Archive for Organizing Challenges – Page 3

We can organize using our eyes if we are competent in our visual processing modality.

Organizing with our Eyes – Visual Processing Modality

Posted by Carolyn on
 October 14, 2015
  ·  No Comments
Organizing with our eyes allows us to use our visual strength to get and stay organized.

Organizing with our Eyes – Visual Processing Modality

Organizing with our Eyes is the first in a series on organizing using one’s processing modalities.  In 2010, Denslow Brown of Coach Approach for Organizers and Organizer Coach published The Processing Modalities Guide.  This is the first of nine modalities that Denslow addresses in the guide.

Organizing with our Eyes – Strength & Sensitivity

We can have little or lots of strength in how we perceive the world with our eyes.   Lots of strength would make us gifted while little strength is referred to as weak.  If we are strong, organizing with our eyes would be natural, easy and help make staying organized easier.  We can also be hypo or hyper sensitive in using our eyes.  Sensitive means we are bothered by, perhaps agitated and likely exhausted by too much or the wrong visual stimulation.

Organizing with your Eyes – Organizing Strategies

Professional organizers and coaches with training in processing modalities understand that the degree of strength and the degree of sensitivity can be used to help a client get organized and stay organized.

If you are visually sensitive then lots of colour might be irritating while one or minimal colour might be soothing.  Try these strategies:

  • Use storage containers that are all one colour, size or shape if they will be used in one place.  Even just one colour will make a difference.
  • Use containers of similar, complementary or minimal colour to contain items that might otherwise look messy or haphazard.
  • Place things in an orderly fashion by size, shape or colour to minimize visual stimulation.

If you are visually strong you remember items by sight.  You can easily identify the visual difference in items.  Try these organizing techniques to take advantage of this strength:

  • use clear containers to help identify their contents
  • label storage containers to identify their contents
  • use colour on file labels or the files themselves to distinguish between different groups of subjects.  For example, client files might be green while marketing files might be red.
  • use visual cues such as symbols, single words or a sketch to remind yourself to do a particular task.

Use your natural and existing strengths to help you get organized.  Organizing with your eyes is just one way.  Organizing with our ears is next.

Organizing Challenges Organizing Strategies
Tags : , , , , , , ,

Keep Small Business Organized: 5 Strategies

Posted by Carolyn on
 September 23, 2015
  ·  4 Comments
5 Strategies to keep a small business organized

Stay clutter free to keep a small business organized

Is Your Small Business Organized?

We live in a changing world where small businesses must stay nimble of foot and focused on their goals.  Sometimes those imperatives seem to contradict each other.  How can we stay flexible, nimble and organized as a small business while staying focused on goals and strategies for business growth.

Its probably easier than you think.  There is, however, no room for clutter in a successful small business; no room for extra stuff, tasks or costs.  Here are 5 strategies to help keep that business clutter to a minimum and your small business organized for success.

  1. Make “clutter free” a priority for the business.  By letting employees know this is important, you set the performance expectations for your staff.
  2. Be clear how you define clutter.  Unnecessary paper is one thing but unnecessary emails is equally distracting clutter.  The same goes for unnecessary meetings.
  3. Be a role model and set the standard for your employees.  If your office is a pile of disorganized papers, your employees will believe that’s an ok standard for your business organization.
  4. Give staff the tools they need to be organized.  Include shelves for vertical storage and  immediate access to a blue box for recycling.  If you aren’t sure what is missing or why an employee is so disorganized, consider having a professional organizer conduct an assessment of the work environment. There may be more complex organizational issues that the employee is struggling with.
  5. Schedule a semi-annual clear out day. The rules for the time are simple. Everyone participates in a clear out of their work space on this day. Order lunch.
Office Organizing Organizing Challenges
Tags : , , , ,
Time and hoarding behaviour are linked. Professional Organizers can help you manage too much stuff.

Time and Hoarding Behaviour

Posted by Carolyn on
 September 8, 2015
  ·  3 Comments

Time and hoarding behaviour are linked. Professional Organizers can help you manage too much stuff.There is an important and strong link between time and hoarding behaviour.

While sorting, sifting and moving a client’s boxes today, I had occasion to notice the amount of time we were spending moving – sorting – moving  – sorting and moving again.  This particular client has been suffering from hoarding behavior, a mental disorder included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders  fifth edition (DSM V).

What is Hoarding Behaviour?

Hoarding behaviour is characterized by:

  1. An urge to accumulate possessions;
  2. Feelings of anxiety when possessions get thrown away;
  3. Accumulations of items that may or may not have real-world value, (others may consider them garbage or junk):
  4. Enough accumulation of clutter that use of space is limited or prevented;
  5. Disruption if significant and important aspects of one’s life such as work, family life, social interaction and a direct result of the hoarding behaviors.

