Your goals form for Feb is ready over at my site. If you’re already signed up, you will have received the form this morning. Otherwise, when you sign up, it will be delivered to you in the welcome pack.

Happy planning

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On Saturday morning I tried to squeeze something into a cupboard and when it wouldn’t fit, I  just lost it.

I then chucked out stuff like crazy.

Why do I have four huge plastic salad bowls when I only ever use at most two at a time?

I use these ones for baking when it’s a 3 cups of flour or more recipe too, and of late, for my sweet and savoury snack mixes.

And that’s how it went.

I had a pile big enough for two grocery carrier bags on my table and told Nester (our cleaning lady) to please help herself to it all. Or otherwise, to toss!

I’ve been seriously decluttering and organising for just over 6 years now, as long as we’ve been in this house and it was my stinginess that started it.

I actually considered getting a kitchen cupboard built to house all my extra stuff and when they quoted me R5000-odd in those days, I nearly fainted.

But I did have an aha – those things I wanted stored weren’t nearly worth R5000 so why would I pay for storage to house rubbish that I probably wasn’t using anyway.

Let that be some inspiration for you!

What do you need to clear out this week?

PS Organise your home will help kick-start your decluttering journey.

I’ve been teaching my children to pack their own toys away, put things away before they take out new toys, and so on since they were about 12 – 13 months.

Well, I thought it was time to teach them decluttering.

Who would ever have thought I’d say something like they have too many books but they really did.

They had foam books, thick board books and even plastic bath books and material books. Lots of the books have been chewed on and are not looking great at the moment.

So I told them to go through their books and take away the ones they don’t read so I could give it to other kids who don’t have books

They decluttered these four plus two of their absolute favourites, Daniel and David.

I will admit that I was heartbroken when they tossed Daniel and David into the mix. Quite honestly I didn’t think they’d thought it through properly so the books have been in my study.

The next night Kendra asked Dion to read David. They looked through the pile and he said, “did you not give David to the other kids?”

Her little lip started to quiver and this is where I encountered a totally new experience – I have never before had a client cry for things they tossed out.

Then again, this little one is my daughter and I did have the book.

You should have seen the joy on her face when I produced David.

Of course a day or two later Connor asked for Daniel and I whipped it out straight away because I certainly don’t want to hear all that screaming.

These four books will now go because it’s been about 3 – 4 weeks and they haven’t even asked for any of them.

Poor Poppy Cat. This was one of their favourite books when they first started “reading” but I think I miss her more than they do LOL

I think holding onto the books for just a little while may be a good thing to do for kids who may not be fully aware that donate = gone for good.

Do you teach your kids to declutter?

What do you do when you want to hang onto something but they want to toss it?

Organise your home will help you declutter and get your home organised for the new year.

     Rachel R. says

1. How do you stay motivated when the junk you box up to send away never seems to get gone? (I don’t drive, nobody comes out this far) and I’m the only one who seems to care whether or not it leaves, or that something as bad or worse takes its place.

2. Also, ideas for keeping a flighty teen on task – she’s got to learn to do it for herself in her rapidly approaching adult days.

My answers

1. What works for us is as soon as I have a packet or box of something ready, I take it to our cars and put it in the boot there and then.

We donate the kids clothes to an orphanage our church supports and as soon as a bag is ready (big or small) I take it to my husband’s car boot (we always use his car on Sundays.

For things that are miscellaneous (I had a box of old books recently that a friend wanted), I give a deadline and say “if it’s not fetched by such-and-such date (I’m not unreasonable – I give a few weeks), I’m dropping it off at the church”. I think people know I’m serious so they come fetch when they say they will.

An idea for Rachel – keep a post-it note on your door so if anybody comes out your way, you have a visual reminder to ask them to drop your stuff off at the nearest collection place.

2. I am a strong believer in natural consequences. It’s worked for me (when I would sleep longer than I was supposed to in my youth…) and I just believe that the quickest way to get “flighty teens” to stay on task is to let the laws of natural consequences take effect.

When no-one bails you out, you get responsible very quickly!

What do you think? How would you answer Rachel?

PS what do you think of my button?

Two quick reminders for you:

1. Have you registered for Spring into Organising yet?
2. My talk next week Monday at the church is on the 3 Ps of time management – perfectionism, procrastination and people-pleasing.

What are your questions about the 3 Ps? Share in the comments so I can address them.

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This week’s inspiring space is from our favourite organising junkie, Laura.

Laura recently posted how she got ruthless and got rid of three HUGE bags of clothes.

 Pic from Laura’s post

I am inspired because:

• she’s already organised so this took some doing and
• I love how she did the first round and decluttered one bag … and then went at it again and decluttered another two bags.

Now that’s inspiration.

