2. Set Organizing Goals

YOU HAVE DECIDED TO REORGANIZE your home, your belongings, and your schedule. You recognized that something is not working, and you want to change it. Congratulations. That alone is a huge first step. You’ve also just come through a major life transition (or are going through one right now) and are starting your next life chapter. Another congratulations for starting with a fresh outlook on the rest of your life.

So where to begin? When I work with people, many want to know where we’re headed. They want to understand the big picture. To give them a path for this journey, I created two descriptions of the reorganizing process. The difference between the two is the end goal.

The first is called REORGANIZE. It is a practical approach that deals with organizing spaces and belongings. Each letter in the word reorganize represents a different step in the organizing process. You can find the steps at the end of the chapter. Read this one and see if it resonates with you.

The other is called SIMPLIFY. It is more holistic in its view and focuses on your approach more than the actual steps. This process can be applied to anything you want to simplify, whether it’s your belongings, your schedule, or your organizing systems. Read the details of this system at the end of this chapter.

This chapter focuses on the S in SIMPLIFY, which stands for “set the stage” and the R in REORGANIZE, which stands for “ready”—readiness for change. Because you’ve purchased this book, you must be considering reorganizing and/or simplifying, so that’s your first step. You’ll want to reflect a bit on where you’re headed, whether you can imagine the entire new picture or just its first step. Neither method is right or wrong. Whatever fits for you is what’s right. You’ll also reflect on your past as it relates to organization. Some people will find their reorganization will mostly be about moving on from their pasts without knowing much about where they’re headed. Others may be able to envision their next chapter, or they may be well into it.

As we begin to reorganize, you must realize that for your new systems to truly support you, you need to evaluate your needs and goals for this next chapter in life. When you know what you want and where you are going, you can identify the tools you need and position them to best help you. If you skip this part and simply start purging and rearranging your belongings, you may find you’ve done nothing more than clean house, and the clutter will return very quickly. You also may find you get rid of either too much stuff or not enough stuff.

It’s difficult, but worth it, to use some of your precious mental energy to figure out how to adapt your systems. Most of your mental energy goes toward surviving the transition itself, but if you can slow down and focus on making some adjustments to your organizing systems, the transition actually goes more smoothly, because with organizing systems to support you, you get control over the basics of daily life. The systems keep you from worrying about the small stuff in life, which only adds to your energy drain. I’ve seen this principle proven time and time again with my clients and in my own life.

Let’s briefly look at this transition you’ve been through or are going through so you can begin to think about how the transition will affect your surroundings. Reflect a bit before launching into an organizing project so you know where you’re headed.

Who are you becoming? What is this new chapter going to be about—and therefore, which of your belongings will you carry forward? Surrounding yourself with things that support your move forward, rather than drag you down or keep you in the past, is key.

You may want to get some extra support or an outsider’s perspective to move you through this process of beginning your next chapter. Some of you will want additional support related to your past, to work through emotions, gain perspective, and move on. Others are already looking forward and need an expert guide or coach to move on.

It’s often difficult to reflect on your own. If you get stuck, use some of these prompts:

• See a life coach or a therapist. What’s the essential difference? Life coaches look forward to help you create your future. Therapists help you review the past and gain perspective; they help with emotional obstacles.

• Journal on the topic of your next chapter.

• Create a vision board. Find photos and phrases that help describe where you are headed and what you want from your next chapter. A vision board is useful because you can post it where you can see it every day. Plus the process of thinking about what belongs on your board is as useful as the results.

• Use a series of affirmations. These have helped some of my clients.

• Go on meditative retreats, silent or not. Take a day (or week!) away for yourself.

• Read books. I loved Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach and What’s Next by Rena Pederson when I needed to create my next chapter.

You can start organizing as you try these ideas. Sometimes we know much more than we think we do. You may be all set to move ahead by answering the questions in the next few pages. I know that it can be unnerving not to have all the answers, to feel like you’re in limbo, to berate yourself (some of you will do this) for not knowing enough right now. The exciting thing is that you’re starting a new chapter of your life. You don’t know all the details, but you get to paint the picture yourself.

Use the following exercise to help you identify your organizing goals before you start organizing. Take your time to answer the questions as thoughtfully and honestly as possible. Don’t worry if you get stuck on some of them. Typically, one or two questions resonate with each individual I work with. If you get stuck, take some time. Go away for a bit and come back later. Setting goals will make your organizing efforts more efficient, more productive, and longer lasting because they will fit your new lifestyle and meet your needs.

Create a Vision for Your Organizing Efforts

1. Complete this phrase: My ________________________ (house, schedule, closet, etc.) is organized enough when … There are a few ways to reflect on this question. You could choose a current room system that feels organized or reflect on a past system or room in a previous home that felt organized. Why do you feel it is organized? Describe it here. How does it look? Feel? What’s it about, this sense of a room being organized enough? There are no right or wrong answers. What matters is that it works for you. Another approach is to imagine the room you’re sitting in were organized enough for you to be pleased with the results. What could you do in here that you can’t do now? If my _______________________room (living room, bedroom, etc.) were organized enough, I’d be able to _________________________________.

