If you’d like to get more organized or goal focused, you may be interested in our two most popular tools:

• Life MakeOver Journal is your month-by-month tool for setting SMART goals across all important life areas. It helps you organize goal-related actions, diary items, milestones and rewards, and ensure your goals are specific, measureable, achievable, relevant and time-framed.
• For the girls, Life & Goal Organizer is a 360-degree life & goal organizer. There are over 340 pages and more than 150 ready-made action plans across 12 areas to help you get your whole life organized.

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If it’s your goal to boost your
happiness over the next year,
you’ll find some some ideas 
for what to focus on  in the post 

How to be Organized in 2009:
Day 8 – Strategies for Happiness 

at my Get Organized Wizard blog.

Ideas for goals include:

• Creating a happiness mindset
• Strategies for happiness
• Releasing barriers to happiness

You might find other, happiness-related areas to inspire you this year in the organizing your new year’s resolutions series, including Personal Development, Health & Fitness, Fun & Recreation. Managing Technology, Home, Family and Relationships.

Ready to make 2009 the year you organize your happiness?

Picture adapted from image by Aldon.

Have you planned any new year’s resolutions?

I thought you might be interested in a series I’m doing at Get Organized Wizard on The 12 Days of New Year’s Resolutions for Better Personal Organization.

I’m spending 12 days posting ideas for new year’s resolutions you might like to choose for yourself. Each day focuses on a different life area:

Day 1: Personal Development

Day 2: Health & Fitness

Day 3: Career & Work

Day 4: Fun & Recreation

Day 5: Managing Technology

Day 6: Home

Day 7: Personal Presentation

Day 8: Strategies for Happiness

Day 9: Money & Finance

Day 10: Relationships

Day 11: Time Management

Day 12: Partridge in a pear tree Family

We’ve only just started, so now’s the perfect time to come check it out.

Importantly, the focus is on progress, not perfection. As humans we’ll never achieve the latter, but we have a good chance at the former.

Don’t wait to begin your new plans – 2009 is moving quickly. Come on over and join me!

Picture adapted from image by Aldon.

Hello Happiness Strategists!

While working on my new project I’ve missed you, and I’ve missed writing about happiness.

What’ve I been doing? Creating resources for people who want to be more organized, that’s what! Come check it out: www.GetOrganizedWizard.com.

Right now you get a free Personal Planning Pack just for subscribing to the Get Organized Tips newsletter (which costs nothing) – so be sure to sign up.

The Get Organized Tips newsletter offers regular tips, tools & techniques for organizing your whole life. Yep – not just home or family or office, but the entire 360 degrees, including:

• Personal Development
• Health & Fitness
• Career & Work
• Fun & Recreation
• Managing Technology
• Home
• Personal Presentation
• Strategies for Happiness (one of my fave topics!)
• Money & Finance
• Relationships
• Time Management
• Family

The Personal Planning Pack contains 13 goal and project planners, schedules, weekly and daily organizers, master lists, and lots more. These easy-to-print tools are color PDFs – they look great whether printed in color or in black and white.

So don’t miss out!

There’s still lots to do for my new product, but I haven’t forgotten about my Happiness buds – and I have plenty more resources planned for you guys in the future.

Til then, choose to be happy – and you will be.

Ciao for now,
Michele

Step 1: Admit you have a problem and

Step 2: Purge

then you’re probably feeling pretty damned pleased with yourself right now – and rightly so! I can just picture you – basking in that glow of clutterless clarity, clucking derisively at friends still trapped in clutter rebutting, nodding sagely as you flip through the pristine pages of home porn (decorating mags).

But beware! Don’t allow your hard work to go to waste by letting disorder stage a coup d’etat when you’re looking the other way. If you return to old habits it’s only a matter of time before you’re back where you started – and tripping over crap to answer a call from Oprah about appearing in her upcoming Horror Hoarders episode.

