You’ve made the decision to get rid of it, you’ve blocked the time and arranged for the children to be elsewhere. You’re looking at a pile of toys in the basement that haven’t been touched by the kids for months/years/decades and can’t decide what to do with it. You’d be surprised how common this situation is. Many of my clients have tried valiently to sort through a pile of unwanted goods and become overwhelmed with the process.
Try this: move the goods to a different location. If the toys are in the basement, pile them all into a laundry hamper and put them in the middle of the living room/kitchen/backyard. Group them into similar objects. Notice how your perspective changes?
Changing the location of the goods changes the perspective for your brain and grouping by like objects demonstrates the quantity of goods you have collected. Changing perspective helps your brain to look at the goods differently and boosts the Keep, Give Away, Throw Out decision making process.
Start small. If you empty the basement into the living room you are committed for a weekend. You might not make it and then you’d be frustrated with the stuff in the living room. Try a couple of laundry hampers worth first. Success? Great. Celebrate and either schedule your next session or try a couple more hampers.
Archive for Children – Page 3
It’s back to school time. If you have children in elementary school who stay at the school for lunch, you have likely had at least on lunch bag go missing.
Today’s tip is so simple and often repeated it will soon be wearing as thin as the nylon on my own favourite lunch bag. But it works:
Write your child’s name on the Outside of the lunch bag.
Even if your own son or daughter can’t remember to pick it up or doesn’t notice it got left behind, chances are pretty good someone else will and the bag will make it back to the owner.
We’ve just returned from a two week trip from Toronto, through Kingston and on to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, following the route of the Optimist Dinghy Fleet from CORK to their Canadian Championships. You would think our car would be the most organized in the lot given my credentials. Sadly, with boat gear, swim gear, overnight gear, a boat and a few extra boat pieces which we carried for another sailor, our van look liked a barely controled wilderness of gear.
We managed the obvious strategies: keep what you are using in the order you use it, take the time to repack the gear when stopped for several days to keep the order efficient, use laundry hampers for the wet (and salty) stuff to keep it open and airing.
By far though, the best strategy, was keeping two coolers: one for the lunch and one for the rest of the parishables. Each day we were on the road, we prepacked the lunch cooler with not only lunch, but a full complement of snacks to keep ourselves and our two children happy for the 8 – 10 hour days. Having the rest of the parishable food in another cooler meant the second cooler kept cold longer and the food less likely to parish. Having a lunch bag cooler at the handy in the car meant less money spent at convenience stores and better snacks for everyone.
And if you have not yet been to Nova Scotia, I highly recommend it!
Here is a quick follow up post from two days ago, after I received several questions from clients.
Yes, I really did mean for everyone in the family to pick a colour to be their colour for family organizing. You’d be surprised how successful this can be. Use everyone’s favourite colour to help pick out all kinds of household items from toothbrushes to tote sacks to calendering.
My husband grew up in a family of 10: M&D, 6 children, one maid and her son. His colour was green. There was green thread on his socks so they could be identified in the wash. Naturally, when we picked colours for ourselves and the children for our family calendar – his colour was green!
Colour can be a quick and easy way to organize anything from toys to files. When we organize we sort (small, medium, large widgets) pattern (like things together) and decide (keep, sell, toss). The same is true for storage and retrieval activity; looking for a spice (sort by alphabet?), filing paper (sort and pattern this year, last year, food, rent, utilities etc) and making decisions at every step.
Coloured boxes, baskets, labels or other storage tools provide an easy first sorting mechanism. Each child could be assigned a colour for their toys (John gets the blue toy bucket) sports gear (Jane’s labels, bag and towel are blue) or items on the calendar.
It is helpful to limit the number of colours to a minimum of choices. Use colour for high level choices. For example, if you run a home based business, try using one colour to sort between business and personal files (business is blue, personal is green). Too many colour choices can increase organizing challenges especially for individuals who are easily distracted and have difficulty focussing.
For many people, the traditional children’s gifts or tokens at Valentine’s Day are plush toys and chocolate. This year, I was particularly challenged as my 13 year old daughter has given up chocolate for Lent. We no longer accumulate plush toys as she has purged her collection down to her few very favourites. My solution is to bake a (vanilla) cake for the family and yes, it will be pink or red(ish).
Do you have suggestions to offer the readership? What do other people use as clutter free, candy free gifts or tokens to the kids?
Add you comments below and let us know your solutions.
