|
To get best value from this blog, begin reading from the first posts in 2015 and work your way forward. The posts take you through a year and more of practising decluttering and organising The Everies Way. Using the blog this way is like having your own daily organising coach :-)
I'm open to reading suggestions for a new blog topic, and I still welcome comments, questions or feedback about this one's content. Comment below posts or use the Contact form if more appropriate. Thank you for reading! (And even more thanks if you put the posts into action!!)
0 Comments
22 April 2019 It is exactly 1 year since my last Everies Blog post -- and the topic is just as fitting for this combined Earth Day/Easter Monday as it was last year! Enjoy:  How would you like to use this year’s Earth Day to begin longer-term better habits for a healthier Earth? If that sounds encouraging, here’s a project you can do within a week or so that will help now as well as preparing you for actions that might require bigger effort, such as significant changes to your lifestyle or dwelling. Here are the ‘easy’ steps: 1. Read over the recycling calendar/pamphlet your local council sends you every year – if you don’t have one, contact your council & ask for one or view the information on their website. 2. Declutter your home* with special attention to such recyclables, setting them aside in their separate categories with a dated sticky-note on for when you’ll take them to their appropriate disposal drop-off point. *Do this to the level that is practical for your level of overall clutter. As a guide if either recycling or decluttering are not typical activities for you, limit yourself to a once-over, picking up whatever you see as you walk around your home spotting recyclable clutter. The idea is to get the hang of it and contribute something for the planet. Even a small range of individual items will get you started thinking in recycling types. The main thing is to practice what you read in the recycling calendar. 3. Place any routine recyclables in your recycling collection bin. 4. Diarise remaining disposals, staying realistic about when you can travel to each drop-off point or get someone to pick them up for you. 5. Stick to your diarised plans. The harder steps, adapted from my Re-Vibe Checklist: Do a little decluttering (to the best of your current organising skills) in each of these areas: 1. Material clutter
Whatever decluttering you do,
just remember to dispose of throwaways appropriately! As a first step in migrating to fully online service (yes, that’s what I’ve been working on while being so quiet) the first course in my new CoachRoom will open on the weekend. You will love this course! It will really show you what decluttering can mean for you. At ten lessons, it will take around the same number of hours, but will cost less than a one-hour organising appointment, and way less than a one-hour coaching session, yet will give you so much more than one of each! Why will it cost less? Here’s the trick: you’ll be helping me build the course! This is how I explain it in the first lesson: The course is presented as text-only and I would love you to tell me what supplementary content would help you experience the information in a more satisfying way. For example, if you read something and think, "I can't picture that, what would it look like?" you can ask for an image to go there. Or if you want to see a process in action, ask for a video. You might want the opportunity to upload a picture of your own, or to comment on a picture -- we could use presentation tools there. Quizzes or games can liven things up or interrupt the flow (which can be okay if you need a break), so note anywhere you feel droopy so I can think about how to give you a boost. Maybe you'd like to see an interview or an infographic, a cartoon or a graph -- just let me know what would help you understand better or enjoy a particular part of the course more. I'll take all your input and augment the materials to include the best combination of learning tools I can, to give you a great learning experience. Then you can take the course again for a nominal fee. That's right, if you buy the first offering of Nutshell Decluttering, and provide feedback, I'll offer you the augmented version for peanuts. You’ll deserve a discount on trying out a course you helped build! You can apply it to new areas of clutter so you'll get a whole new range of benefits from it! You won't be obliged to give detailed feedback for that one, just a quick note at the end about how it was better or if it still needs improvement. The object is to make it as easy and fun as possible for you to get beautiful results from learning and practicing the Inspector Ross way of decluttering with purpose. You can even help me name my course area – should it be a CoachRoom, Academy, Tutoring Room, College? Getting ambitious there, I know. Anyway, I like the idea of peripatetic (in an open walkway, or ambulant) study, because you’ll be pretty active doing my courses, but I couldn’t think of a simple name to reflect that. I’m open to your ideas right now! What do you reckon about all that?
