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A Downsizing Menu for Fairfield County

Downsizing options in Fairfield can be like ordering from a menu: A la carte or prix fixe. Where you may spend more on individual services, you can save money by skipping unneeded services. If you do need a full service option then a move manager may be a better value. However, for help in just a few key areas, a ...

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Organizing Paper: When Should You Scan and Shred?

When should you scan? and when should you shred?, aren’t the first questions you should ask when organizing paper. However, clients often ask these questions early on in the conversation, so I am going to answer them. I understand the frustration that leads to these questions. The paper accumulation is overwhelming. They client has had it and believes there has ...

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When to Organize Your Storage For Action!

Here are some tips for storage for action.

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Storing Keepsakes

A while back, ! wrote a post on organizing keepsakes. It was really more focused on getting your keepsakes organized. This post focuses more on tips for storing keepsakes. Clarify keepsake category The first step to storing keepsakes is to recognize that you have them! As a reminder, we are talking about items that you are keeping strictly for sentimental ...

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Why Your Garage’s Floor May Be Its Greatest Asset

There are a lot of of great garage storage products out there.  The MVP, however, might be something that you may think of as nothing. In my last post, I discussed when empty is golden. This certainly includes an empty garage floor. Here are three reasons why  your garage floor may be its greatest asset. Protect Your Car! Do you ...

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Minimalism: When Empty is Golden

You know the song “Silence is Golden?” After a loud day, silence is golden. It’s a relief.  I wouldn’t quite say that empty is golden, not always. We certainly don’t want an emptybank account, for example, but sometimes empty is golden. Clients often asks, upon emptying a bin, “What am I going to use this for now?” This always strikes ...

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5 Attic Organizing Tips

Attic organizing projects can be overwhelming, but you can overcome, by understanding the challenges and breaking them down.

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Organizing the Playroom

While I’m not a parent, after almost 15 years of organizing the playroom, I understand the challenges. Mostly, I understand the limitations of just how organized a playroom can get. You just can’t hold it up to the same standards as rooms that you have more control of. I often have clients ask for a playroom where their children can ...

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How To Get Organized Fast

Recognizing that basic division is the first step in how to get organized fast. Here are six more.

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Organizing Priority Management

I often say that organizing is ultimately not about sorting out your stuff, your paper, or your time. Rather, it’s about sorting out your priorities. Financial advisors have similar advise for managing your finances. Don’t look for that magic stock. Start by looking at what your financial priorities are. It’s essential in both cases. Why? Because everybody has different priorities ...

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A Guide to Donating This Holiday Season in Westchester

Throughout Westchester County, there are donation centers that are eager to accept gently used belongings and pass them on to local families in need.

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Five Organizing Tips for Basement Storage

The best organizing tips for basement storage make sense when you understand it’s supporting role.  This can be understood by revisiting a model called showroom/stockroom, which I’ve written about before.  This is a conceptual model of storage, that makes your organizing systems more sustainable. Here’s a summary of how it works. In a showroom, the space is open, inviting, and ...

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10 Tips For Organizing a Guest Room in Your Home

The organizing details that you appreciate the most when you stay in hotel room must be tempered by accommodating the room’s other purpose.

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Best Organizing Zone Signs

There are two parts to organizing: getting organized and staying organized. It doesn’t make sense to buy organizing supplies, to stay organized, until you get organized first.  In this video, I recommend my favorite processing materials to get organized. This includes the best organizing zone signs, which you can download here, for free. 01 Review Zone 02 Keep Zone 03 ...

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A professional organizer talks about how to get your parenting life in order

The end of the summer always gives me a mild case of the blues. I enjoy the more relaxed schedule when school is on hiatus, even though I work year-round. But this year, more than ever before, September landed on my doorstep with a miserable thud. As my two kids have gotten older, they have gotten busier — scouting, marching band, multiple sports, homework, social activities. Welcome to parenting a Gen Z tween.

We have a color-coded command center on the wall in the kitchen. We have a homework station. We have all of the apps and alerts to let us know when there are changes in the soccer schedule or band practice. Yet we were spending too much time each week trying to figure out how to get Kid 1 to Point A and Kid 2 to Points B and C, while still getting dinner on the table and keeping the house running and holding down two full-time jobs.

In the midst of this chaos, Julie Morgenstern’s new book, “Time to Parent,” showed up in my mailbox at work. I hungrily dived in, looking for something — anything — that could help me rein in our over-scheduled existence (and yes, this is self-inflicted and avoidable — a topic for another day). The book’s aim, according to the blurb on the jacket, is to help people find “a healthy balance between raising a human and being a human.”

