too?

What lists are essential in your life? Please share in the comments!

Maybe it starts small: you accidentally pour the orange juice into your cereal or realize your gas tank is almost on empty when you’re running late for work.

Perhaps you have a fight with a loved one or the person with whom you get along the least well (that’s a nice way of saying it, right?) gets a promotion or media attention or some other kind of success.

Or maybe something truly terrible (but still in the realm of “bad day”) happens, like a fender bender or news of impending layoffs at work. 

When a few small bad things happen in sequence, no matter how strong your intention, the collective experience tends to upend your schedule, foul your mood, and destroy your day. If you let nature take its course, you may feel better after a delicious grilled cheese sandwich or a tearful phone call to your bestie, or your bad morning may turn into a bad day that scrolls into a bad week.

So, let’s not let nature take its course. Let’s stop that bad day in its tracks.

ORGANIZE YOUR WAY OUT OF A BAD DAY

Organizing your space, time, and thoughts can be powerful. It can even prevent catastrophes. But other times, the best it can do is make catastrophes less catastrophic. At those moments, we must accept what has happened, or what is happening, and turn inward to control our response.

Insert a Break

Anyone who has ever used a word processing program knows the command to Insert Page Break makes sure that there’s ample white space between one set of content and another. You insert a page break between chapters in a book, or between sections in a report. It keeps unrelated material from flowing together.

In your time management, when you’re having a bad day, take a pause to keep your bad morning from flowing into a bad afternoon.

Let’s say something annoying happens at 9:45 a.m. Depending on how resilient we’re feeling, we may get a fat-laden snack from the vending machine or take a walk to get some fresh air, and then regroup. If that little break is enough to reverse course on your bad day, count it as a win!

Embrace Time Blocking

But if you’re feeling resentment from multiple recent annoying things bubbling up inside of you, you may be at risk of bringing the whole day down. Here’s where your break needs to be a little more focused. This is where we can steal from the concept of time blocking.

We’ve explored time blocking often, most recently in Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity. At its most basic, time blocking focuses on creating chunks of time for particular activities. 

The whole notion is that an endless to-do list never sets aside fixed time for the categories of activities we claim to value. If we are constantly putting out fires and dealing with interruptions, the most important tasks never get done. With time blocking in the way we normally approach it, there are some basic tasks:

Start with a brain dump of everything you need to accomplish. 

Group all your tasks into categories. At the time, I said, Work categories may not be all that different from school categories. You had math (now it’s bookkeeping or bill-paying) or English (now correspondence, marketing projects, or reading for fun). All of those activities were regulated by a fixed schedule that ensured you had ample time to focus on each subject. A bell triggered transition time. Your schedule even accounted for lunch and phys. ed. to keep your brain and body healthy.

Schedule your blocks so that you guarantee yourself set time for dealing with each important category.

I also said to “bubble-wrap” your time blocks with buffer time, so instead of trying to having Zoom meetings and major projects back-to-back, you’ll have recovery time. 

Sometimes, life circumstances require you to replace a planned day with different activities. But by grouping categories of tasks into blocks, it’s easier to slide the tasks around and move them to where they’ll fit.

And this is where time blocking comes into play on a bad day. When teaching clients how to time block, I usually suggest they make use of 90-minute blocks. Just focusing on the workday, and not taking into account your early mornings and what you’re trying to deal with from dinner to bedtime, it’s easy to see we have not one big blob of a day, but multiple blocks:

• Early Morning
• Late Morning
• Early Afternoon
• Mid-Afternoon
• Late Afternoon

Let’s say you have a run-in with a co-worker or get bad news from your boss in the early morning. Or you have a fight with your spouse or a frustration with a parent in the drop-off line at school. Or, someone is wrong on the internet!

©XKCD/Randall Munroe (Creative Commons License)

It is so freakin’ easy to let an ugly mood settle into your day like a bad cough in your chest. If inserting that page break into the story of your day did work, your next option is to tell yourself that the day isn’t lost.

Take a deep breath. If you’re actually time-blocking, look at the the blocks you have on your calendar and figure out what’s the next possible block you can slide to a different day so that you can use your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit (see below) to get out of your funk.

