Congratulations! For less than the price of lunch, you’re about to get your mind, your schedule, your food, your finances and your home organized … for real!
As you embark on this journey, I hope you’ll connect with me personally to share how things are going. Please reach out to me (Susan, the author) on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter so we can hold each other accountable and share the joys and challenges of our busy lives.
Need a little more information about this e-book before you buy?
Check out a full blog post about the book here; watch the book trailer on YouTube below; or scroll down to read the full book introduction.
Introduction:
How not to get stabbed by an avalanche of DVDs
For much of my life, until recently, I was a “seesaw organizer.”
What exactly is a “seesaw organizer,” you ask? Let me describe one for you.
In the past, the spaces in my house – or dorm room or apartment or cabin or wherever I was in life at the moment – would typically fall into one of two categories: meticulous model home or hazardous waste zone.
I still don’t completely understand why I default to one of these two polar opposite housekeeping conditions. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always been a bit of an all-or-nothing person. My mind works something like this:
“The kitchen floor is really dirty. I’ll clean out the silverware drawer and organize the plastic cereal containers first to kick things off …”
“The living room needs dusted. I’ll just go ahead and iron the curtains and redecorate the walls while I’m at it …”
Maybe I’m a perfectionist. Maybe I’m a procrastinator. Maybe I just like to see a really dramatic before and after. Whatever the reason, this method of letting things get really bad and then spending hours – OK, days – making rooms perfect again created a recipe for housekeeping failure. Seesawing wildly between bouts of frenzied activity and exhaustion-induced avoidance never seemed to produce the well-maintained home I desired.
Eventually, the piles stacked higher and the inspiration and motivation to whip them into shape diminished due to growing life obligations and commitments. Don’t get me wrong; I still desperately longed to have spaces worthy of the pages of “Better Homes and Gardens” magazine. When my home was clean and organized, I felt immense joy and peace. When it looked like a war zone, I felt stressed out, anxious and irritable.
I would share my plight with friends and listen as they tried to cheer me with statements like, “You have young kids right now. You’ll just have to let some things go.” And while I understood the wisdom and practicality of their advice, I still felt in my heart there were some areas I didn’t want to let go. I had a passion for a beautifully organized home that I didn’t want to bury for a decade while my kids and harried lifestyle took over my schedule.
In other words, I needed to make some big changes, starting with getting smarter about my time and resources.
The pinnacle moment when I knew I was ready to dig in and get organized for real came after one particularly disturbing organizing frenzy.
I was in the middle of a seesaw upward, determined to get the closet in our office/guest room cleaned out – at least to the point where I could make an educated guess as to what might be in it.
As I was wading (yes, this is an accurate description) through stuff on the floor, I bumped into the top closet shelf, triggering an avalanche of DVDs.
(The closet that almost killed me but made me stronger)
Unfortunately, I looked up just in time to get smacked in the face by one of the falling DVDs. Since none of them were in their cases, the raw edge cut my face just under my eye. As I sat there clutching my injured cheek, buried in the rubble, emotion overwhelmed me. How did I let things get this bad?
My 7-year-old daughter came running to see what all the commotion was about. What a sorry sight I must have been at that moment!
After that meltdown, I vowed to get off the seesaw and find some simple, foundational methods of organizing my life that worked more permanently. The five solutions I discovered and write about in this book continue to change me for the better.
Although I may not have a home that looks like it belongs in a magazine, I now feel at peace with the spaces I live in (most of the time). I can find stuff and the rooms are kept reasonably clean and clutter-free.
More importantly, the stuff and chaos are no longer hindrances to bigger and more meaningful goals in my life.
The steps I explain in this book are simple and totally worth the effort, although they are not necessarily easy. But if the potential of injuring yourself by the clutter in your life is a real fear, perhaps it is time for you to get off the seesaw, too.
