Some people’s workspace is for studying, some people are working from home, some are attending school virtually. My guest blogger this month is the Custom Writing Team.
According to recent studies, it can take up to twenty minutes to get focused again after getting distracted. Finding and organizing the perfect working/studying space may be the best solution for you.
Proper arrangement of stationery, a comfortable chair and desk, and the absence of clutter and distractions may significantly boost your productivity. Even the colour of your walls and accessories impact the learning process too!
To help you organize your workspace, we have prepared nine great tips, outlined in the infographic below. Check it out and make your room comfortable and inspiring!
Did Custom-Writing miss anything? Comment on what you would add as tip number 10.
If you need help creating, redesigning or organizing your work/study space contact julie@mindoverclutter.ca
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. 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 physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and 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. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Meal planning can seem like a difficult chore. I am going to talk about 4 ways to simplify your menu planning. Organizing your menu will give you a healthier diet, save money on food and create a relaxed mealtime.
Shuffle the Deck
Make menu planning into a game. Compile recipes for 20 to 30 easy-to-prepare main dishes and the same number of side dishes and desserts. Cut them out of magazines, download them the internet. Get together with friends and each bring 10 recipes and share them.
1. Put each recipe on a 5 x 8 card, noting any special ingredients that require a stop at a specialty shop.
2. File all the recipe cards in a card box.
Each week:
1. Select your required number of main dishes.
Mix and Match side dishes to give each meal a new appearance
2. Mix and match them with side dishes and desserts.
Meal Planning can be easy if you make it into a game
Your menu is complete.
Plan a month of meals
I like to plan a month of meals and then take the plan and repeat it for 6 months. I find there are different meals made in the winter than in the summer. Make one menu plan for the colder months and one menu plan for the warmer months. Each year review it, add a few new items. The easiest way to do this is to write down everything you make for one month. Now you have a plan. You might want to look through books, or websites and collect ideas. I used to do my planning while I was waiting for one of my children to finish a sports practice. With this system, you will only eat each item 6 times. If you didn’t plan the menu I think there would be some meals you would eat a lot more times than just 6.
Plan using a grid
I like to make a grid with categories across the top. The categories might be based on food, ways of cooking or time limits. It may be a combination of these categories. When my kids were at home, I needed some meals to be ready quickly because they came home and left for work or a sport. Other days I would arrive home from work later so I prepared supper in a crockpot.
Under each category (column), you fill in meal ideas, record where to find the recipe and if there are any unusual ingredients that need to be put on the grocery list.
Each week you read across (row) and you have your menu and your grocery list. This provides lots of variety in the menu and it is adaptable to your needs each week.
As my children got older one of the categories became new food. After the new meal, we would evaluate it and see if it stayed on the grid or was voted off. If it stayed on the grid, it would be move to the appropriate category, after all, it isn’t a new meal anymore.
The other ideas lent themselves to paper. I like paper because you can post it in the kitchen and everyone knows what is for supper and can help. Apps are wonderful. You can select your menu and the app will generate the shopping list. Big Oven is one of many apps.
Breakfast and Lunch
You can plan your breakfast and lunch menus in the same way. I find those meals to be more repetitious and easy to just have groceries on hand and let people decide what they feel like. I always make more supper servings than are needed at the meal (2-4 more) so they are available for lunches and late night snacks for the hard-working athletes in the home. Sometimes I would remove those extra servings before the group sat down to supper.
However you like to plan, paper or digital or a combination use your plans over and over. Do the planning once a month, twice a year or yearly. Take the stress out of “what’s for supper” and you will end up spending less money eating out, less money wasting food and less time worrying.
Coupon Tip
If you like clipping coupons, write your shopping list on the back of an envelope, and stuff the envelope with the appropriate coupons.
Leaving the decision about what to eat for the last minute makes every meal stressful. Do you like menu planning? If you want help book a virtual menu planning meeting with me.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. 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 physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and 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. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
You wake up in the morning motivated and ready to tackle whatever it is you’ve been procrastinating on. Or maybe you’re excited about a new project. You drink your coffee, get dressed, and get ready to get to work. Then something happens.
Maybe you open your email, or worse Facebook and get sucked into spending the next few hours on your computer. Or maybe a good friend calls and asks you to go shopping. Or you get an alert that your favorite TV show dropped on Netflix. It doesn’t matter what it is, the point is that there are people and things that will try to distract you into procrastinating. If you let them.
Strategy – plan the night before
There’s a simple strategy you can use to keep this from happening. It’s to make the important project you’ve been procrastinating on a priority and working on it first thing every morning. The whole process starts the night before. Before you call it a day, sit down and make a simple plan for what you want to get done the next day. Identify the three most important tasks. This will be things that start to move the needle. Maybe they are all focused on one main project, maybe it’s several things you know you should be getting done.