Occasionally, I've been asked for an app, or some other method of daily reminders to make using The Everies Book easier. So, I've created a year's set of bookmarks to help you learn The Everies system and steadily accomplish goals throughout the next financial year: these are The Everies Learning Curve Bookmarks. They can be printed then cut out and used as actual bookmarks in your regular diary or viewed electronically in daily columns. I discovered I can email the PDF to my Kindle account & view the columns day by day on my phone. I even sent The Everies Book to it, with ‘Convert’ typed in the subject line so I can refresh myself on pages of the Book whenever I want (without having to put my glasses on...). Note that this conversion method doesn’t work well for the Bookmarks because it doesn’t keep table formatting etc.; but for the Book, it’s great that I don’t have to scroll back & forth to read each line! I’m going to learn more about formatting for different e-book readers, but that’s another project. Until at least midnight, 30 June 2017, this 160-page companion volume is completely free with your sale-priced Everies Book download. Yes! I want as many people as possible to experience the Everies way so I’ve reduced the price of The Everies Book to just A$7.99 for this same end-of-financial-year period. If you already have the Book, simply ‘purchase’ the The Everies Learning Curve Bookmarks download for free on its own. I know some people may want to try the free book first without buying The Everies Book, and that’s okay, but I must warn you that the Bookmarks refer heavily to terms and theory in the Book, without further explanation. It would be foggy-going, but with a little imagination you might be able to get decent results. You could try searching new terms on my blog to see if they’ve been discussed there. I’d welcome any feedback about using the raw Bookmarks so daringly! They definitely work better with the Book. Hope this offer eases any tax-time grrrrr
and makes next financial year look more appealing. Cheers, Heidi This is my last check-in for 2016. Besides wishing you all the best for Christmas, I encourage you to take some quiet time on or before New Year’s Eve to rapidly review this year in the most positive light you can. On New Year’s Day, smartly get on with creating your 2017 plans, and immediately declutter something appropriate to clear a path for them. Wishing you Peace, Love and Laughter for the Season.  I took some extra time to make sure I fully did my Daily Paperwork, repeating days where I missed my morning, evening or supper routines – hope you’ve been getting somewhere with your own practice of diarising and recording. Now it’s the time of year where major wrapping up and re-planning takes place! During these last couple of weeks before the New Year rings in, squeeze out some time to review any plans you’d made for the year and see if you can finish anything off that’s been hanging fire, no matter how minor it may be. Then you’ll be more energetic for the next round – 2017! To help you have a great next year, I’m keeping my Everies Book at half price over the Festive Season. You can now view the TOC (table of contents) here or at the end of The Everies Book page. As a special thanks to blog readers, I am also giving away 5 free copies!
Use the contact form to send me your email address, & the first 5 forms will receive a reply with the PDF attached. I won’t use the email to initiate anything further except to send you a feedback form; it will be up to you whether you fill it in or not – no pressure. All forms received before the expiry date, but after the first 5, will receive a special excerpt from the book. Offer ends Wednesday 21 December 2016, midnight, Western Australian time. How’d you go with checking in on your diary progress? I found it helped me work out which 1 Small Thing to declutter – the first thing that came to mind when I read the undone diary steps. If clutter puts you off doing ordinary, everyday diary entries it’s bad enough, but when it stops you carrying out your longer-term plans, it simply has to go! This week, keep doing the same actions as in Reminder 53 but now add a preparation step: close to bedtime, tick off any extra diary entries you were able to complete in the evening, then briefly prepare for the next day. This last step in your Daily Paperwork is called the Nightly Review'n'Prep & it’s explained in Everies Reminder 17. These 4 simple actions will help you stay on an even keel while getting more done. 1. Diarise, 2. Check-in, 3. Declutter 1 Small Thing, & 4. Review’n’Prep.
