Wishing you a clutter-free, romantic day with someone dear to you. Cut roses are wonderful gifts since they are not only beautiful but also consumable.
Author Archive for Carolyn – Page 10
What is your Organizing Personality?
Back in 2008, one of the first posts on this blog discussed the concept of individuals having a unique organizing personality. Through nine years or working with clients, understanding the individual organizing personality has become even more important to the success of my work with clients.
Processing Modality Traits
The organizing personality includes many traits. Those most frequently discussed amongst organizers are the processing modalities or sensory modalities that one uses to process information and learn from stimulus in the environment. In her book Processing Modalities Guide: Identify and Use Specific Strengths for Better Functioning … for Organizers, Coaches – and Those Who Want to Live with More Ease and Effectiveness – and Less Frustration, Denslow Brown provides a full discussion of the difference between how sensitive we are to stimuli (you become irritable in a noisy room) and how competent we are (you learn best through hearing new information). Some organize best by seeing, some by hearing or talking to themselves and some by actually moving objects around or touching them.
Piler, Filer, Tosser, Dropper Traits
Other traits include how you like to put objects together. Some like to file while other prefer to toss. Are you a tosser who like to “toss” items into a storage bin/basket/file/drawer? Children are frequently in what I call the “toss and drop” stage of their lives and would be most organized with open bins to toss and drop their belongings into. The pilers, prefer a collection of piles and are very adept at remembering what is in each pile of objects. This is frequently seen in the office setting and a common way of handling large amounts of paper. Early on in my organizing career I identified the filer when working with a client in the editorial industry. Their preference was to file as much as possible – not just the paper – into a filing cabinet by alpha order.
The Tool Maven
Some individuals find that time is a key sorting or organizing tool. These individuals will often have their files, to-do lists and projects organized by date due, date received, age or some other sense of time. Others prefer grouping, sorting and containing by another common element such as size, to whom an object relates or the special meaning of an object.
Why Does it Matter? What Does it Mean?
By understanding one’s organizing personality, one is able to develop organizing systems that more closely meet their natural organizing tendencies and will more likely be successful and sustainable. A mismatch will lead to systems which don’t get used and processes which fall apart with the resulting disorganization and frustration that ensues.
How do I Know What is my Organizing Personality?
To determine your personality, take note of how you sort, contain and retrieve items. Do you talk out loud (auditory)? Do you like to sort your files by colour (visual)? So you like to sort by date? Do you prefer all your surfaces to be clear but don’t care about the inside of your drawers or cupboards? Maybe you need everything out where you can see it (visual). Or would you rather get up and file or toss things in your office (kinetic)? Would you put everything you could into a filing cabinet? See if you can identify your own traits and then gradually modify your organizing strategies to match these traits.
Organized Files Again
We recently moved. Not far, mind you; but just far enough to require a truck, a moving company, many boxes and complete upheaval of our orderly lives.
You’d think a professional organizer could handle her own move with ease. Suffice it to say, I’m as normal and human as the next person when it comes to sorting, purging and packing 18 years of life and a family of four, plus a cat and fish.
One evening after the move, in an attempt to get some boxes out of our office, my SO and I emptied the contents of the file boxes into the filing cabinets. Now we don’t do alot of paper filing anymore but we still had alot of paper files. We had already done a purge prior to packing – no need to pay to move your garbage. On this particular evening we were more concerned with freeing up floor space than ordering files so we simply emptied the boxes as they were stacked on the floor and promised ourselves to sort the files later.
That was a mistake. Fast forward four weeks and I still haven’t sorted those files. Until tonight. At some point over the past month I realized we had put the files in backward. I’m very visual and use an alpha filing system. With backward files that weren’t even in the right order, I had been completely disoriented and unable to find anything in the file drawers for many weeks.
The style of filing you use is less important than whether it works for you, it helps you store and retrieve material and you can maintain the system. My files have some colour coding and are alpha labelled and ordered. They have been like that for years and without that order I find I can’t use the system at all. The result? I have a huge pile of filing sitting in the filing bin.
I’m pleased to report that with one hour of focussed time and attention, my filing system is now back in order, sorted in the correct direction and ready for use. I’m no longer disoriented and I’m looking forward to getting the pile of filing into the cabinet where it belongs. Meanwhile, I’ve also learned that there is much, much more purging to be done. The purging will have to wait for another day.
Christine is Canada’s most recent and only 6th professional organizer to attain the Certified Professional Organizers-Chronic Disorganization (CPO-CD) certification with the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD). I’m especially pleased as I know what a significant accomplishment the certification is and it reflects the philosophy and values within Wellrich Organizers. We are committed to bringing knowledge through research, and a thorough understanding of disorganization and its challenges to our clients and their organizing challenges. Christine’s CPO-CD accomplishment keeps us on track with that philosophy and is consistent with our values.