Write 3 things down
Write these three things down. They don’t have to be anything big. In fact, I find it helpful if they are all items I can take care of in an hour or less. When you get up in the morning or get to your office, look at your list and work on these three most important tasks before you do anything else. Don’t look at the email. Don’t start playing on your phone. If possible don’t even answer the phone or attend meetings before these three tasks are taken care of. Make them your number one priority.
Aside from that, simply being more aware of what things, devices, and people tempt you to procrastinate is helpful. When you find yourself putting something off, look back and see if you can pinpoint what caused it. Then take action towards preventing it from happening in the future.
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, book a complimentary 30 minute coaching appointment to discuss how to increase your productivity and reduce your procrastination.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. 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 physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and time. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
Are you a procrastinator? Many of us have the tendency to put things off and no matter how often we beat ourselves up over waiting to the last minute to pack for a move, declutter our home, or file our taxes and struggle to get it all done in time, we keep doing it again and again. If you’re ready to finally beat procrastination and get ahead of the game, you’re in the right place.
Forgiveness
Over the course of seven blog posts, I’m going to share my best tips and strategies for overcoming procrastination with you and we start today with – Forgiveness. I know it seems like a strange place to start, but it’s an important first step. Here is why forgiving yourself for procrastination should always be the first step.
There’s nothing you can do about the past except learn from it. Beating yourself up about not following the plan you made for reaching a goal does you no good. Quite the opposite actually. If you stress yourself out and engage in negative self-talk, you make it worse. Those feelings of anxiety will enforce your habit to procrastinate again the next time.
The next time you find yourself procrastinating, tell yourself that it’s okay. It’s not the end of the world. Say it out loud and then promise yourself to try to do better. Trying is the important keyword here. You’re working on mastering new skills and changing a habit. That takes practice, time, and of course failing again and again. It’s part of the learning process.
You may feel frustrated at times about your lack of progress. It’s normal. If you can, tap into that frustration and use it to motivate you. Vow to try again and do better. Look at your mistakes. What caused you to procrastinate this time? Learn from it and you will start to do better.
Learn from your failings and start again
Maybe there’s a big task and you started strong, chipping away at it a little at a time. Then you missed a day and another. That’s okay. Not great, but okay. You did well for a while. It’s good practice and maybe this particular experience taught you that you can’t allow yourself to skip more than one day on an ongoing project.
There’s always something new to learn whenever we fail at something or slip back into a bad habit. At the very least we figure out that something isn’t working for us. Maybe you do better with three or less to-do’s per day. Maybe you need twenty-five so there’s always something to check off. You won’t know until you try.
Forgive yourself for procrastinating so you can move on and practice some more.
If you need help to get back on track with your project try a virtual organizing appointment. Virtual organizing allows me to support your organizing projects by providing planning, coaching and mentoring while both remaining safely at home.
Book a 30 minute complimentary virtual organizing appointment.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Some people say they don’t need very much sleep. Recently a super sleep gene was found. Only about 5% of people have it. It allows their body to cycle through the REM and non REM sleep cycles more quickly so the person feels more rested in a shorter amount of time. Unfortunately, about 30% of people report only needing 4 hours of sleep a night. So about 25% of those people would benefit from more sleep. Harold Taylor is a time management expert. He publishes a newsletter, Taylor Time Newsletter. The August edition has a great article on sleep and time management.
by Harold Taylor Work Smarter is more about Timing then Technology
What are sleep cycles?
When we sleep, we do so in approximately 90-minute cycles throughout the night, each cycle consisting of five stages – four stages of non-REM sleep (about 75% to 80% of our sleep time) and one stage of REM sleep (about 20% to 25% of our sleep time.)
The first REM stage begins about 90 minutes into our sleep and then the cycle begins again about every 90 minutes until we wake up.
Scheduling your worktime and projects
What most people don’t realize is that these 90-minute “sleep cycles” run through the entire day. We obviously don’t sleep during the day if we have slept sufficiently during the night, but the cycles become waves of high and low energy and are referred to as ultradian rhythms. Our internal clocks are critical to our personal performance as well as our health and well-being. Our body has many internal “clocks,” each operating independently but in constant communication with one another.
I have always known that I was more productive working in sixty or ninety-minute chunks of time, and I suggested all kinds of reasons for it – such as it was the maximum amount of time I could work without having to be interrupted or even interrupting myself. But I never knew until recently that ultradian waves of high and low alertness had actually been identified. One study of young violinists back in 1993 revealed that the best violinists all practiced the same way – in the morning in three segments of no more than 90 minutes with a break between each segment. The same thing was noticed among other musicians as well as athletes, chess players and writers.
