Archive for Understanding disorganization

Overwhelmed

Overwhelmed with Getting Organized?

Posted by Carolyn on
 January 6, 2016
Overwhelmed

Have attempts to get organized in the new year got you overwhelmed?

Welcome to 2016.  I’m overwhelmed.  How about you?

The way I feel right now, I could do without a new year ever again.  I’m bombarded with email, tweets, FB group posts, Instagram pictures and LinkedIn comments telling me how to plan, schedule, set goals, accomplish goals, managed resolutions and be successful in 2016.  Since most of us would like to be more successful at whatever we do, that seems like a good start to the year, right?

Wrong.

Too much.

I was feeling so optimistic as 2015 came to a close and now with the bombardment of direction and cheers from well meaning social media, I’m hiding here at my desk wondering how to manage the overwhelm in my head.  Ideas, thoughts, plans, goals, schedules, resolutions;  it’s all there in a big foggy, swirl.  Remember that picture of electrons swirling in circles from high school science?  Put that in a vat of swirling cotton candy and that’s how my brain feels. It hurts.

Anyone else on the same page or am I out here alone on planet Overwhelm?

As a professional organizer, I’m not immune to being overwhelmed.  And like everyone else, I have to get organizing whether I’m overwhelmed or not.  The only difference is I’ve coached and supported clients back from planet Overwhelm and I have strategies I know will help.  I’m going to use them.  A few simple steps to get rid of that overwhelmed feeling when trying to get organized.

Get Moving

Go for a walk.  Moving large muscle groups helps to dissipate stress.  If all else fails, just walk around your house, apartment, room or office.  Head to the water cooler.  Or better still…

Get Some Fresh Air

Walk outside.  The clear, cooler air will help blow away the cotton candy from your brain.  The smell of wood stoves always takes me back to my days working on a reserve on the Canadian pacific coast where life was relatively simple.  The fresh air is almost as good as a RESET button.

Write it Down

Just writing down the swirl of thoughts and confusion can sometimes provide clarity.  Even if the thoughts are randomly written, your brain will start to put them into order.  Grab a pen or pencil and just start writing.  Don’t worry about anything making sense.

Make a List – or Two

Take the random written thoughts and group the ideas together.   Try groups like stuff to do, calls to make, decisions to make, long term plans, next week’s party, business goals, vacation plans.  You have your own stuff going on that will provide natural groups.

Take a Break

Organizing and being overwhelmed will require more breaks than organizing at other times.  Decision fatigued sets in faster when an individual is overwhelmed – if they are able to make decisions at all.  Give yourself lots of breaks to refresh your grey matter.

Take a Social Media/Technology Break

Our cell phones, computers, tablets and television bombard us with direction and instructions.  Take a break and get away from everyone else telling you how to start your new year.  For some, even just a few hours without the device will make a difference to help get you back from planet Overwhelm.

Getting organized in new year is a great thing.  Being overwhelmed is not.  Using these few easy steps I got back from planet Overwhelm and was able to get this blog post written.  You’ll get your stuff done too.

Organizing Challenges
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Organizing with our ears involves using what we hear to help us organize.

Organizing with our Ears – Auditory Processing Modality

Posted by Carolyn on
 October 14, 2015
Organizing with our ears involves using what we hear to help us organize.

Organizing with our Ears – Auditory Processing Modality

Organizing with our Ears is the second 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 second of nine modalities that Denslow addresses in the guide.  Auditory processing involves what we hear.  It includes sounds around us as well as what we say.

Organizing with our Ears – Strength and Sensitivity

Like visual processing, auditory processing modality can be described on a strength continuum as weak, competent or gifted. Someone who is gifted might have perfect pitch or be able to identify sophisticated meaning from sound.  Someone who is auditorily weak does not rely primarily on their hearing to understand, learn or interface with the world (that’s me).  Organizing with our ears can also be identified as hypo or hyper sensitive.  Someone who is hypersensitive might become overwhelmed or irritated when there are too many sounds at one time such as in a crowded party room (me again).

