Latest Blog Posts
Spring is in the air
Perhaps Spring Cleaning should be thought of as Winter Clean up. To make your life easier start by sorting through the things you are going to store for next winter. If they are:
- broken, get rid of them
- if they were not used donate them
- if you have outgrown their use, clothing or toys, donate them
Sometimes donation sites will not take winter items in the spring. If you are finding it hard to donate your winter items, box them up and label them to donate next winter. When you see those items next winter they will be ready to leave your house making your life easier.
Now that your space is empty and ready for spring and summer items apply the same rules:
- if they are broken, get rid of them
- if you didn’t use them last year donate them
- if you have outgrown their use, clothing or toys, donate them
Donate these items early in the season so donation sites can sell them when people are looking for these types of items.
Finally, you have the things you want to use this spring. Store them close to where you use them for example,
- gardening items can be stored in the garage, a shed or near the backdoor
- patio items, dishes, candles, table cloths, and napkins can be all stored together so it is easy to entertain
- toys for playing with outside, chalk, bubbles, sand toys, trucks, bikes, scooters can be stored so it is easy for children to get them and put them away without help. This makes cleaning up before they come inside quick and easy.
Make your life easy by keeping only the things you need and love and find the best spot to store them so you can get them out quickly and put them away easily.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home and office. She guides and supports you in managing your time. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
MIND OVER CLUTTER is offering a free 30-minute Virtual Organizing Session.
Here’s how it works:
1. We book a virtual appointment with a video chat over Zoom or send me photos or a video and chat on the telephone
2. You show me your home office or another part of your home.
3. I recommend solutions for your organizing dilemmas.
Contact me to take advantage of this free introductory offer or book a time online.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
For clients who wish to do the “hands on “organizing themselves I offer support services through virtual organizing. In order to keep the process simple only one room will be discussed at a time. There will be an initial session cost for each room to be organized.
Initial Session
The initial session costs $100.00. It consists of an intake conversation, about one space, over the phone or Zoom or e-mail lasting about 15 minutes. It is followed by or at the same time, sharing with me a visual look at the space to be organized. The client can e-mail me pictures or can show me the space over Zoom. If the client wishes, they can send me a description of their challenges. I will e-mail a plan of action to the client. After the client has studied the plan a question and answer conversation will occur to clarify the plan and establish a timeline for the project. This session will last about 15 minutes. Once a timeline has been established for the project one of two options may be selected.
Option 1
The client will work on the project and will e-mail me pictures or set up a Skype call as needed to help them solve problems, clarify the next step, receive storage suggestions or donation and recycling information. This system works well for people who manage their time well and are motivated to get the job done. The cost of option 1 is $10.00 for each half hour consultation requested by the client. A retainer of $30.00 is paid in addition to the initial session cost at the beginning of the job. Additional retainers can be purchased as needed.
Option 2
The client will e-mail me the day and time they will be working on the job. I will e-mail, Skype, text or call each hour to see what assistance they need in order to successfully complete the work scheduled for that day. This system works well for people who are easily distracted or procrastinate in getting the space organized. The cost of option 2 is $5.00 for 5 minutes each hour. For example, if the client is planning to work from 12:00-3:00 on the job then I will contact them at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and the cost of the session in $15.00. A retainer of $30.00 is paid in addition to the initial session cost at the beginning of the job. Additional retainers can be purchased as needed.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
Find the motivation and you can learn it.
How can some people learn to be better housekeepers? The optimal word is learning. Keeping a house organized is a skill that can be learned like any other skill, reading, skiing, or social media. There needs to be a motivation to want to learn this new skill. If you can decide that adding organization to your life will make you feel less anxious about your home, provide you with a system that allows you to get everything done and still have time for yourself or live in a space that you love and enjoy you can take on the task of being less messy. So here are 3 tips:
- Schedule everything. Decide when you will do each of the household tasks you are responsible for eg, laundry, grocery shopping, bill payments, meal preparation, driving children, cleaning, and doing the dishes. Look at your week and add it to your schedule and consider it an appointment with yourself and complete the task.
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Treat all tasks as an appointment with yourself
- Make the space look better than when you started working in it. The old saying “if you get it out put it away” works. Don’t set it down; put it back, in the desk drawer, in the dishwasher, in the laundry hamper, or in the refrigerator. In addition, put one more thing away too. This helps you to slowly get rid of the “mess”. You are not creating more mess and you are reducing any mess that has accumulated. Your space will continue to look better.