I recommend that people find their high energy time in the morning and start working on their top priority items for about 90 minutes. Then take a break of about 15 or 20 minutes before starting the next task. Following the second 90-minute work session there should be a break of at least an hour before resuming. (This could be lunch and a brief walk.) It will take time to get into the right pattern. You have to listen to your body to determine the best start time and the actual duration of your high-alertness cycle.
Breaks are important too
You don’t necessarily have to take a coffee break, go for a walk or do stretches during your breaks as long as you switch to a different type of task. There are three basic types of activity – mental, physical and emotional. If you have been working on a mental task requiring intense concentration such as writing a business proposal, a switch to cleaning your work area, filing or checking messages on Twitter or Facebook for twenty minutes might be just as relaxing to the mind as a twenty-minute chat at the coffee center.
Use your natural body rhythms to be more efficient
The problem is that people have been fighting their natural body rhythms by feeding it coffee and other stimulants and therefore developing inefficient working habits. They have likewise short-circuited their natural sleep cycles with late nights, artificial lighting and stimulating electronics.
Contact www.taylorintime.com to subscribe to his newsletter
Virtual organizing allows me to support your organizing projects by providing planning, coaching and mentoring while both remaining safely at home.
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Here is an excerpt from a great article on why we procrastinate and tips on how to stop procrastinating.
“You know how it goes. One part of your brain says –
“Stop procrastinating. Just get on with it. Finish it!”
But then another part screams-
“But I don’t want to!”
Ziegarnik effect
It may not be anything major, but the task keeps niggling at the back of your mind. It can leave you feeling unsettled, slightly annoyed and stressed. Here’s the thing: you can’t be fully at peace until you complete the task. Why? Because the Ziegarnik effect is in full swing. The Ziegarnik effect is the tendency we have to worry about something we have started and haven’t yet finished. But if you can just get it done, your brain will breathe a sigh of relief. You will feel lighter. Chances are you will have turbocharged energy levels too.”
There are tasks or projects that needs to be completed and they are getting put off to the side and nothing is being done. Many times the problems is that you don’t know what to do. Break the task or project in smaller pieces that so you can start on the things your know how and complete them. As you continue you will find the parts you are not sure how to handle. When you have determined the part that is outside your knowledge, ask for help, do research or delegate to someone with that expertise. Let procrastination be a trigger to look at the situation as a problem solving question instead of an activity you don’t like to do.
For tips and articles to help you organize your mind and space join Julie’s Facebook group Organizing Mind and Space
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Here is a short excerpt from an article by Harold Taylor. Harold Taylor is a time management and productivity expert.
Change your environment in some way to offset your natural inclination to avoid doing things you don’t like.
You can minimize destractions:
turn off your cellphone,
disengage voicemail,
turn off email alerts and
close your office door at specific times while you work on your priority projects.
image by Jason-Salmon
You can minimize visual distractions:
remove all clutter and other potential distractions from your immediate work area
including any in-baskets, they give you an excuse to chat with the person dropping off paper
don’t have family photos or memorabilia in your line of sight
face a blank wall, not a window or open doorway.
You can set-up a work schedule:
Work on projects for 60 or 90 minutes at a time – maximum.
Then change to another type of work for 15 minutes
Work on a project for 60-90 minutes
Then take a 30 minute break, doing something completely different from your previous work
Work for 60 monre minutes on a project
If you find that’s too long to postpone urges to interrupt yourself, shorten the work sessions. You can always increase them gradually later. Between sessions you can check email, return phone calls and grab a coffee. Work in short sprints rather than attempt marathons. Research shows that it takes a lot of energy to practice willpower.
Resist the temptation to interrupt yourself
Do what you can to develop a work environment that makes it easier to resist the temptation of interrupting yourself or others, checking email constantly, grabbing for your smartphone whenever there’s a call or being distracted by other things.
To subscribe to his monthly newsletter on Time Management go to www.taylorintime.com
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
My favourite time management technique is to know when I will have a WiFi connection and when I won’t. Yes, there are still times and places when I can’t get WiFi. Use data? Not me. For those time I plan to have work with me to do when I am unconnected. You might think, “when does that ever happen”, more often than you think:
When I arrive early at a client’s home
When I arrive early to pick up someone
When the person I am pickup arrives late
When the client is late
When the distance between appointments and returning to the office will cause me to waste time commuting, I find a quiet location to work instead of wasting my time driving.