How to Time and Hoarding Behaviour Connect?

Having a lot of possessions means taking alot of time to look after those possessions.  The more stuff one has, the more time, energy and money one will spend looking after that stuff. In the case of a hoarding situation, some items are constantly being moved from one place to another and back again as they impede the use of everyday required space.  Frequently, every task in the home of an individual with hoarding behavior takes a long time while the tools are located, items are moved to clear space or even just moved out of the way.

In the care of today’s client, she realized that the stuff was preventing her from doing the things that she loved like tending the garden and playing music.  We have slowly but surely sorted and sorted out of the house items that are no longer current, useful or have a role in her current life.  She works hard to resist the urge to bring items back into her home to fill the space.  She is learning to enjoy having clear space to sit and enjoy her home.  it has been a struggle to overcome those urges but she is gradually making progress.  She can now walk freely from one end of her home to the other in a fraction of the time it used to take.  She can find certain things commonplace in an office and use the garden door to access the garden.  With the additional time, she can now tend to the garden.

We have much more sorting to do.  Eventually however, the client will have in her home those items that she needs, that contribute in a significant and meaningful way to her life.  It will take her less and less time to manage her belongings as we whittle down to the essential and beloved.  That leaves more time for the garden, the flute, the dogs and the knitting.  The flute has a home and is easy to find.  The dogs have space to run around the house.  The knitting has a home and the wool is being whittled down to just the very favorite skeins.

This client will never have the magazine perfect home.  She will however, experience less and less anxiety as she tries to manage the urge to accumulate items.  She is gradually getting used to the open spaces; as are the dogs.  Not only the spaces feel like they need to be filled, but without as much stuff, her habits using time also will change.  She is learning to take time to enjoy activities that don’t include moving alot of stuff around or moving around alot of stuff.

 

Slowly but surely.

Organizing Challenges
Tags : , , , , , ,

Re-used Bags and Kon Mari’d Socks

Posted by Carolyn on
 August 21, 2015
  ·  No Comments
Take a pile of socks....

Take a pile of socks….

I’ve read Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up; I’ve helped clients find joy and packed up non-joyful items in my own home.  Since I am usually spending my organizing time with clients taking items – lots of them – out of their homes, I am reluctant to try any new method of organizing that requires the purchasing of new gadgets or tools.  Recently, however, I had the chance to try out a KonMari Method technique and was pleasantly surprised at the results.

My client and I were sorting through several drawers of socks, stockings and pantyhose.  The pile of non-joy-inspiring items was growing into two bags headed for Goodwill while the cherished, comfy, favourites awaited return to the drawer.

... use scissors and a clothing store bag....

… use scissors and a clothing store bag….

I remembered Kondo’s guidance about socks, rolling rather than turning down the tops on each other, and wondered if we might try the strategy.  We had previously liberated a dozen or more better clothing store, rigid bags which I retrieved from their home.  Using scissors, I cut down the bags to just shy of the height of the drawers and inserted several into each drawer.  The shortened bags fit perfectly into the drawer and were narrow enough that we had enough for each colour grouping of socks.

You can see the result in the drawer.

...and voila. A joyful, organized sock drawer.

…and voila. A joyful, organized sock drawer.

Unfortunately you can’t see how pleased my client was to be able to see her socks, laid out by colour, making her dressing experience easier.  The technique worked very well in this application and I like to think the socks were happy too.

 

Organizing Challenges Organizing Strategies

How Many Synonyms Does Planning Have?

Posted by Carolyn on
 March 31, 2015
  ·  1 Comment

Life comes at us all at about 150km/hour in my estimate. Occasionally a little faster; sometimes a little slower. Usually, pretty fast.

Being organized is being prepared to respond to what’s coming at you no matter how fast it arrives. Anticipation, preparation, planning all work the same way when it comes to organizing for life’s challenges.

Take tax season for example. I know today, 30 days before most of our taxes are due, that next year on June 15th, 2015 my business taxes will be due. I have more than a year to prepare myself and all the bits and pieces associated with tax submission in order to submit on time, or depending on your circumstances, early.

Tonight, on the other hand, I have no idea what time everyone will be home for supper and in fact, I’m not even sure anyone will be home for supper. So I have about 5 hours to figure out how to handle that challenge. My solution, a stash of nutritious freezer foods that even my 12 year old can safely prepare for himself after swim team training session.

Home Organizing Organizing Challenges Organizing Time

Children’s Behaviour when parents exhibit Hoarding Behaviour

Posted by Carolyn on
 September 10, 2014
  ·  No Comments

A friend and colleague recently contacted me regarding behaviour she had seen in one of her contacts.  She poses an interesting question and I thought you all might be interested.