If your day is not so carefully blocked out, mentally flip through your obligations for the next several hours until a good dividing line appears. If it’s 11:30 a.m., declare bankruptcy on your late morning block, know that lunch is a built-in daily mental health repair kit, and try to move or cancel whatever is in that first block in the afternoon.

The point isn’t to run away and join the circus, but to give yourself ample time to treat the yucky experience as a bad chunk, rather than an entire bad day. Then apply chocolate, or a soothing phone call, or an unplanned yoga class, or whatever, to the bruise forming from your crash with whatever ruined your mood. Instead:

• Acknowledge that something unpleasant happened.
• Give yourself permission not to deal with all of your emotions regarding the experience right now.
• Take responsibility for clearing the decks for the next block (or two) so you can recuperate.
• Use your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit.
• Find your path to resilience. 

Create a Bad Day Rescue Toolkit

More than a decade ago, Daniel Powter had a hit with the song Bad Day.

My favorite part of the lyrics is when, after cataloguing the various travails, Powter sings, “You need a blue sky holiday.”

Every person’s Bad Day Rescue Toolkit will include different items, but use these ideas as a guidepost. The key is to organize as much of this now, when you’re having a fine or neutral day, so you’ll have it when you need it.

• Make a list of the phone numbers of your most upbeat and/or most supportive friends.

Note: these may not be the same people. Scroll through your phone and think about who you might call if you need to vent or need to be perked up. My BFF is my go-to when I need to vent, and I try to be that for her. I’m not as good at refraining from trying to fix the situation as she is. (If you just want to vent, tell the person that before you get started.)

But here’s a sneaky tip. Try to tell the whole story of whatever frustrated you only once, to just one person. Get it out — all the “grrrrr, arghh” — and then move on to the rest of the experience. If it’s the right time to start looking for support with solutions, do that. Otherwise, invite your callee to distract you. Let them tell you about an awful situation at work, something ridiculous their mother-in-law said, or what’s making them bananas these days. (Try to avoid politics. That’s giving us all bad days.)

• Keep a browser-bar folder on your computer or phone for websites that distract and amuse you — better yet, sync them for easy access. On Mac/iOS, back them up to iCloud. And here’s an article for How to Sync Browsers Between Your Phone and PC.

Similarly, start maintaining a folder (digital or paper) of jokes, funny stories, cartoons, or goofy memes. If you’re on Twitter, use the bookmark tool to save those long, ridiculous threads where people report silly family stories or embarrassing tales.

Airport cashier: “Have a safe flight.” Me: “You too!” I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN.

— Jenny Lawson (@TheBloggess) November 1, 2015

This classic is one of my all-time favorite threads, and by the time I get days into the contributions, I usually end up looking like the laughing-crying emoji.

For professional humor, I particularly like comics that are gentle. My favorites are:

Liz Climo’s The Little World of Liz books and Twitter feed

Dinosaur Comics and Twitter feed

Nathan W Pyle’s Strange Planet comics, books, and Twitter feed

recently I started drawing a series called ✨Strange Planet✨

here is a thread of these comicshttps://t.co/WcqCOljAIJ pic.twitter.com/uuYnqeuCc8

— Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) February 21, 2019

• Start saving videos that make you happy.

It’s shockingly easy. Make sure you’re logged into Google (because Google owns YouTube) and then whenever you come across a video that makes you laugh or lifts your spirits, click on the SAVE button to the lower right of the video.

This is how you create a playlist. When the little window pops up, click “Create New Playlist” and give your playlist a name, like Make Me Happy! You can also decide whether this playlist is public or private.

• Consider making YouTube playlists of other kinds of videos, like travelogues or workout routines — anything that focuses on what take you out of your head long enough to regroup.

Sometimes, you don’t even need to do the workouts (though it helps). Consider watching The Kilted Coaches. (Your mileage may vary.)

• Create a playlist of songs that reverse crankiness.  

Having grown up in the era of mix-tapes, I found the late-90s/early-00’s experience of trying to make CD mixes frustrating. 