I’m quite good about decluttering my clothes but there are still one or two pants and skirt suits I’m hanging onto once I lose my last 3 kgs

How easy is it for you to declutter your clothes?

When you write a blog like this one, it’s very much a labour of love.

And when you get very little feedback from people you sometimes think you’re not impacting anyone.

After all, there are so many blogs with more perfect pics, tons of comments, better this and that, and whatnot.

(okay, that’s not all hypothetical – that’s all me)

So imagine my sheer pleasure when I received a lovely email today about how a post I wrote last week is making a difference in this lady’s life.

Here is her email:

I want to thank you today for all the inspirational blog posts you do. And not even just those, just being inspirational yourself.

(I considered editing this first paragraph out but darn it, I need some encouragement so in it stays!)

Last night I came home and cracked. I cracked because of how cluttered my home is. I am the only one at home who tries to keep everything organized all the time. When everyone comes home, everyone is always too tired for anything and I have to pick up everything and tidy up. So I cracked.

I realized that the only way to make life simpler for myself at home, is to declutter. The post you did about magazine boundaries came to mind immediately.

“When things get too much, I need to declutter” You said this in that post

So I knew right there and then what I needed to do. I took a number of refuse bags and started with the children’s rooms. Every little toy that was broken was thrown into that bag. Every toy they don’t play with was thrown in another one which I delivered this morning to the nursery school.

I also went through every cabinet in my home and threw away so much stuff that was either broken or things we never used. It felt so great, Marcia. It felt as if a huge stone was rolled off my shoulders. I can breathe again.

This morning my house was so much more organized, clean and calm.

Thanks for being inspirational.

Blackhuff
Jhb, South Africa

She is TOTAL inspiration in the way she just went for it, isn’t she?

And I love the way she describes how she can breathe now that her house is more organised.

Which feelings does an organised space evoke in you?

When you take off just one day from reading blogs and your previously empty reader goes to 120 unread items, you know it’s time to start decluttering.

Well, that’s how I know it’s time to start decluttering.

The thing is…

I typically have a problem letting go. I’d say that on the scale of 1 – 10, where 1 is terrible and 10 is great, I’m about a 3.

• What if they post something super-awesome and I miss it?
• What if there’s the PERFECT organising tip and I don’t see it?
• What if there’s the best crafty idea ever?
• What if I just miss out?

(clearly I think too much)

But I’m going to set myself mini goals.

I already started. From 116 subscriptions I’m already down to 98.

I’m telling myself that somehow, somewhere, if something is meant to find its way back to me (!), I’ll either see it featured on a blog I still read or on Pinterest.

How’s that for positive self-talk?

So how good are you at letting go?

And more importantly, how many do you have in your reader?

Computer clutter has exactly the same effect as physical clutter – it drains your energy, paralyses you and makes you feel overwhelmed and stuck.

Not only that but it also makes your computer run slow so you should schedule regular time (weekly or more frequently) to declutter your computer, even if only for 15 minutes at a time.

Photos

Now that we’ve all gone digital, it’s so easy to snap, snap, snap and then snap some more.

Download pictures regularly (I aim for once a week), delete the bad ones there and then, and save the rest to CD or DVD regularly to free up some space on your computer.

I only print beautiful photos so if I wouldn’t want to print it, I don’t keep it on my computer. If I want to use pics on my blog, I compress them immediately so that they take up 50KB as opposed to 1MB. And I name them meaningfully so I can find them afterwards with just a few clicks.

Blogs

How many blogs are you following in your Google Reader or other feed reader?

Do you know how long you take to read all of those blogs every day?

Take some time to go through your feeds and declutter those you tend to skim over, especially if you do this 3 or more times every week.

Get to know your comfort number. Mine is around 40 – 50 and yet I currently have closer to 100 in my Google Reader.

I know when I start adding more and more blogs without deleting any, I start feeling more and more overwhelmed at the sight of all those unread items so yes, I’m busy decluttering my blogs right alongside you.

My coaching challenge to you

1. Print out this post.
2. Tackle one of these sections every week until they’re all done.
3. Let me know when you do them.

Happy Organising.

Today I want to talk about an area of the office that may just be one of my favourite things to organise – your computer!

Because we can’t see computer clutter as obviously as we can see physical clutter, we often don’t realise it’s there but believe me, it’s still affecting you.

How does it affect you?

When you open your Inbox and feel drained at the sight of all your emails, when your computer runs slow because there are so many photos on there and when you click into your Google Reader and can’t BELIEVE how much some people post because you went through your blogs for 3 hours yesterday and now there are 127 unread items yet again!

Sound familiar?

We’re going to look at 4 places where you can declutter electronically. Today we’re going to look at two and next week we’ll discuss the other two:

Free downloads

We (especially women) like fr.ee things, don’t we? Buy one, get one f.ree sales come to mind… As a result, we download anything and everything we can find that’s for fr.ee.

