When Andy Warhol died 22 years ago, he left behind 610 boxes filled with trash and treasures.  Only 19 have been opened and cataloged.

He had his reasons. He called the boxes time capsules. Some were “collections.” They would be valuable some day, he mused. They reflected the times for history, he said. They … and on and on his reasons supported his obsessions.

But his home became a warehouse. He had to pay for extra storage. All in all he dedicated a great deal of his life to the acquisition of unproductive stuff. Those of us who have walked anywhere close to this way of life ourselves or have watched others know the emptiness of its promises. Wonderful personhood becomes buried under worthless possessions.

Andy Warhol made his choices. Fortunately we can make ours as well, warned by Andy Warhol’s negative example.

 Look, I know that when we live together we all have our workaday jobs that keep the household going. You take out the trash I have contributed to and I cook dinner for us all. That kind of shared work is good.

But when one person makes extra work for another, that’s a big no-no. Like when I have to hunt for the Band-Aids™ while bleeding or the hammer because you have not put it back.

I have two valuables I will not allow to be pilfered away from me — time and energy.  When I have to pick up your dropped towel or clear your plate out of the living room, I use up a little of both. Oh, not very much but day after day it adds up.

My time and energy are the warp and woof of my life. When, like a vampire sipper, you drain my day of both, my life is diminished.

Somewhere in the world there is a list of things that are universally acknowledged as “unfair.” One of the very clear and important ones is this, “One person should not do things that make extra work for somebody else.”

Let’s make a deal.

• If you dirty it yourself, you clean it yourself.

• If you get it out, you put it back where it belongs yourself.

• If you drop it, you pick it up yourself.

• If you mess it up, you straighten it yourself.

I’ll do the same. It’s a deal!

Are you proud of how many activity balls you can keep in the air as you go about your work day.? The news about multitasking is not good, I’m afraid. The more you multitask the less you get done according to recent studies.  The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s college in London found that trying to do two things at once lowers your IQ by ten points during the time of the distraction. This drop is even more than the drop in IQ experienced by marijuana smokers.

Three areas are effected most. Short term memory becomes poorer because the brain never fullly absorbs what is being presented to the distracted person. In addition, it takes longer to finish two tasks when working on them in tandem than to attend to first one and then the other. And finally, the work you do is of poorer quality.

Let’s face it. We all have to multitask (or switchtask) from time to time. It has become a way of life in the modern world. But let’s try not to make it the preferred way of life. Whenever possible concentrate without distraction of phones rings, email bings, or other things.

If you practice concentrating on one thing at a time, you will get more done, remember better, turn out better work, and as a byproduct you will start asking yourself, “What is that strange sense of peace I feel?”

For more information, go to the book, Organizing Your Day, by Sandra Felton and Marsha Sims.

     I was riding in the car when two items of contrast caught my eye along the side of the road. One was an empty paper cup carelessly tossed from a car. The other was a sign from a group that was dedicated to keeping the roadside clean: THIS ROADSIDE PROUDLY MAINTAINED BY (INSERT NAME HERE.)

Umm, I thought. In this world there are two kinds of people: those who throw it down and those who pick it up. There are those who are care-less and those who are care-ful. Apparently those who don’t care about trash on the road do not care about the extra work they cause for others either.

So it is in the house or car or office.  Soap is casualty left to melt on the side of the tub for someone else to clean up. Files in the office are not replaced leaving someone else to search for and return them. Trash is abandoned in the car until somebody cares enough to delitter.

Many of us vacillate between the two. We first are part of the care-less crowd and later return to clean it up. What a wonderful world it would be if we all stepped out of the care-less bunch altogether, joined the care-full group, and had a figurative sign erected over all of our environments stating, THIS AREA PROUDLY MAINTAINED BY (INSERT NAMES HERE.)

How you spend the first eight minutes of any activity you begin will determine how successful you are. These include:

• when you first get out of bed. You can make the bed (2 minutes tops) and probably dress in a total of 8 minutes.

• when you finish a meal. You can clear the table and kitchen into the dishwasher in 8 minutes.

• when you enter the house after work, school, etc. You can put away your things and change into more       comfortable clothes in 8 minutes.

• when you bring clothes from the dryer. You can fold a whole lot of things in 8 minutes.

Even if you don’t finish the job you start during the FIRST eight minutes, the fact that you used those initial important minutes with determination will usually propel you to move successfully forward with the rest of the job. It sets your mind on the right course.

Net result : Committing to that kookie idea of a successful eight minute start will bring lots of organizing sanity to the rest of your day.

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^®.