If you take it out, put it away and one other thing as well
- Get help to be successful. You may find you don’t have time to do it all yourself. Delegate it to other family members. At first, it may take longer to get things done as they learn how to do things. Stick with it and soon it will no longer be your responsibility. Hire help for the things that are the most difficult for you to complete. You may want a cleaning service, lawn care service, share carpooling for your children or Professional Organizers. Consider your budget; you may not be able to have them come every week but what if one service came each week?
You may not be able to do it all yourself so get some help
At the end of each month you would have most things under control with the help of your scheduling, putting things away as you use them and involving others in sharing the work. Tell me how you become better at keeping your house in order.
If you need help establishing routines to keep your home organized and clean book a complimentary 30 minute chat with me.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Click here to learn more about her online course Create an Organized Home.
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
In October 2015 Professional Organizers in Canada celebrated their 15th National Conference in Toronto. Often times people look at the cost of a conference and decide it is not worth going. There are 6 reasons to go to a conference.
1. Grow Your Business
You will learn new information and other peoples’ perspectives on the information. We had great speakers that taught us about marketing our business with speaking for Success by Sarah Hilton, Marketing for Success by Sarah Buckwalter and networking and volunteering to grow your business by Mary Dystra
2. Learn new Online Skills
Social media changes quickly. Whether through a session or while networking you can gain tips to help you better understand social media. We had the opportunity to learn about blogging from Janet Barclay, and apps and online tools from Samantha Kristoferson
Social media can be a challenge
3. Become Better at Your Profession
Go to learn new skills and niches in your profession. We learned about the specialized skills we need to do Digital Photo Organizing by Lisa Kurtz, to work with Special Needs’ Clients and Their Families by Leslie Josel and Dr, Regina Lark and to know how to help Clients with Traumatic Illness & Injury by Lisa Mark and Maureen DeGarmo
Leslie Josel also works with students
4. Become Passionate about What you Do
Having a passion for your profession helps to make you the best you can be at what you do. Sometimes you lose that passion. Spending time with liked minded people at a conference can spark that passion again. Lisa Layden helped us to discover our Big Visions and Big Dreams and Elaine Quinn focused on Secrets to Loving our Business. Val Low helped us to move from being Unfocused to Unstoppable
Lisa has courses on her website to help grow your business
5. Become Involved in Your Association
When you attend a conference you get a glimpse into what is needed to run a professional association. You can see how becoming involved in growing your profession helps you to grow as a person and develop skills. Carolyn Caldwell and Elinor Warkentin helped to develop a model on how to make ethical decisions.
6. Have Fun
Getting outside your comfort zone meeting new people, visiting a new city and trying new things can be fun. We had the opportunity to get a massage from the students at Trillium College Toronto, see the Blue Jays at the Rogers Center or Nathan Phillips Square, and enjoy shopping and restaurants. The conference is about people and building relationships in the way that works best for you.
Let me know why you attend conferences.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually through Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home and office. She guides and supports you in managing your time. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
Where are those 2 special boxes?
When you are moving pack 2 boxes that has everything you need for moving day and the first night. Keep these 2 boxes with you and not in the moving truck. These boxes should include:
- Glasses – plastic or glass for drinks or water.
- A roll of paper towels
- A roll of toilet paper for each bathroom
- A bar of soap or container of liquid soap for the bathroom
- A hand towel in the bathroom
- Dishcloth, dish soap and tea towel for cleaning dishes that maybe dusty from moving
- Sheets for the bed and pillows so you can go to sleep at the end of a long day moving in
- Towels for a shower and basic cosmetics to clean up after the move
- Chargers for your phone, tablet and computer
It is handy to pack a pail of basic cleaning supplies so you can do a quick clean before things are unpacked. Bring:
- Cloths
- All purpose cleaning supplies
- Broom and dust pan
- Mop
- Pack it all in a pail
With these things easily accessible you can clean up and get a good nights rest before you continue to unpack and make your new place a home.
Harold Taylor’s, Taylor Time Newsletter June 2015 gave this great advice on storage space. I hope you enjoy it.
If you have more drawer space in your dressers and cabinets than you need, the number of items stored there will increase to fill the space available (Parkinson’s Law).