Plan your time
I will have a book along to read to do some professional education, mail to open or start on my e-mail that I downloaded before I left for the call. Sometimes I am reviewing a speech I am presenting, signing holiday cards, planning my week/ month or getting in my exercise by going for a walk. Using these small expected or unexpected amounts of time well will make you more productive. I learned this technique by trial and error. I found myself sitting around waiting with nothing to do when my children were involved in activities. I quickly realized that I was wasting a lot of time and needed to plan my “spare time” as well as my work time to be able to get everything accomplished without using my family time or free time to get things completed.
Manage yourself
Time management is not about managing time it is about managing yourself. There are traps we fall into that cause anxiety and stress because:
we are late,
we don’t meet deadlines,
we miss meetings,
we are unavailable for important personal events
Determine what “traps” cause you to miss mange your behaviour making you late. Are they:
doing one more thing that makes you late
underestimating how much time you need to get ready and leave ( the house, for a meeting)
thinking your time are more important than the people’s time who are waiting for you (to arrive, hand in a report), they won’t mind waiting
procrasting on projects, reports and committments instead of looking for a solution to be able to complete the task on tim
I can help you manage your time and streamline your routines to increase your productivity. Give me a call or text 905-321-1616
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Place all paper in one location, don’t let it travel all over the home
Open mail and discard the envelop and advertising
Schedule a time to file, make calls, pay bills etc
2. Make a decision on each paper the first time you touch it
If it can be done in 60 seconds or less to it now, otherwise R.A.F.T it
Set up 3 files, bins or trays and sort your paper into:
R – read later
A – action required
F – file
T – toss it / shred it now
3. Follow through on work
Each time you pick a sheet of paper put a small dot on the top corner.
Three dots or more means it is time to take action on that piece of paper.
If you are procrastinating about what to do, it probably means you are not sure how to solve the problem in the paperwork. Ask for advise, designate it to someone else, research the issue or break it into smaller parts you can complete.
4. Be ruthless
80% of what is filed is never accessed again, so 80% or more of the paper you receive on a daily basis can be discarded
Clear out your files once or twice a year
Remove yourself from subscription lists
5. Think before you print
File e-mails in a folder on the computer
Print only the selection of the e-mail or webpage you need
6. Store inactive files in boxes indicating a destroy date
7. Follow retention guidelines
Retain files as specified by your company or accountant
Put inactive files in boxes and place them in storage indicating a destroy date on the box
Clear out outdated files
For more great office organizing ideas read “Don’t Agonize Organize Your Office” by Diane A Hatcher
If you need help with your paper organizing book a complimentary discovery organizing session with me. Organizing Session
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
For children of parents who hoard, the mess remains after their parents pass away.
Newsweek by Hannah R Buchdahl
“Greg Martin wasn’t sure what to expect when his mother died last May, forcing him to return to his childhood home for the first time in nearly 18 years. The house, located on a pleasant block in San Diego, had always been cluttered, but now it was virtually uninhabitable. “There were piles as tall as me, six feet or so,” Greg said. “Where there used to be floor, there were trails—a foot and a half high, so you’d be walking on stuff.” Greg was forced to navigate through piles of magazines, papers, and books, plastic bags filled with thrift-store purchases, expired medicine bottles and literally tons of clothes. The only “living space” was a small pocket by the front door, where his mother, a colorful and fiercely independent woman, had collapsed shortly before her death at the age of 83. Greg, who has taken a leave of absence from his job, expected that cleaning out the house would take six months. It’s now been eight—and counting.”
Relatives are forced to put grief on the back-burner and the emotions that surface are usually anger, frustration, guilt and depression.
Books
This book can help you to better understand hoarding even if you are not a professional organizers.
Everything A Professional Organizer Needs to Know About Hoarding by Judith Kolberg
Clutter Scale
It can help to get information so you better understand the situation. You can download a clutter scale at https://www.challengingdisorganization.org/clutter-hoarding-scale-
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. She enjoys working with her clients to provide customized organizing solutions to suit their individual needs and situation. She reduces clutter, streamlines processes and manages time to help her clients be more effective in reaching their goals. Julie can coach you to break-free of the physical or emotional clutter constraining you from living life on your terms.
Recipient calls or e-mails to book their appointment
3 hours of organizing time.... $150.00
On-line Lifestyle Organizing Coaching leading professionals From Clutter to Freedom Residential Organizing Services for the Region of Niagara, Hamilton, Halton-Peel and Surrounding Area
Julie Stobbe is a Trained Professional Organizer and Lifestyle Organizing Coach who brings happiness to homes and organization to offices, in person and virtually. 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 physical activity to reduce clutter, in your home, office, mind and 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. Get started by downloading Tips for Reorganizing 9 Rooms.
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