VB writes: Is Hoarding in the genes? Have you ever seen young children hoard? In a family I recently worked with, one of the children cried and was very upset when his Dad sent a couple of pieces of furniture to the curb hoping someone would pick up for free.! (The aunt is a “collector” and another aunt shows evidence of hoarding behaviour.) Dad is worried about his child. He understands not wanting to part with toys, but furniture? Any thoughts or advice for this situation?”

Here is my response: Although there is much work currently being done with children of those with hoarding behaviour,  I am not aware of any definitive research on the genetic link for hoarding behaviour. We do know, however, that individuals with chronic disorganization, of which hoarding behaviour is a subset, personify objects and have unusually high emotional attachment to objects. These charact traits I see in the children of my clients all the time.

In the absence of a psyche degree, we as organizers ought not to be trying to remove or change those traits but there are tried and true techniques for managing them so the impact of the traits is not harmful. My fear is that this child has now been emotionally impacted – which he/she will remember long after the furniture is gone – and carry forward to other objects preventing him/her from healthy separation in the future.

Try this:
1. Let the child “say good-bye” to the furniture just like they would a friend.
2. Take a picture as part of the goodbye process and create an agreement on how long the picture hangs around.
3. Help the child understand the furniture needs a new home that can use it better. It will have new life with its new family.
4. Help the child understand objects have a natural life cycle with us. We need/ desire, they come, we use/love/use up, they leave (donation/ sale/recycle/garbage), they have a new life.

I’d be interested in hearing from others on similar experiences to VB.

Organizing Challenges
Tags : , , , , ,
desk with chair and bookshelf

Your Organizing Personality

Posted by Carolyn on
 February 5, 2014
  ·  No Comments

What is your Organizing Personality?4 pictures collaged together including sissors, sewing notions stuck in a tomato cushion, tools on a peg board and files in a file cabinet.

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 TraitsPiles of paper and filed on a desk top.

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?orderly clothes closet

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.

Organizing Challenges Organizing Strategies
Tags : ,

Are you seriously disorganized?

Posted by Carolyn on
 June 3, 2013
  ·  No Comments
We can help you manage and overcome your chronic disorganization.

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.

Organizing Challenges
Tags : , ,

ADD Time Monitors

Posted by Carolyn on
 December 7, 2011
  ·  No Comments

For individuals managing ADD, learning to manage time can be an ongoing challenge.  Professional organizers and ADD coaches often encourage the use of timers to make sure hyper-focus doesn’t cause the swallowing of hours and hours of time scheduled for something else.


Here’s an idea I created for a young client whose tremendous creativity sent me searching for an alternate timing device.  Create a set of playlists for yourself on your mp3 player for various lengths of time.  One might be 5 Min Playlist, another 10 Min Playlist etc.  When you have a task to complete or a job that you need to focus for a designated time, plug in and turn on your playlist that matches that period of time.  It may take a couple of attempts before you figure out the genre of music that works for a 10 minute end-of-day-get-stuff-off-the-floor task versus a 30 minute I-really-have-to-enter-in-my-expenses-today-if-i-want-to-be-reimbursed-this-month type task.


Have fun with it – its a perfect personalized tool to support your time management.

Organizing Challenges Organizing Time
Tags : ,

Forward Two, Back One – Shall we Dance?

Posted by Carolyn on
 May 27, 2009
  ·  No Comments

So how is that desk going? The credenza? The floor? What about your New Year’s Resolutions to keep a clutter free, high efficiency work space?

Right about now, as second quarter comes to an end and tax time looms for many solo-preneurs and small business owners, the clutter is at an all time high and level of discouragement follows suite.

So I thought now would be a good time to revisit an earlier post on backsliding. It is a common experience for almost everyone who is de-cluttering. Even the best of us have moments, days and weeks when decision making is maxed out, time is layered like a lasagna and the opportunity to find “a place for everything and keep everything in its place” just doesn’t seem to exist.

The good news is you are perfectly normal. We all go through it. More good news is by taking one step at a time, one piece at a time, you can get back on track. Here are the four steps:

  1. Stave off the guilt. Life is too short.
  2. Figure out what you stopped doing that was helping you stay organized.
  3. Figure out why you stopped doing it.
  4. Find one behaviour you can commit to doing again that will start you back on track. My favourite is clear the floor. Somehow the floor has the best glue around and stuff that gets down there just seems to stick. Another would be clearing the space just inside your office entrance way. More glue.

Now repeat item #1 – stave off the guilt!

Organizing Challenges
Tags :
← Previous Page
Next Page →
Carolyn Caldwell photo, Instagram logo and link to follow.

Banish those Gremlins!

Conquer Procrastination Cheat Sheet

Struggling with procrastination gremlins? Grab your free copy of Conquering Procrastination Cheat Sheet: 4 Procrastination Gremlins and the Tricks to Beat Them.

Name(Required)
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Caldwell Evolution | Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Website by Janet Barclay