If it’s fr.ee, it’s got to be good, right?

No, actually, it’s not all good. Not only are you cluttering up your computer but you can’t possibly use all the things that are out there because we live in an information-overload society.

I wish I could say that I’m immune to the addiction to F.REE stuff but I’m not! I am much better than I was but I still find myself entering my email address far too often for my liking.

At one point I had about 6 different grocery shopping lists on my computer (all fr.ee downloads) and 10 different versions of a to-do list. None of them quite worked for me so I made my own and deleted all of them.

Email

Mmmm, email.

My clients need help with email more than any other thing in their office, and paper’s a close second.

That’s because email’s so fast and because we don’t use it correctly. Did you know that for every email you send out, you get at least two emails back?

So how do you know if your emails are a problem?

The quick answer is if you spend more than 30 minutes a day on email.
90% of people waste an extra hour a day on email that they don’t have to. That hour translates to SIX WEEKS a year. You read that right – six weeks!

Get familiar with the delete key (my favourite key on the keyboard) and start deleting. Delete immediately once you’ve replied to an email and don’t file unless you absolutely have to.

Disable all the notifications from social networking sites like Facebook.

I only get friend requests, messages and notes on my wall in my inbox. The rest I’ll see when I choose to log on. (No, I don’t get Facebook on my phone but that’s another article for another day)

Here again, decide on your comfort level for emails and make sure you work your system until you can breathe again. Personally, I set a daily goal of deleting at least 50 items so once I’m done with my inbox, I go through my Sent Items and delete, delete, delete

As a matter of interest, how many emails are in your inbox right now?

Want to reprint this article on your blog or in your newsletter?

You may do so as long as this entire blurb is also included.
Marcia Francois is a time management coach and speaker who inspires busy women to break out of overwhelm, make the most of their time and take purposeful and focussed action so they have the time and freedom to live life to the full. Visit http://purposefultimemanagement.com for your free Time Management Purpose Pack.

You know how there are places in your home that bug you everytime you look at them, but because you don’t see them regularly, they don’t bug you enough to sort them out?

Yes?

Well, that’s my linen cupboard.

In my old house (which I actually need to stop hankering after…except that it had tons more storage than this one) I had space to store linen and towels in each of the bedrooms.

Not so in this house.

When we moved here and started unpacking, I was horrified at how little storage space there was.

I got a few quotes to add extra cupboards here, there and everywhere (mainly the kitchen) and when I saw how much money it would cost, I thought, “no way am I spending money to store more stuff”.

That’s how the decluttering and organising journey began.

And this blog, 5 years ago in 2006

Anyway, so now the babies’ linen and towels are all stored in their room, I have one shelf in the guest bedroom for an extra duvet cover, sheet, pillowcases, set of towels and a thick quilt.

And one cupboard in our bedroom for the rest.

There is also a tiny drawer in the main bathroom for hand towels and bath mats, and another tiny drawer in our room for hand towels for our bathroom, also known as the smallest bathroom in the world.

But let’s show you the main linen cupboard.

Nothing to write home about but that’s the thing.

It doesn’t have to be.

So often we think everything has to be picture perfect to be organised because of the rooms and spaces we see on TV and blogs.

Not so.

Function first and then form.

Also, my own personal organising guideline is if it’s for the inside of a cupboard it can be less pretty than if it’s on show, like on a shelf.

Of course, if you can do pretty on the inside, go for it.

But don’t go and buy lots of pretty things if you have perfectly good and functional boxes/ baskets.

Back to you.

Where do you store your linen? And how much do you have?

Also, do you have any personal organising guidelines?

The first thing I have done to simplify my life is the beginning of the purge. I made a deal with my older son that if we went through all his toys and got rid of anything he didn’t use he would get a prize. In the end we came up with 3 bags full of toys to take to the charity shop.

Starting this week I haven’t bought any unnecessary items into the home. I am endeavoring to use everything up in my fridge before it goes bad by making my lunches and creating meals out of the contents of my fridge.

Emails, wow do I have a lot of them. Just checked my emails and there are 1250 emails that I haven’t deleted or sorted yet. I have begun the process and the way I will do this is to do it every time I get a few minutes during the day. Whilst doing this I am unsubscribing to the mail I don’t want to receive.

I started to de-clutter the area I need to the most, the front door. Here I have simplified my life by creating an area where there is a place for everything. I labeled the shoe rack with everyone’s name so that each of us has a place to put our shoes.

From Shoe and Bag Chaos

To organised launch pad clearly labeled

Looking forward to my next e-mail on how to simplify my life.

WOW, Samantha – I can’t believe the transformation – you are doing a great job. Well done!

Don’t you love Samantha’s front door organising makeover? What’s the last thing you organised in your home?