I STILL am haunted by the number of paper shopping bags that creep into my foyer closet! 

As I sort them every other month or so, I too struggle with keeping the “pretty” ones.  There’s just something about paper bags.  Try as you might to recycle them or avoid them all together, the ones that are too pretty to toss eventually take over. 

When I decided to become an organizer upon graduating college, it was a gift to have such clarity so young.  I was and still am confident that I’m on the right path.  When I joined the National Association of Professional Organizers at 21 years old, I was the youngest person in the room, and often asked by peers and prospects if I was still in high school!

It’s hard enough to organize things we can see, feel, and touch, so how do we organize time?  It’s usually a different process for each client that then needs to be tested and tweaked until we land on just the right combo of solutions. In this case, we laid it all out on a board propped up in her office. One of my clients is an interior designer specializing in medical offices.

My mom recently picked up texting with bitmojis as fast as any tween or millennial.  She also has one of the more accurate semblances of any bitmoji I’ve seen!  I get a kick out of each one that she sends, and many come in each week.  It pained me to delete the texts, so I started dropping them into Evernote in my “Memorabilia” notebook as a “Mom’s Bitmojis” note. 

My clients aren’t as interested in what’s new in the world of productivity as they are in what actually works.   The dilemma of where to focus in a world of information overload feels like a modern dilemma, though the quest for working more efficiently isn’t a new one.  I’ve been re-reading the 80 year old book Think And Grow Rich. 

When our to do lists are a bottomless tangle our countertops have gone missing, and our desks and floors are covered with signs of indecision and lack of time,  it’s easy to feel like we have lost control.  This year I’ve personally adopted the motto of “make the most of what you have, with where you are.”