Q and A: Paper
This is the first of what will become a regular feature on the Wellrich Blog: a Question and Answer column. I often receive questions from clients. Many of the questions are very similar. I will post here some of the more common, interesting or helpful for your benefit. If you have questions you would like answered, send them to me at wellrichorganizers@rogers.com.
Q: I can’t keep track of all of the paper that comes into the house- mail, school papers, etc. If I try to put things away I forget about them and miss things, and if I leave them out I can’t find anything. What do you suggest? I currently have stacks of paper in various places, things on my bulletin board, and the really important things stuck into my planner. Cherri, Toronto
A: “How do I handle the paper?” is the most common question most professional organizers receive from their organizing clients.
Step 1 – The first step to correcting the solution is to get all the paper in one place so that it can be weeded out. Schools are notorious for sending second and third copies of forms to be signed if they haven’t shown up by the due date. Pull is all together in one big pile and let’s go.
Step 2 – Go through and throw out (recycle) all the duplicates, envelopes and junk mail. What you have left is the material that you really need to address.
Step 3 – Set up a date sensitive/hot file type folder for handling birthday invitaitions, Kiwanis dates, doctors appointments or anything else that stale dates. This can be as simple as (my favourite) an alligator hook holding the date sorted papers hung on a hook in the kitchen, or as complicated as a 31 day accordion file used as a bring forward file.
Step 4 – Set up a reference material holder. This could be (my favourite) an accordion file labeled by subject (church, teacher, ballet studio, music teacher) or a binder with dividers using the same titles. File the paper related to these subjects as reference for when you need it. If it doesn’t contain reference, toss it.
Step 5 – Set up a filing system for day to day items such as statements that you still receive in hard copy. Get into the habit of keeping only the minimum required e.g. one year of statements, latest bill, total year to date etc.
Step 6 – Set up a mail station with a separate slot for every member of your family. This could be as simple as a cereal box cut like a paper tray (get the kids to decorate their own), plastic stacking paper trays, wall hanging shoe holders or anything else you can imagine. Go vertical! Label each members slot and make sure that when the mail comes in, it gets sorted. This is a good “chore” for a grade 3 student.
Step 7 – Give your kids a folder – plastic, 2 pocket, which they can choose the colour and decorate. Have them use this folder for everything that comes home for you. They bring it home and put it in your mail slot. You take out the contents, sign the forms and put it back in their slot. They check the slot each morning before school.
It will take a while for your family to buy into all of this but persevere. They will catch on and the kids will love not being nagged at school for the forms which used to be always late. Kids also like having their own mail slot. It makes them feel important and on an equal footing to older siblings/parents at least in this one department.
Next to “what do I do with all the paper?” the question “what do I do with my teenager?” is one of the most frequent questions I am asked as a professional organizer. When I dig deeper for information, most of you are concerned about 1) their bedroom which often looks like a cyclone went through and 2) their school desk/locker which looks like the cyclone dumped everything there.
Why are the teenagers so messy? Why are they so disorganized? What am I, as a parent, going to do about it?
Great questions.
Teenagers have a lot of “stuff” going on in their minds, which means they may be too distracted and preoccupied to worry about the “stuff” on the floor of their room. Keeping track of the relationship with and between friends, who is wearing what, who is talking to whom – or not – is a lot for a preteen and teenager to be thinking about. When you consider how quickly this social scene can change when you are between the ages of 12 and 19, especially the 12 to 14 year olds, their brains are on fast forward just keeping up with social dynamics.
Now add issues around school work and assignments, part time jobs and any other sports or activities they might be engaged in. We aren’t done yet; now add in the physical growth challenges like how to use arms and legs that grew (apparently) overnight, brains that are just plain tired from growing. Finally, to top it all off, the oversupply of (feels like new) hormones with attached emotional ups and downs, and – well – whether or not the laundry is in the hamper pales in significance by comparison. Can you blame them?
There is hope. The frontal lobe development occurs in the teenage years and with it the executive control that is housed there.
What can you do? Children tend to learn their organization skills from their parents. If you send out the message from your own state of organization (what does your desk look like?) that organization is not a priority, they will follow your step. Allowing them to leave the laundry on the floor until it stands itself up in the corner is sending the message that dirty laundry on the floor is ok.
We all know as parents – in case you wondered, yes, I have a teenage daughter – that we have to pick our battles. Organization is no different. I will leave you with this thought and homework: What message are you sending to your teenager about organization? Does everything have to be perfect? Is mess and disorganization ok as long as no one sees it? Is there a level of organization that is required, or desired, in order to meet our obligations at whatever stage of life we are in?
Think about it.