I hope you went well with beginning to diarise and declutter daily. I did 7 shelves in my kitchen cupboards, and it feels great to open the doors now! This week, keep doing the same actions as in Reminder 52. Add in this bit of control: In the early evening, tick off any diary entries you completed for the day, and catch up on any you can still reasonably fit in. The extra step is called the Dusk Check-in & it’s explained in Everies Reminder 16. 1. Diarise, 2. Dusk Check-in, 3. Declutter 1 Small Thing.
In The Everies Book, I have a set of 21-day Learning Curves for different types of Everies. The first is a nice, easy groove-in of diarising and decluttering. Anyone can do this and it’s a great way to bring order back in whenever you’ve been busy and life has run amok. For the first 7 days, do 2 steps without fail: 1. Diarise your plans in the morning. No need to make a ploughman’s breakfast out of this, just make a point of it. Jot down some plans which you can realistically expect to tick off by the end of the day. 2. Declutter 1 Small Thing in the evening. That’s not even a 'small area’ yet, merely a Thing: a purse, wallet, drawer, shelf, etc. It need take no more than 15 minutes but it should be completed, not half-done or shuffled around. What you are aiming for with these steps is to set a daily rhythm of beginning with a sense of direction, and ending with a sense of completion. If you don’t have the book, and need refreshing on how to declutter,
revisit the How To Declutter slide show on my DIY page. Da-dah! My store is working at last. There is more information in the Goods tab. Please check out The Everies Book as soon as you can. Meanwhile, I wanted to let you know the direction this blog will take now: I'm going to work through the book myself and provide extra info on tasks or theory where it seems helpful. You won't have to have read the book to understand the posts,
but it will help! Okay – that’s enough hibernating for me. So nice to thaw out at last. What a winter that was! I thought I'd start a spring-clean of my site, since it's so slow to warm up outside. But what was the first thing I found? My store has been overly changed, and one of the features I’m concerned about is that it now asks for too many personal details before you buy. Sorry about that! All I need is your name & email address. I’m doing what I can to get it improved. If it can’t be, I’ll test some workarounds. If it’s causing you any persistent problems, let me know via the contact page. Grrrr....
But, hello again! :-) Heads up! I've finally put The Everies Book in my store. Soon I'll begin promoting it for real, but right now I need a rest! In the meantime you can get it at a lower price than I expect to eventually charge. If you have any questions you'd like to see answered in the promotional pieces, please let me know via the contact page. All the best!
I rearranged a few features in the book to make it easier for you to put The Everies into practice. This required a few tweaks for continuity, but it won’t be long now!! I feel like that little train I read about when I was a kid:
Puff, puff, puff...I think I can, I know I can! I’ve now added an information page about The Everies Book so you can read all about its purpose, content and special features. Click here to go to it, or use the tab at the bottom of the left-hand menu. Enjoy!
My long-promised organising book is almost ready for launch! All being well – I’ve never done this before – the sales page will be completed by Thursday 19 May, 2016, with the upload following as soon as technically feasible after that. It should be all systems go by the weekend. Thanks for your patience!
How did you go with following the NAC? Hope some of it was useful for you. Now April’s here, it’s a good time for us in the Southern Hemisphere to do Autumn Cleaning. It’s similar to Spring Cleaning, except that instead of cleaning & decluttering to open things up, it’s done in preparation for battening down the hatches. Especially, clear away any outdoor clutter that could get blown away – or into your windows – during a storm; get trees trimmed; and fix any leaky or fragile spots around the house. Clear away indoor clutter near outer walls, to avoid mould issues. Clean those windows, too, before they’re covered up for winter. Then clean & maintain the car to keep it sturdy on rainy trips.  As promised, I’ve uploaded 2016's National Organising Week Activity Calendar (‘the NAC’) for you. You can download it from my DIY page. Remember to take before- and after-photographs.