When you sort through your belongings and donate or scrap the sweaters, blouses, scarves and other clothing items you never use, re-purpose the drawer for those non-clothing items that are causing your closets and other storage areas to overflow. You are re-purposing when you use closet hangar space to hang a shoe holder to free up floor space, or when you remove the bottom shelves of a linen closet to store your golf clubs or use a kitchen drawer to house your toolkit. Don’t feel that you have to use all storage areas for the purpose they were originally intended.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
Harold Taylor is a time management specialist. This article appears in his June 2015 Taylor Time newsletter. Contact him to get on his mailing list and receive other great information on organizing time and space. Harold Taylor Time Consultants Inc | info@taylorintime.com
Slow decision-making wastes time, as do spur-of-the-moment decisions, which usually result in costly and time-
consuming mistakes. But the worst thing you can do is procrastinate in decision-making. Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, once conducted a survey of successful people and found all of them were decisive. Don’t be afraid of being wrong. We learn from our mistakes; but if we do nothing, we neither accomplish anything nor learn anything.
Delay until you have enough information, but don’t wait until you have all the information. If you have all the information, the course of action becomes a foregone conclusion: no real decision is necessary. Have the courage to make decisions with only 70% to 80% of the facts. When you have mulled over the facts and considered, the alternatives, sleep on it. Decisions are usually better after a good night’s sleep.
Spend time in proportion to the importance of the decision. For instance, don’t waste a lot of time discussing the menu for the staff Christmas party. The decision to close down an operation or expand the product line warrants a greater expenditure of that costly commodity called time. Make minor decisions quickly. If the consequence of the decision is not important, it is not worth much of your valuable time.
If the decision is yours alone to make, and you seem to get bogged down in the process and get frustrated by your lack of progress, it’s frequently faster, in the long run, to leave the problem for a short period of time. Work on some unrelated jobs for a few hours or even a few days and then tackle the problem anew. The change in pace will revitalize your thinking. But delay it only once or you will be tempted to procrastinate.
Always make short-term decisions with long-term objectives in mind. Don’t make a band-aid decision that solves the immediate problem, but results in time-consuming problems further down the road.
And above all, don’t waste time on past decisions. Instead of saying “If only I had done such and such,” say instead, “Next time I will ..”
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Click here to learn more about her online course Create an Organized Home.
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/4473565014″>Well, that’s perplexing…</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
There are many networking groups available to business people to make connections with potential clients and 
businesses. Groups meet for breakfast, lunch or supper. Some groups have an educational component. Most networking groups are based on building relationships with the members of the group so to be successful choose a group that you can attend regularly for two years. If you are looking for a networking group go to the Meetup.com site to find a group in your area.
Some people do find that they don’t have enough time in their day to exercise. Here are 2 ways to combine networking and exercise.
1. Netwalking – Instead of meeting for a coffee, meet while walking. During the good weather walk outside during cooler weather, walk inside on a track, at a mall or along hallways. Most malls open early and have mall walking programs.
2. Sweatworking – Fitness clubs are starting networking groups. In this environment, you naturally have a common interest, health and exercise. This is a more relaxed atmosphere to build relationships with other networkers. Here is a great article describing sweat working. http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2015/06/01/sweatworking-the-new-way-to-advance-your-career/2/
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
It starts again on July 1, 2015
You may remember that in April I joined the Ultimate Blogging Challenge where you blog every day for a month. I started out great for the first 10 days feeling like I had some fun content. The suggestions they sent as part of the resources were somewhat helpful. I had forgotten about blogging about books. They suggested blogging about fun days and so I talked about the world figure skating championships. However, as time went on my business got very busy and I felt like I didn’t have interesting content so I blogged less. I am glad I tried this experiment because:
1. It is not for me, once a week is a good time frame for me. I can keep up with the schedule and I have content I am proud to share
2. I discovered that my new blog had not been set up the way I thought and articles were not being shared with my social media sites. Since I was blogging regularly I noticed the change and got it corrected.
3. I received 30 different ideas for blogging. Most were personal rather than business topics but they are excellent for brainstorming new ideas and new approaches to blogging.
So overall I think the experiment was valuable. Give it a try, it starts again on July 1, 2015 and let me know how it went for you.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, coaching you virtually using Zoom. She has been working with clients since 2006 to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situations. She uses her love of teaching to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. She guides and supports you to be accountable for your time, to complete projects and to reach your goals. If you’re in a difficult transition Julie can coach you to break-free of emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms. Online courses are available to help instruct, coach and support your organizing projects. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Contact her at julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Twitter – Facebook – Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