2. What do you know about what you want for your house, your belongings, your schedule, and your life in general?

3. What do you value most about yourself, your relationships, and the nature of your work? Name your current values, needs, and priorities. If we can connect your organizing goal to one of these, it will be easier for you to stay on track with your organizing, to get motivated, and to sustain!

4. What organizing system do you feel most proud of? What organizing system, at any time in your life, has worked for you? Describe it, thinking about why it worked. What worked about it for you?

5. Was there a time in your life when you felt as organized as you now want to be? If so, what was different then? What worked? What didn’t work? What really resonated for you?

6. What has worked well in the past?

7. What have you tried so far?

8. How do you talk to yourself about your home and its organization? Or how does your home talk to you (how does it make you feel)?

9. Do you have issues with staying focused or becoming easily distracted? If so, how does this affect your organizational abilities, your home, and your time? How does it show up in your life?

10. What gets in the way of your home being as organized as you’d like it to be?

11. How does not being as organized as you would like impact your life?

12. When your home is organized the way you’d like it to be, how will things be easier? How will it feel or look? What will you say to friends? (This is sometimes a difficult one until after we’ve started organizing. Sometimes it’s hard to see through to the new picture.)

13. What immediate change would make the biggest impact to your current situation?

As you reorganize your home, you will be amazed at how much thinking you’ll do. Reorganizing is often a great time to process what’s going on. It’s cathartic, like running, swimming, or meditating.
Rearranging your belongings and changing up your space is often an outer reflection of what is going on inside. The more you focus on organizing, the more you learn about what you want for your next chapter. You’ll have more answers as your mind-set shifts and you move through the transition. Here are examples of people who reorganized their homes as they were exploring the next chapter of their lives.

When Kathryn and I worked together, she had one foot in the previous chapter of her life and a toe dipped into her next chapter. She contacted me a few years after her husband died in his late forties. She still lived in the home they’d bought together only a couple of years before he died. She still worked at the same company and attended the same church they’d been active in together. She’d made some new friends, somewhat reluctantly. She was not through processing her grief, but she had moved beyond the early stages enough to realize she needed and wanted to make her own life. She had done some initial simplifying in response to her transition by finding some wonderful new homes for her husband’s closet full of clothing. When she contacted me, her goal was to let go of more of her husband’s things, change the energy in her home, and begin moving forward to create her new chapter. Together, we came up with several specific organizing goals including the following:

• Going over his memorabilia and reducing the amount she kept

• Going through the boxes in the garage that were never opened when they had moved into their new home

• Going through his clothing that was stored in a secondary closet

• Going through his books

• Finding a home for anything new that we brought into her home and creating systems if necessary

• Using her own items to reorganize any space we opened up by reducing his presence in her home

Did Kathryn know exactly who she was becoming when she started organizing? Not necessarily, but here is what she did know: She knew she was becoming a woman who owned a home by herself. She needed to take over responsibility for the chores and organizational systems her husband used to take care of. She was becoming a single woman in her social life. Upon the advice of a good friend, she had decided she would not make a change in her work life for at least a year. She knew she could count on her family. They’d been there for her and would continue to be there for her, no matter what changed in her life. She had developed some new friends at work. She was carving out her own role at her church and in that community.

So Kathryn actually knew a lot when she discussed her next chapter with me. And that knowledge was a great starting point. Over the next few years, she would continue to branch out on her own, changing work, changing church communities, developing new hobbies, changing her diet, and getting to the gym. It’s often true that when you have one major change in your life, others eventually follow. Or as one woman said to me, “If I can make it through that change so well, what else can I do? A lot!”

Sandra was in a similar situation in that she was beginning to consider options for her next chapter. She had built a successful business on her own before she got married. The work was physical, and shortly after she got married, she had a significant medical issue that prevented her from doing her work. She saw various medical and holistic professionals and learned there would be no cure for her. She had to figure out for herself how to give up the work she loved and create something new.

Sandra called me after she had sold her business. She was doing pretty well accepting that she’d have to discover a new passion to turn into work for herself. She was considering several avenues. So as she was breaking away from the previous chapter of her life (her years as a business owner) and beginning to build the new, she discovered a need to also shed old belongings from her home. She and her husband hadn’t lived in their house very long, so the old belongings were mainly things brought from their last home but never unpacked at their new home.

So our reorganizing goals included the following:

• Sort through the unpacked boxes and decide what stayed or went.

• Find homes for items that stayed.

• Find places to donate items she didn’t want to keep.

• Create an exercise space that would help her manage her medical condition.

• Create an office space where she could start seriously working on her new business ideas.

• Simplify in general. She wanted to get control over pockets of clutter, including papers in the kitchen, excess bathroom products, and closets that contained clothing no longer worn.

Sandra was moving on and making changes in many aspects of her life. She didn’t know what the next chapter held, but she was turning the last pages of the current chapter, and she was ready to make decisions about what to bring forward with her.