So how do you maintain the gain? Well, I’m going to let you in on a secret. There’s a way to keep disarray at bay without hypnosis, or therapy to heal your inner hoarder, or trekking to a meditation master for the secret to simplicity. It’s just one little trick that will make dishevelment a distant memory.

Step 3: The secret to staying clutter-free: OCI-OGO

Ready?

One comes in, one goes out.

That’s the answer. You can never be overtaken by clutter again if you simply stick to this one little rule in your life. It will become a habit fast – and it will let you bypass a lot of soul searching and angst. Just adopt this change and you’ll forever be free of life rubble. For example…

Bought a new handbag or briefcase? Give away an old one.

Got the latest New Scientist magazine? Put Ralph (the articles, I know) in the recycle bin.

Picked up a nifty nik-nak you don’t need? Forget OGO, you need to cut this one off at the OCI stage and return it, drop it off at a charity store or put it in the trash before you even get home. (Put those wasted dollars down to ‘the cost of sanity’.)

Here are some tips for making OCI-OGO a part of your home-life. Most of these are about creating boundaries so that OCI-OGO gets structured into your environment.

Your wardrobe
After you’ve completed Step 2: Purge, discard any leftover hangers. Now, whenever you buy a new outfit, you have to free up a hanger by letting go of something else. It doesn’t have to be ugly or old, it simply has to be something you like less than the other clothes you have.

Your kitchen
Unless you regularly entertain Nobel laureates and international dignitaries on whom world peace may depend, consider having only ‘everyday’ crockery, cutlery and glassware. Choose designs that are attractive, dishwasher- and microwave-safe and available in separates to replace breakages. Have enough to meet general use and get rid of everything else. Use these items until they start to look worse for wear and then replace the lot. This approach spares you time, energy and storage space.

Your reading/music library
Once you have your shelves in their post-purge perfection, keep them that way. As you set off to buy the latest Tori Amos or Ian McEwan, take something from the shelf with you – and don’t bring it home again.

You get the idea – now use it! I promise you it will change your life. From lipstick to lounge chairs, OCI-OGO works at every level to simplify your home – and your life.

Technorati Tags: getting organized,clutter,spring-cleaning,life make-over

Being mired in more paraphernalia than you can handle means your life is constipated. You’re holding onto stuff from the past, overwhelmed with too much stuff in the present, and fighting to forge a clear path into your future. You need a life laxative to release the stodge and ease your pain. It’s time for…

Step 2: Purge

How do you do it? Simple. I call it the three-bags-and-a-basket method and it involves just six simple steps.

1. Start somewhere

Pick a room. Begin somewhere easy so you can take the success with you to more challenging spaces. If a whole room is daunting, begin with your wardrobe, a cupboard, even a drawer. It doesn’t matter. As long as you feel ready to do some clearing, the momentum will take you along.

2. Get receptacle-ready

Collect three large bin liners and a big basket or laundry hamper. It’s a good idea to put an easy-to-read label on each bag so you don’t get confused and can work quickly – momentum is a key part of this process.

The labels are:

• Trash: anything not used/worn in the past 12 months and in poor condition
• Charity: anything not used/worn in the past 12 months and in good condition
• Repair: anything you would have used/worn in the past 12 months but couldn’t because it needed fixing.

Re-assure yourself that if you need something later you can replace it. In my experience it’s rare to need a discarded item; but even then, the joy of being clutter-free greatly outweighs the small inconvenience of re-buying something you previously had.

The basket is for stuff belonging in the trash pile which you aren’t quite ready to release from your life. When you’re done, it will go to a friend’s garage for 6 months – by which time you’ll probably have forgotten about it and your friend can send it the way of all trash. (Be kind and choose a friend whose garage isn’t worse than yours.)

3. Expect excuses

Clutter represents all manner of psychological baggage and there will be resistance.