We can help you manage and overcome your chronic disorganization.
Calling all really, truly, seriously disorganized individuals. We would especially like to talk to those people who are very afraid that the folks at work will realize just how disorganized they are in their offices. Have you tried to make changes to become more organized and failed? Have you been disorganized for as long as you can remember? Does your disorganization prevent you from achieving your personal or professional goals – especially at work?
These are exactly the clients that Wellrich Organizers is looking for. All three of the professional organizers in our company have been trained specifically to work with those individuals with serious and very challenging disorganization. Give us a call. You don’t have to live with the stress that disorganization creates.
For more resources on chronic disorganization click through to Institute for Challenging Disorganization.
Thank you to the Toronto Chapter of Professional Organizers in Canada for including me in their Ask a Senior Organizer panel at last night’s meeting. I was honoured to share the panel with highly esteemed colleagues Harold Taylor of Taylor in Time and Deanne Kelleher of the Kaos Group. The evening was very well attended; the view from the front of the room was fantastic with over 40 people in attendance.
Emily Gibson, the evening’s program coordinated, had previously solicited questions from members, which she then distributed to the three of us. I found this a great strategy since it gave us a chance to prepare our answers and it gave the audience a chance to prepare their questions.
Thank you POC Toronto for a great evening!
Calling all new or novice professional organizers!
Are you looking to kick start your business this summer? Wondering how to get started but not sure who to ask?
Come and join us at Professional Organizer Boot Camp starting June 2013. This 6 week, intense group mentoring program will help you get your business toned and tuned. Check us out. Kick start your business and join the fun.
Give us a call and lets get you started: 647-505-2256
Label your staging area to make downsizing less stressful.
In the world of home moves, staging has become a popular activity to help sell a house. In the case of sorting and organizing a downsizing project, staging is still used to sell a house but is also what we do to prevent churning and to simplify the decision making process. This was evident to me yesterday while helping a family friend pack her father’s household goods as part of a downsizing move to his newly purchased condominium. A very active bachelor for many years, Jill’s father had accumulated large amounts of sports and recreational gear. The years, however, were catching up on him and, having limited his activities to his favourite few, he was ready to send away to a new home many of his not-loved-or-needed-anymore household, recreational and sports items. Jill and I were preparing items for his move next weekend and to take a load to the auction house the following weekend.
As Jill and I walked through the house, she was able to point out to me many items in closets, cupboards and various rooms that had already been sorted and were in various stages of being packed. Jill expressed concern that her father was planning on moving too many items to his new “pad” and would struggle to adjust to the smaller space. I suggested to Jill we set up a staging area to accumulate items on which decisions had been made, help identify what was left to sort, collect items for packing together in one area when possible and start to move out the items that were being sold or donated.
Jill had set up a packing station in one part of the house but the area had become congested with items her father was still using on a day to day basis. We identified a convenient staging area, collected and labelled the sorting, packing and boxing supplies and moved them to this area as a new packing station. Jill had wisely used a packing table so that boxes could be packed at waist height without the packer having to strain their back by bending, leaning or twisting. We moved this table to the packing station along with all the remaining boxes. This cleared out one of the bedrooms so that Jill and her father could more easily see what still needed to be sorted in that room. In an open area in the living room, beside the packing station, we established the rest of our staging area: in one corner were the items for auction, in another the items listed online to be sold, and in a third the items packed to go to the new condominium. We then did a second sweep through the house, which had several stories, and grouped items on each floor. As most of the large furniture was already gone, it was easy to move items into one area on each floor. We set up areas for each type of item based on where it was to go: auction/for sale online, donation or the condo. The recycling and garbage we took away and put in the garbage/recycling bins. Any item for which a decision had already been made was moved out of its place and put into the appropriate pile. These items can be packed in place and them moved to the main staging area.
The end result of our work was that Jill and her father didn’t have to revisit these decisions each time they entered a room or looked into a closet. Her father could clearly see the volume of goods heading for the new condo and they could both see the results of their sorting as each room became emptier and emptier. Finally, Jill could easily see when packing supplies needed replenishing. All of these small details help to reduce stress in a downsizing project.
Spring is my favourite time of year; not just because my birthday is in April. This is the month when gardens and yards burst into colour like a painters pallet, kids get back on their bicycles and many of us start walking again to places we drive all winter.
Spring is also a great time to organize. If you have a garden, try taking your sorting project out there. Sorting items out of context makes it easier to make a decision and helps your brain make a more objective assessment of the value of the items to your life. Out of context, our thoughts often take a different path then we see the items in their usual “home” around your house.
Besides – most things just look better bathed in sunshine.
