The first week of August is Simplify your Life Week.
The first and fastest thing you can do is: Get rid of the visible piles.
Piles can occur in any room of the house. The most common areas are:
Just removing the piles from your eyesight will dramatically improve your stress. However, if you just toss items into a drawer or closet, you haven’t accomplished anything. Your mind will know the piles still exist, just in another place.
So take the time this week to get rid of the piles. AND Tell yourself that you will not start any new piles.
Make your new mantra = NO MORE PILES.
I challenge you to do this for the next 30 days.
Make August “NO MORE PILES” month, and you will start to create a habit. Continue that habit, and you will see a drastic change in your lifestyle. You will reduce your stress and feel so much more relaxed. You won’t see piles everywhere, and you will find things fast.
Any piles you remove will simplify your life!
Helen used to run around her home and pickup the piles whenever a friend came calling.
Then she’d throw those items all into the guest bedroom. ‘I’ll do it another day”, she would say, and close the room door.
That was fine until the holidays came. Helen’s sister wanted to come into town, which meant she needed to use the guest bedroom. It wasn’t enough to have to worry about meal planning for family and relatives for the holiday, now Helen also had to get the guest room ready.
Before Helen could wash the bedding, she had to get to it. Those things she constantly tossed in the room were piled on the bed and all over the place: clothes she was going to donate to Goodwill, books and magazines she had finished reading, stuffed animals and toys from redoing a grown child’s bedroom, suitcases, gifts, etc.
It would take her weeks to clear up the piles of clothes, books, toys, boots, shoes, purses, photos, and everything else she had haphazardly tossed in the room to deal with another day.
Helen was fed up with having to clean up the bedroom every time a guest came in. She saw a listing in her local paper, and signed up for my course. She went through the P.L.A.C.E.™ principles, and cleaned up her house.
Helen learned to stop tossing items into the guest bedroom and just deal with them right then. No more waiting for more things to donate, no more piling things in a room. No more un-piling the guest bedroom just before the holidays.
Helen learned how to be better organized.
This is the first time this course is available online. You don’t have to spend any extra time or money to travel to a course. It’s coming to you.
There’s only 2 more days left. The course is closing Sunday night.
Cindy closed doors to her home so she could keep the clutter out of her mind. She might not have been able to see it, but the closed doors constantly reminded her there was a mess behind each of the doors. So not only were her piles growing, but the piles in her mind were also growing. So now her emotional stress and frustration was growing too.
It seems that whenever a pile starts, it’s so much easier to just add to it. You think, “I’ll just put this away when I put away the other things in this pile.” And so the pile keeps growing and growing.
That’s probably how hoarders end up that way. Now I’m not saying you will become a hoarder, that’s unlikely because hoarders don’t seek out help. And if you didn’t want help, you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place.
I was hired once by someone’s son to help his mother as he was out of state. I talked to her on the phone, but once I got to her house, she refused to even let me inside. In fact, she barely opened the door to talk to me. Needless to say, I didn’t get inside to help her clear her hoarding.
Cindy’s main problem was how was she going to find the extra time to get rid of the piles.
Here’s 3 steps to get rid of those piles.
| Cindy was frustrated by the appearance of her home. In fact she was so frustrated that she even closed doors to all of the rooms. The first reason she did this was so visitors didn’t see her messy house. But the main reason was for her – she didn’t have to look at the clutter either — But it didn’t help. The closed doors just made her feel worse about her house knowing that behind those closed doors lurked a mess. A mess that she was going to have to clean up, someday.
As if she didn’t have enough things to do by going to work, coming home, making dinner, and taking care of the family; clutter represented one more thing to do–one of these days. Doors just helped her procrastinate the inevitable, but it didn’t remove the frustration of knowing it was there.  Kitchen clutter
Cindy’s frustration was adding to the physical clutter by giving her mental and emotional stress.
Worry that someone would think she was a terrible housekeeper. Wondering how she was ever going to crawl out from under the piles. Thinking how much more work she now had to do.
A lot of people get very discouraged when they realize that their frustrations are due to their inability to keep their house organized.
But it’s not your fault. No one taught you how to Clear the Clutter and STAY organized.
There was no class in school like Health or Home Economics to teach you. So things just started piling up, and the more they piled up, the easier it seemed to just add to the pile!
Whether your clutter is in many rooms, one room, or you just want to learn some systems for organization, click the link below now to discover how to Cut the Clutter to Enjoy Your Life. This course won’t just show you how to declutter, it’s going to teach you systems to be organized.
Come join us!
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I looked under the bed, in the closet, everywhere.
But I can’t find the remote for the bed so my husband can sleep somewhat upright. If you have sleep apnea, you know what I am talking about. It’s like a hospital bed. Adjust it any way you want it to go.