One last story about moving ahead without the complete picture. I coached a woman who owned her own business. She was concerned and anxious about not knowing where her life was headed. In her mind, everyone else seemed to have visions of where they wanted to be in five or ten years. She didn’t have this vision, and so she felt lost.

As we coached together, she had a key insight about herself: By nature, she is creative. Locking herself into a five-year plan felt very uncreative to her. She realized that organically creating her next chapter would work better for her. After she realized this, I could hear her voice relax without the pressure of what “everyone else” was doing, and then she was able to get organized to begin creating her next chapter.

As these examples show, you don’t need to know exactly where you’re headed to begin figuring out what will come with you to your exciting next chapter. You can make a good start at simplifying and reorganizing, which will change the look, the feel, and the energy in your home—all of which will be a part of what will propel you forward to living your next chapter.

Reorganize Your Surroundings

		READY. Are you ready to reorganize? Are you ready to change habits to make this work? What happens if you don’t move ahead? What’s motivating you? Why now and not before now? (See chapter two.)
		EVALUATE. What do you like about this room or other rooms that are a model for what you want? What’s working? Not working? If you have tried to reorganize your space or your schedule in the past, what worked or didn’t work? (See chapter five.)
		OBJECTIVES. What do you want to do that you can’t? How do you want the space or your schedule to feel, look, be? Decide on the purpose for your space. (See chapter five.)
		ROUND AND ROUND. Make up your boxes. Take out everything that doesn’t belong, even if you don’t know where it will go. You have to start somewhere! Stay in the room you’re working on; it will be tempting to reorganize the space you move things to. (See chapter six.)
		GET RID OF (OR NOT?). Decisions, decisions. Use the no-regrets questions list (see page 101). (See chapter six.)
		ANALYZE REMAINING ITEMS. Think areas or sections of activities. Organize by area instead of looking at the space as a whole. Organize belongings by how often you use them. Keep the daily use items within easy reach. Keep the occasionally used nearby, but not in your everyday space. Keep I-use-it-a-few-times-a-year items out of sight—in a closet or in another room. (See chapter seven.)
		NEGOTIATE THE SPACE VERSUS YOUR BELONGINGS. Measure and count the items you’re going to containerize. Also measure the space the container needs to fit into. Go vertical and use the walls. On shelves, use containers. Use drawer organizers to keep items together. (See chapter seven.)
		IMPLEMENT. Implement your ideas in each area, one section at a time. Don’t try to reorganize the whole room at once. Move furniture around. See which layout makes you feel productive or inspired or comfortable. Find or buy new storage containers and put the room back together. (See chapter seven.)
		ZEBRA! Be one. Each zebra has a unique set of stripes. So do we. Your organizing solutions are unique to how you live and work. Give yourself a chance to try new space, skills, and/or habits. (See chapter seven.)
		EVALUATE, EVALUATE. Each piece of paper creates a pile. Each new item of clothing makes the others more wrinkled. Always be thinking as you look around—am I satisfied with how this works? If you go through a major life event, evaluate how you’re organizing for it. What works for you in one stage will need to change as you move on to another stage. (See chapter seven.)

Simplify Your Life

		SET THE STAGE. Are you ready for change? What’s the easiest way for you to start? What happens if you don’t move ahead? What’s motivating you? What do you like? Dislike? What’s working? Not working? What frustrates you? What do you like about other, more organized spaces? (See chapter two.)
		INVOLVE OTHERS. Who might enjoy belongings you think you’ll give away? Who could work with you on boxing up things? Who can take away things you no longer want? Who can help you make good decisions? (See chapter four.)
		MAKE SMALL STEPS. Break down your project into the smallest of steps, until you look at what you’ve written and think, “That’s easy enough. I can do that.” Or focus on an amount of time you know you can work with. (See chapters four and five.)
		PLAN TO CONTINUE. Plan a regular time of day, a regular day of the week, or use vacation time. Focus on moving around the room like clockwork so you can quickly see your progress. Go around and around until you finish the space; don’t leave it while you’re working, or you may end up reorganizing another space you hadn’t intended to. (See chapter four.)
		LET GO WITHOUT REGRETS. Ask yourself enough questions about each item so you don’t end up regretting any decisions. If you need to set aside a few items to put on probation or decide on later, put them in a box and mark a date: “Decide by … “ (e.g., three months from today’s date). (See chapter six.)
		IMPLEMENT YOUR IDEAS. It’s a new chapter, try new ideas. Try out your ideas and give them some time to work. Changes (like new organizing systems) take twenty-one times in use to become a habit, longer if you have ADHD or other brain-based challenges. Have patience with yourself; this is a lot of change at once. (See chapters six and seven.)
		FINE-TUNE YOUR IDEAS. Take stock. What’s working well? Pat yourself on the back. What’s not working the way you intended? Pat yourself on the back for trying; reality sometimes changes our best laid plans. So let’s change the plans then. (See chapter seven.)
		YOU DID IT. Congratulations! Now … where to next?