Organizing with our Ears – Organizing Strategies

Professional organizers and those trained in processing modalities, understand that using one’s dominant processing modality to organize, increases the ability to stay organized and maintain an organized environment.  Most of us use more than one modality to interface and learn from the environment.  In fact we likely use several.  A few will be stronger, more dominant, than the others, and therefore most useful in staying organized.

If you are auditorily sensitive, many different sounds may be irritating, annoying or exhausting.  Simple, soothing sounds may be pleasing and help with focus. Try the following strategies:

  • Use soothing background music to drown out or distract your ears from a noisy room or street below your window.
  • Use pleasant background music to help you focus on a task.

If you are auditorily strong, you remember items by their sound or a sound associated with them.  Words and tones are meaningful to you.  Try these strategies to keep you organized:

  • Label file folders by names that first come to mind when you think of the contents e.g. “Family Pictures I Would Keep Forever” rather than “Family Pictures” . 
  • Use sounds on your watch to help you keep track of time.
  • Use a timed playlist on your phone or digital music player to help you keep track of time spent on a particular project or task.
  • Talk yourself through the steps of an organizing project.  Write them down and say them out loud while you work your way through each step.

If you are naturally attuned to sounds – and like to play with sounds and words – use that skill and strength to your advantage when organizing.  Next post in the series will look at the kinesthetic processing modality.

Organizing Challenges Organizing Strategies
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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

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
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Children’s Behaviour when parents exhibit Hoarding Behaviour

Posted by Carolyn on
 September 10, 2014

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
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Your Organizing Personality

Posted by Carolyn on
 February 5, 2014
20150613 Laundry basket 2

For the tossers, the perfect open laundry hamper.

20150613 Piler

Evidence of a piler. In this case, there were lots of piles like this.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? Do you need everything out where you can see it (visual). Do you like to 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 Strategies
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Books – Enough Already

Posted by Carolyn on
 March 9, 2009

Peter Walsh’s most recent book Enough Already is now available on Amazon. I highly recommend this to those of you who are overwhelmed not only by your clutter, but by your life in general. True to his character, Peter handles not just the stuff in our lives but the issues of emotional and mental clutter.

Whether you are tackling little clutter, big clutter at home or at work, I recommend this read to you.

Organizing Resources
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Top 5 Series – Excuses Professional Organizers Hear

Posted by Carolyn on
 February 4, 2009

Over on Wellrich for Business, I periodically post on the Top 5 Series. While they generally address the small business or home office organizing issues, I felt this particular post would be of interest to my residential readership as well. Do these excuses sound familiar? Maybe some help from a professional organizer would be a good idea!

  1. “I don’t have time to worry about tidy piles of paper“. You don’t, however, mind asking everyone else to wait while to try and find whatever it is you are all looking for?
  2. “I don’t need to be more organized; I can find anything I want in my office“. Except that it takes you three hours to find a single piece of paper or file folder and meanwhile, everyone else is held up.
  3. “I’m not disorganized, I just like to keep things in case I might need them, someday“. Meanwhile you pay for a storage unit that you haven’t accessed for months or years (would that money help pay off the mortgage?) You have rooms you can’t use due to the clutter and boxes covered in dust i.e. they haven’t been touched in years.
  4. “I am actually very organized. I know exactly where everything is“. Have you noticed you are chronically late for appointments, submitting school forms, paying your bills (and therefore wasting money on late fees) and rushing for completion of tasks at the last minute. You think you’re organized? Have you asked your family or friends recently?
  5. “I have my own style of organization. No one else would understand it“. You might be correct – no one else can find anything in your home either. Some professional organizers are specifically trained to understand your particulary style of organizing, and help you to make it work for your life.

Are you children learning their organizing habits from you? Is this a good thing? Would you like them to live with the harried existence that you live?