Morgenstern, who has been a professional organizer for about 28 years, including working a project for the Oprah Winfrey show staff, divides each of those tasks into four components (Provide, Arrange, Relate and Teach for raising a human, and Sleep, Exercise, Love and Fun for being a human). I homed in on the “Arrange” part, which covers the scheduling and organizational tasks involved in running a home and a family. If I could just get that under control, I thought, maybe we would reclaim some semblance of order.

I recently spoke with Morgenstern, who also launched a podcast on this subject this week, about arranging and more. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation.

There was a lot of talk about a year ago about the unequal distribution of emotional/mental work in families. This ties into your section on arranging. Why do you think it ends up being so unequal?

People gravitate toward the things they notice or are good at, or the things that are important to them, and the work silently gets divvied up without discussion. And even when there is discussion, it’s never complete. . . . But it’s a huge deal because the infrastructure of a family or household either enables or obstructs each family member from being able to achieve their goals. When we’re organizing a closet for one, we’re the only ones who are affected, but when multiple people are using a system, whether it’s the front entry, the kitchen, the living room, it can’t be based on how one person organizes.

[How schools are failing working parents — and how some are helping]

All of the arranging required for a household of people to operate successfully, to be able to come home at night and relax and spend quality time together, is not any one person’s job. It’s the tasks of the family. . . . You need to put everything on the table and divide it based on skill, ability, interest. . . . I think with that mind-set, people respond very well: These are the tasks required for the family, and sharing the work is a way of taking care of each other. Everyone gets that, and it’s liberating for most people. If you don’t honor a system, don’t put things back where they belong, or leave dishes in the sink, that not doing it is the theft of time. Every time you don’t honor a system, you’re putting it on someone else’s to-do list. Mindset shifts really help.

The suggestion in the book, of using index cards to represent family chores, then dividing them up to show the workload distribution, seems like it would help a lot of people. Can you talk a bit about that?

It is a visual aid. . . . The family I featured in the book, I think it was a 15-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl. The boy was so reluctant, like, you’re kidding me. He really felt very put-upon with chores. But when we divvied everything up on the cards, he was transformed. His mom had 80 percent of the cards in front of her, he had a few, his sister had none. She wanted to do stuff but had to be taught, and it never occurred to the mom to teach her. . . . It helps you put it out there and make it objective. It can also clarify the things you don’t need to do, and that’s very powerful.

How can parents have the arranging portion more under control?

Automate the key areas and create systems to deal with things. . . . I had a client, she and her husband work and have three kids, but they never figured out systems for their house, like where things belong. They never figured out the food thing, so every day they had to figure out what are we going to have for dinner. . . . If you sit down for an hour and design a system in the most simple, predictable way, come up with 10 dinners that everyone likes and are easy to throw together, and that’s what you make. You can have a shopping list made up ahead with a list of the ingredients, and you just circle what you need. Put the ingredients together in a bin, with a card on how to make it. Whoever gets home first can prepare that meal.

Don’t overcomplicate it. You need to keep the routines simple and self-instructing, so anyone can do it, a child or a friend or neighbor or family member who is helping out. . . . If you don’t have patience for it, get someone else to do it, or do it as a family. Someone is bound to have the skills, so sit down as a family and figure it out.

Any guidelines on how to set limits on kid activities to give us all a breather?

Lots of families who handle this really well, who want their kids to have rich lives but also value downtime, literally limit it every semester to one or two extracurriculars for each kid, not five. . . . If you have more than one kid . . . try to choose ones that synchronize really well. And also for the parent, if the kids are doing these things on weekends, try to align your self time for when the kids are doing their things so you can also have downtime together. . . . There’s something really lovely and healthy for kids to have some together-apart time in the house, where they’re each doing their own thing under the same roof. If kids are out constantly doing things, you’re eclipsing any of that together-but-apart time, and that’s cheating them of something.

How can parents, particularly those with flexible schedules, keep from letting work and home bleed into each other?

The key is to always put up the edges and look before you leap. There’s no better practice for parents to contain each thing than to end every day by looking ahead, tomorrow plus two days beyond. Set it in your head: Tomorrow the kids are at school, and I’m working from 8 to 2, then I’m picking up the kids, being with them for three hours, then when they do their activities, I’ll go back online for more work. Find the [natural divisions] in the day … just like when an athlete sees their run before they go. Create intentions for each block, set your benchmarks for what success looks like. . . . Make each block of time pure. If you’re going to be with the kids for an hour, be with them. If you’re online working, be online working. . . . Even though we can work anywhere and anytime, I don’t think it’s good to do that. The more it all bleeds together, the less satisfying it all is.

Source: A professional organizer talks about how to get your parenting life in order