She was 17, sweet, and helpful. She was the child of a friend of a friend and I had never met her. She was no professional organizer though she said shyly later on, “I like to clean.” But when she left my house two and a half hours after she came on this Saturday morning, my office had been transformed.

I had been looking for a teen to help me get over an organizational hump in my house. I had tried to do the job on my own. In the past I had made little vows. I had set aside time to do it. I - well what does it matter what I had done to try to get the office cleaned up. It was still a mess.

The fact is the job had gotten too big for me to tackle alone. Like many who give in to avoidance, I had let my office/store room/cat litter box room get out of control. The rest of the house was feeling it. Papers that I should have filed were in a pile in my bedroom because it was easier than negotiating the way to the filing cabinet.

I had been trying to get started for some time. Visitors are often the catalyst for getting on the organizing ball. Now my son and family were coming for a four day visit. Because I am The Organizer Lady™ I knew where a big part of the answer lay — bring in outside help.

I wanted her for three hours but her mom got lost driving her to my house so our time was shortened somewhat. When we first stepped into the office I reverted back to my old panic mode. And then I mentally switched into a place of power. I called on the organizing approaches I had learned as I had clawed my way into order and finally become (drum roll, please), “The Organizer Lady™”!

Rule Number One - Have supplies ready. I had two “magic white boxes” made up, a bag for charity giveaways, and a trash bag. (See a picture of them on www.organizerlady.com products page.

Rule Number Two - Recall that the goal is to clear surfaces. The biggest surface is always the floor so I started there.

Rule Number Three - Get started. So as I directed she recorded giveaways for tax deductions. I got rid of several “good” things that were no longer good for me, like a label maker and a calculator with paper that recorded on paper. She threw away great stacks of paper like magazines, a journal I had written years ago and moved on from, newsletters, and the like. I’m sure they were wonderful but not as wonderful as the space and control I derived from discarding them. None of us can keep everything that is “good.” She placed Valentine decorations in a white box and stored the rest in their proper places in the office.

After the floor we attacked the surfaces of the desk, file tops, and the like. When all was done I set my little Roomba™ vacuum to work on the floor to finish up the job.

She did all the foot work. I did all the decision making. (Not easy. I had to take a ten minute refreshment break to catch my breath.) In that two and a half hours we made giant strides including hanging three pictures to get them up off of the surfaces we were clearing. Now the room is presentable for my family and I can clear the pile of papers in the bedroom.

Maybe rule number one is really: Do whatever it takes to get overcome disorganization even if it means calling in outside help. When organizing techniques meet an appointment with a fresh-faced teenager, wonderful things can happen.

It’s not easy to do the organizing deed. But it is even harder living with the deed undone. Getting help is the key. Whoo Hoo!

Bad times, sometimes tragic times, come to all of us. How do we face mundane tasks such as organizing our houses in times of loss and devastation when we are distracted by our trauma?

First we give ourselves time to grieve and to recover from our shock. We cannot expect to be able to go on with business as usual when we are experiencing a personal or family tragedy.

It helps to recognize that under stress, weaknesses become exaggerated. In our case, messiness gets worse. Situations like this are when automatic habits come into play. It is beneficial to try to stick to our habits and routine. There is no benefit to us, our families to let things fall apart in our own lives and houses just because things are falling apart elsewhere.

In times of stress, order and serenity in our homes becomes even more important. Organization gives us the support we all need so that we will be able to function in the ways necessary in times of trouble. Participating in mundane tasks can be soothing. We cannot control world events but we can take care of things around the house.

We need to keep our priorities straight. As a concept, organizing is not nearly as important as many other things in life. What it delivers often is.

Many hard working and basically organized women (and sometimes men) find that their chief hindrance in keeping a neat house is their messy family. Maybe our neighbor who also has a family doesn’t seem to have a problem. One of the reasons our neat neighbor can keep a consistently neat house is because they have found solutions to the messy family problem. How do they do it? They do it by loving the subtle order of a beautiful dance.

The relationships in every household work like a dance in which there are unwritten rules by which everybody moves. Each person has a habitual and predictable response to the actions of others. In the organized neighbor’s house, the dance has a graceful look about it with each member moving in conjunction with the other to produce, in the case in point, an orderly and harmoniously run house.

As in the case of dancing, though it may not be obvious, someone is choosing the music and leading the dance. In the case of housekeeping, nine times out of ten that somebody is Momma or “the lady of the house.”

In other households the dance is pretty chaotic. Imagine a Jane Austin type movie in which those dancing the quadrille prance around in disorder stepping on feet and bumping into each other as they go. The dancers don’t know the pattern and there is no leader. In the end, nobody enjoys the dance or wants to do it again. When the housekeeping dance works like this, the house is chronically in a mess. Often the members, who may be dancing vigorously, can’t figure out why their house is cluttered and the neighbor’s is consistently neat.

If your fam is a big part of your housekeeping problem, concentrate on teaching them the dance steps and your messy house will clear up like magic. To learn more, read the book, ORGANIZING YOUR HOUSE AND FAMILY, by Sandra Felton available on www.messies.com)

(Taken from an upcoming book by Sandra Felton, “Why Is Her House So Neat and My House Is a Mess?”)

Other people seem to do things so much easier than we do. They accomplish goals with aplomb. Or as Judith Kolberg puts it, they have a way of getting “from here to there” with ease while we Messies struggle to finish up multiple half done projects leaving the pieces cluttering up our homes and offices.

But why the difference?

Judith Kolberg, expert on chronic disorganization, shared some of the reasons in a recent teleclass with me. In a nutshell she suggests that those who accomplish goals easily do so because they can:

• Organize in an efficient and systematic way.
• Can plan and achieve a goal.
• Have a working memory

Among the suggestions we discussed is to get outside help when necessary, write and refer to steps crossing them off as you go, posting priority goals in a prominent place until achieved, and, of course, using the Messies Anonymous battle cry habit of STOW AS YOU GO!

(See Judith’s article available on SquallPress.net)

For more help in accomplishing goals, go to www.messies.com and sign up for a daily encouragement from me, Sandra Felton, The Organizer Lady™.

“God give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed; Courage to change the things that should be changed; And the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”
Reinhold Niebuhr (Original Serenity Prayer)

Let’s look at this prayer, the original from which the shorter version used by most Anonymous groups was adapted. Let’s start from the end and work back to the beginning.

In this prayer we ask for three things:

1. First we need WISDOM of discernment as we look at our struggle with clutter. What actions should we take? What should we accept as a part of the situation which will not change, at least for now?

2. Perhaps most of all we need COURAGE to change the things in our life that bog us down. Sometimes that means changing ourselves. Concentrate on those things that we can alter.

3. Finally we need GRACE or SERENITY to accept things that are out of our control. Don’t waste time and energy on these.