Think about it.

Organizing Challenges Top 5 Series
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Top 5 Series – Excuses Professional Organizers Hear for Disorganization

Posted by Carolyn on
 February 4, 2009

This probably isn’t you, but perhaps someone you know, is chronically disorganized, forever holding everyone else up and causing deadlines to slip, and shrugs off the suggestion for help form a professional organizer or complaints from colleagues with:

  1. “I don’t have time to worry about tidy piles of paper“. You don’t, however, mind asking everyone else to wait while to try and find the quarterly report or have to reprint it because it is truly lost in your mess.
  2. “I don’t need to be more organized; I can find anything I want in my office“. Except that it takes you three hours to find a single piece of paper or file folder and meanwhile, everyone else is held up in their work.
  3. “I’m not disorganized, I just like to keep things in case I might need them, someday“. Meanwhile you keep insisting you need twice as much filing space as everyone else, your office is a stack of boxes covered in dust i.e. haven’t been touched in 5 years.
  4. “I am actually very organized. I know exactly where everything is“. Have you noticed you are chronically late for meetings, late on work submission, rushing for completion of tasks at the last minute. You think you’re organized? Have you asked your colleagues recently?
  5. “I have my own style of organization. No one else would understand it“. You might be correct – if you didn’t show up for work tomorrow no one else would be able to find any of your relevant work. Your office and your contributions to the company would be dismissed as meaningless.

When we work for someone else, the work they pay us to do generally belongs to that company: files, paper, reports etc. You have an obligation to ensure that if you don’t show up to work tomorrow, for whatever reason, someone else can step into your shoes can pick up the baton. When was the last time you asked your colleagues how they feel about waiting for you to finish reports – chronically late

Think about it.

Organizing Challenges Top 5 Series
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Right Brain Organizing – For Messies

Posted by Carolyn on
 January 30, 2009

Your best friends are engineers. You cringe at the thought of straight books on a shelf. Your world is full of colour and ideas – and mess. And you are tired of it. The mess that is (engineers are ok). How about tailor made organizing support for the right brain world.

Organizing for the Creative Person is just that. Dorothy Lehmkuhl and Dolores Cotter Lamping have captured the world of the right brained soul and provided clear, concise information on how to harness your gifts to end your world of mess. For a taste of their humour and understanding of the issues consider the following excerpt:
“The acronym ‘PUT OFF’ can be used to summarize the specific causes of procrastination:

  • P = Priority
  • U = Unknowns
  • T = Time

  • O = Overload
  • F = Fears
  • F = Feelings

An easy read, great suggestions for all you right brain creative folks who have fatigued of living with the mess. Enjoy.

Organizing Resources
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Chronic Disorganization

Posted by Carolyn on
 January 27, 2009

As with most states of being, there are different degrees of disorganization. One can think of a continuum from very organized to severely disorganized. Chronic disorganization, however, is considered to be a different situation altogether.

People who are chronically disorganized likely live in a state of severe disorganization. They do not typically respond to conventional organizing practicies and strategies no matter how hard they try to make them work. They have three difining features as identified by Judith Kolberg in Conquering Chronic Disorganization:

  • They have been disorganized all or most of their adult life;
  • Being disorganized negatively effects their quality of life in some way everyday; and
  • Previous attempts to be organized have not been successful.

Chronically disorganized people think, learn and organize in ways that are unconventional and therefore conventional organizing strategies do not work for them. Fortunately Judith Kolberg and a number of colleagues have made it their business to understand how to help individuals with chronic disorganization. She founded the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization which now provides education to professional organizers and related individuals on working with those who suffer from chronic disorganization.

So if you think you may be chronically disorganized check out the

NSGCD website. The professional organizer directory on both Professional Organizers in Canada and National Association of Professional Organizers includes identification of those who specialize in this area.

You don’t have to live with your disorganization.

Organizing Challenges
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