Hope you enjoy the activities! Hello, again! I had to forego other writing to finish my online course while keeping up with book-writing targets. The Everies™ Book is nearly ready. I’m on the final draft & still need to check a few permissions on included content. I’ve dropped in to let you know that from 7 – 12 March is NOW! National Organising Week is here early this year. Usually held in September, Professional Organisers in Western Australia have traditionally started the week off with a calendar of introductory activities that take advantage of spring’s arrival. I’ll upload an autumn edition at the end of the week, though, because this year’s NOW aims to help you especially with wardrobes. Check it out here:
https://www.aapo.org.au/now-national-organising-week This is one of those lucky months that end neatly with a weekend so you can do your end-of-month activities at a convenient time. What are those activities? You may already have some you like to do, such as:
Gosh – has it been 10 days already? That’s the interval since my last post! The online course I’m doing is so absorbing, I keep forgetting to come up for air :-) Yet that is what I love – being so captivated it’s as if I’m miles away. I mention this because it has quite a lot to do with decluttering and you. If there’s something you’d love to do but have never had the time, just keep moving that clutter out. Some day your cleared physical space will become cleared...what? Time? Maybe, but mainly because of cleared mental space! Your mind will no longer run around in a frenzy telling you you’ve got no time. Then you’ll be able to lose yourself on purpose, instead of getting hopelessly lost in housework and filing. Are there key clutter pockets in your home that nag at your attention?
Choose one & declutter part of it right now. Those in our metropolitan area will have noticed milk rations introduced due to fires in the South-West affecting supply. Now would be a good time to employ a mental challenge of the type suggested in the Neurobics Reminder: use milk substitutes or drink clear teas for a few days. This will help rations last longer, give your habits a little shake-out, and let your digestive system rest a bit :-) Then make sure you have no fire hazards in your own home.
Review Decluttering for Fire Safety if needed. How are you going with your Annual Plan so far? Did the week disintegrate into business as usual (apart from heat-exhaustion counter-measures, in our part of the world)? That’s how New Year’s Resolutions or other goal-setting ventures get off to false starts. But that’s all they are – false starts! Your Annual Plan will soon be up and running for real if you keep referring to it and doing what comes next. You might even need to write it in chunks over the whole of January. I’m writing my full plans in ‘begin as I mean to go on’ mode: slowly but surely, tackling them in bites each day. I’m staying aware of things that drag my attention away, and noticing how I feel when I think of what I wrote the day before, while I’m going about my routines. Do my plans make me feel ‘blah’ when I think of them? Chirpy? Or a bit nervy? If you don’t like the way yours make you feel, adjust them ‘til they’re more to your liking. They are yours, right? I think it’s good to put in aims and goals that move you around emotionally. That way, if one line of action is getting too heavy or boring, you can switch your focus to something different for a while and still make progress overall. I’m on something very challenging just now – an online course about ending war! The way I see it, it’s not so different from regular organising, yet needs to be done on a huge space that’s a whollllllle lot more cluttered... So, edit the Annual Plan until it inspires.
Follow it with Dawn Planning, Dusk Check-in & Nightly Review’n’Prep. If you’ve been following the Quarterly Diary Excerpts, you’ll know that before New Year rolls in, there is a very important Every: Review how you went on your plans over the past year. Do this backward glance rather quickly, unless you achieved a great deal – then it’s okay to sit and gaze for a while :-) Mark the occasion for any significant achievements. ‘Significant’ here relates to the fact of achievement, not the thing itself. Whether large or small, if you definitely got somewhere with any step, or gained something unexpected along the way, that’s significant! Celebrate it in some way. It’s up to you how. Just don’t undo it in the celebration of it ;-) Pick something affirming, like ‘dancing’ to enjoy an improved fitness level – something along those lines. Work out how to maintain these achievements into the New Year, then decide which of the other goals and plans you still want to carry forward. Transfer them to your new 2016 Annual Plan, or a January – March Quarterly Plan if you’re working through the financial year instead. Add any new plans, too. Remember to diarise the main steps right away! If you still need a 2016 Diary,
I’ve uploaded the next Quarterly Excerpt to my Store for you. Happy New Year! Short and sweet: Thank you very much for reading my blog this year, & I hope it’s helping you! Season’s Best,
Heidi |
In using this blog, please Note:
|
RSS Feed