Nowadays, most folks are going to make playlists directly in Spotify, so whether you want to do it on the desktop or via mobile, here are Spotify’s directions for creating playlists. (And, of course, if you prefer to watch videos along with listening to your music, you can search out your favorite songs on YouTube and follow my directions above.)

If you’re not that up on popular music, you can also search online for happiness-including playlists that other people have created. For example, The Ultimate Happy Playlist on Spotify runs almost two-and-a-half joy-inspiring hours and has more than 10,000 followers. From Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine to Pharrell Williams’ Happy to many less obvious choices, it’s a good starter for dissipating a bad mood.

• Build up your success folders.

As we’ve discussed before, having tangible folders for papers and digital folders (generally for email) allow you to keep proof of your successes to read when you’re feeling down on yourself.

In my prior career, I had one particular manager who bore a striking resemblance to Dilbert’s evil, pointy-haired boss — I’m not sure what exactly went on during his long lunches, but depending on his mood, he’d either hunker down in his office or roam around to a pick a fight. He was once heard to scream at a hapless employee, “Everyone hates you because you use too much copy paper!”

That was the point when I first recognized how valuable and life-affirming it can be to keep written copies of positive comments.

You might have an email from a client saying that they couldn’t have accomplished their goals without you, or a handwritten thank you note that shows appreciation for something you’ve done for a friend. Or you might just get a note that says, “You’re the best!” or “You really made me laugh.”

The point is that we never know when an evil, pointy-haired boss, or a bad boyfriend, or a good person having a bad day is going to do or say something to puncture our self-confidence. You can’t organize your way out of being disappointed in a representative of the human race, but gathering up the equivalent of a positive affirmation in the form of someone else’s handwriting (or over their email signature block) can really help reverse a bad day.

Other options to develop for your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit might include:

• a happy list — Whether you keep a note on your phone or have a sprawling list at the back of your journal, keep a running list of things that please you. My own list is a heady mix of things my friend’s four-year-old has said (most recently, with a big sigh, “HOW am I ever going to find a wife?), experiences I love (like waking up, seeing I have hours before the alarm will go off, and going back to sleep), funny lines from beloved TV shows like The West Wing and Ted Lasso, and a sub-list of just completely unexpected experiences that always remind me that you never know what might happen next!
• a workout plan with moves that boost your endorphins, or a bookmarked schedule of live exercise classes (in-person or remote) for when you need some human interaction along with your running/biking/downward-dogging.
• a set of mantras to get you going again (whether it’s a serious one, like “I am not defined by one mistake” or one that makes you laugh, with expletives not deleted) 
• a meditation app —  Good Housekeeping has put together a list of the 15 Best Meditation Apps of 2022. Calm and Headspace get all the media buzz, there are lots of good alternatives, including quite a few that are free.
• essential oils — OK, to be fair, I really don’t know anything about essential oils. Mostly, I know that my favorite scent is a grilled cheese sandwich, but many people swear by essential oils, either in the bath or through a diffuser. And I hear lavender oil can release tension. (If you’ve tried this option, let us know in the comments.)

When It’s More Than a Bad Day

Obviously, all of these suggestions are for resources that will help you tackle a garden-variety bad mood or bad day. If you find you’re having more back-to-back bad days or weeks than simple organizing can handle, please give yourself the gift of qualified professional support.

Call your health insurance Member Services number or check their website for mental health providers in your network. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, please know that you can call NAMI (the National Alliance of Mental Illness) hotline at 800-950-NAMI or text “NAMI” to 741741, or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255)

A Parting (Musical) Note

I hope you’re having a good day right now and that this post has helped you prepare for the future, in case you need to turn a bad day around. Please share your own ideas for organizing your way out of a bad day in the comments section below.

Finally, when I originally created this post, YouTube would not let me share the official video for Bad Day, which you can now see up above. Over the past few years, so many people have told me through the years that it lifts their spirits, so in case YouTube makes the official video unavailable again, I wanted you to have the option to at least year the song and read the lyrics. While there are a variety of explanations for the neurological or psychological mechanism, but truth is that sometimes a sad song helps turn a bad day around.