I know I shouldn’t think so, but I suspect a little grandkid about 3 yrs. old may have moved it. He loved to push the buttons and watch the head or the feet of the bed go up or down. I did call and ask him if he took it, and he said no.
Of course it didn’t help that it had been missing for a few days before we realized it. My husband stopped raising his bed every night because sometimes he could just fall asleep. And it doesn’t help that there is a garbage can right but he night table where the remote would Sit. I really do think I would have checked the trash bag if it weighed much as it is usually just full of tissues. But it’s been 3 weeks and the remote has now shown up.
I’m an organizer, and I don’t like to say I lost something, but it’s lost. Possibly lost forever.
We called the bed company and they wanted $150 for a new remote. Then it turned out that they could take m y emote – since we got matching beds – and pair it to his bed. So we did that since I only raised mine when I had foot surgery and had to be in bed several days.
Still hoping we find it, but I’m almost giving up. But – you never know. I have yet to pull absolutely everything off the closet floor – just in case it’s in there. About 2 years ago I found a digital camera in a boot. Apparently my husband packed it in the boot on the way home from a vacation and forgot, and we just thought we lost that camera. Of course when we found it we already had better cameras.
So even though I’m an organizer, some things can get lost, accidentally.
Never said anything was 100%.
PS If you have little kids and remotes – hide them (the remotes, not the kids) when they come over.
Or the remotes may disappear!
When my mother passed, and my father cleaned out the house, there were 2 items I didn’t think to ask him to save.
Thinking back
Here’s an article of items other people regretted losing. It appeared in a blog called SpareFoot.
You might to check it out: decluttering regrets
Have you ever tossed something when you were decluttering that you wish you still had?
Comment below.
Hope you had a great Valentine’s Day!
Eileen
Sorry for your losses and speedy recovery physically and emotionally to all the people who have gone through the hurricanes recently.
Think about it. You might not have been a hurricane victim, but are you prepared if you are ever in an emergency?
Whether it would be due an earthquake, tornado, hurricane, forest fire or flood and you were going to have to evacuate your residence that might not be there when you returned, what would you take? Seriously think about it.
If you were in an emergency situation, what would you take?
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Do you have extra canned food?
Do you have a non-electric can opener?
Do you have food that doesn’t need refrigeration or electric or gas cooking?
I know I’d grab my purse with IDs and credit cards and if time permitted more important documents from a safe.
I’d also want key electronics: cell phone, laptop, hard drive and USB sticks that have some data not on the laptop and cords for all of those.
And I’d certainly grab some clothes and jackets as well as water bottles.
Our cars always have flashlights, but that’s as prepared as we are if we weren’t home.
It’s one reason my father taught me from the day I was 16 and drove a car:
You may think it will never happen to you, but you just don’t know.
Yes, some “thing” may make you smile.
You bring the item into your office or your house, and it gives you that smile maybe one or two more times.
Sometimes, though, it doesn’t even do that much–
Advertising Gimmick
Think about it –
How many “things” are wasting precious desktop space
or drawer space that aren’t useful?
How many “things” are causing clutter in your house?
You have all these “things” that no longer give you the same reaction you had when you first saw it. Instead you have a bunch of “things”, often called “stuff”, that just take up space and often end up in piles.
And if you collect too much “stuff”,
you have overload,
which causes overwhelm.
Instead, collect moments in your life:
The moment your child took his/her first step.
The moment your child built his or her first Lego creation.
The moment your child lost his first tooth. (My grandson swallowed his with popcorn Friday night.)
The moment your child went to kindergarten, high school, or her first dorm room.
The moment your child graduated from middle school, high school, or college.
I look back at the scrapbooks I made of my children growing up, and I remember those times – the birthday parties, the Lego builds, the bicycle training, the dances, and the graduations. And now I take pictures of my grandchildren’s moments.
Graduating Dental School
Those are the things that really are worth saving.
And if you are lucky, you were able to capture those precious moments in a picture. Digital storage is so much easier than paper storage, and you will always be able to re-live that moment in your life.
It’s the moments that make life worth living,
not the things you have.
Too many things can make you feel frustrated.
They can end up in piles never to be looked at again.
They take up valuable space that you could use for other items.
They create clutter.
Stop collecting things and take pictures that are precious moments–
Skiers Take Picture With Cell Phone
not a zillion –
just enough to cherish the moment.
And don’t forget to take time to delete the bad or duplicate ones! Otherwise your computer will be stuffed too!
A backup hard drive just for pictures is a great idea to keep the computer space free!
What things or stuff do you have that you can release?
Comment below.