This process will test your every inclination to hoard, every conviction that you will one day break out that Ab-roller and achieve your very own six-pack, every heartfelt fear that your life will be unspeakably empty without your Bedazzler.

A part of you will seek to procrastinate, rationalize or make excuses. Expect these tactics and more – it’s normal.

You can give in and put the process off, blame someone for your crap-filled home, see a shrink to process your spatial constipation – but you’ll still end up stuck in your stuff.

Or you can summon your inner Borg, chant ‘Resistance is futile’ and begin moving from clutter to clarity.

4. Empty everything

Now that you’re physically and mentally set, it’s time to take action.

Whatever the space you’re working on – room, cupboard, desk, drawer – empty it. Take everything out and place it on the floor nearby.

5. Maintain momentum

Now, take one item at a time and place it in the bag where it belongs or, if you genuinely want to keep it, put it back in the space. Move quickly, not thinking too long about each item. Remember – if it turns out you need something later you can buy another one.

Exclusions: You may choose to exclude from this process such loved items as favorite books and CDs, photos and precious items that hold special meaning for you, or beautiful things that give you pleasure when you look at them.

The exclusion does not apply to out-of-date lecture notes and texts, jeans whose zip hasn’t moved since 1998, or figurines you look at only to lament about the dust.

I find the process is more enjoyable if I put on fun music – Abba or Howard Jones are especially recommended.

6. Suddenly surfaces

Continue until everything is off the floor. Then move to the next space. Let the music, momentum, and reassurance that you’ll survive and thrive without all your stuff keep you repeating the three-bags-and-a-basket method in every room of your home. Then move on to the garage. (Your office will get a step to itself.)

You’ll know you’re done when:

• Your bags are bulging (you can drop them off at their respective locations)
• You find yourself moving from room to room saying ’so that’s what color that is’
• You feel so, so good.

Purging is the hardest step in de-cluttering your life – and one you should feel great about achieving. After all that clearing you’ll want to keep the benefits and not fall back into clutter habits.

And that’s just what Step 3 will help you do.

Step 3: The secret to staying clutter-free: OCI-OGO

Are you a clutter-rebutter? If so, you probably respond to the sound of jaw-hitting-ground when someone sees your office, home or car with one of these convincing gems:

I know where everything is.
Then where’s that great magazine article you saved? Your left tennis shoe? The cat you were minding for the neighbors?

Creative people need mess.
Did we miss your last exhibition?

Name anything and I’ll find it!
We’ll let you know when they invent that scintillating game show.

Having a place for everything and everything in its place isn’t for everyone, but having everything all over the place is unlikely to prove an effective happiness strategy either.

Here’s why:

• If you have clutter in your home, office, glove-box or computer, it takes you longer to find anything – you waste time.
• If you can’t find the remote-control, hamster or family heirloom then you have to buy another – you waste money.
• If you have too much stuff you forget what you do have and lose the chance to use and enjoy it – you waste opportunity.
• If you keep seeing clutter it’s a constant reminder that you need to clear it, causing frustration and irritation that achieves nothing – you waste energy.

In other words, impedimenta – mindless, lifeless things – become a despot over your time, money and happiness.

Step 1: Admit you have a problem

If you’ve ever:

• Missed an appointment because the reminder card was trapped under magazines hyping shoulder pads and New Romantic bands -
• Bought a second copy of Tchotchkes for Dummies because you mangled the first extracting it from an overstuffed drawer -
• Been offered a contract to open your house as an eBay showroom -

Then it’s time to quit clutter-rebutting and admit you’ve fallen under the tyranny of stuff. You needn’t go from Oscar to Felix overnight, but to conquer clutter it helps to admit that superfluous stuff is moving you crap-ward on the happy-to-crappy scale.

If you’d like to re-claim your happiness from under all that stuff, then make a note to check back here soon for Step 2.

If you can find a pen.

Step 2: Purge

Step 3: The secret to staying clutter-free: OCI-OGO