Do you ever feel this way?

Overwhelmed?  Try these 8 Strategies

Okay, I am going to level with you—these past few weeks, I have felt overwhelmed by all I want to do.  Even though I am a time coach, sometimes I will get caught up in a mistaken belief that I need to do it all.  So what did I do for relief? 

The first thing I did:  Scheduled a massage on my day off. 

Next, I promised myself I would not schedule anything else in my busy week.  I told my husband, so he would keep me accountable.  This is the second big tip: do not take on any new projects or training.  Delay them until next week (or later) whenever possible.  This is NOT the time to learn new things, when you are barely keeping your head above water.

Remember, if you are feeling overwhelmed: start where you are.  See what is causing that feeling.  Is it because you have too much to do?  Or Is it because you don’t know what you have to do?  Both cause anxiety.  The answers will guide your next action.

I found it immensely helpful to plan my week and see just what I needed to do to get ready for my clients, meeting, and speaking engagement. I wrote it all down. When you see it there on paper and it is no longer an unknown, you can experience some relief.

But sometimes just seeing it written doesn’t help and you are still overwhelmed.  At this point, I find it helpful to get some perspective.  Take a step back, look at the bigger picture.  What are your main goals? Are there any items on your to-do list that do not fit or that seem less important now?  So you are reevaluating, asking yourself: What do I really have to do?   The key is not working longer hours, spending more time away from home and slogging through your work.  Instead, pare down your tasks to the essentials.

If things are really getting to you, a breath of fresh air and a 15 minute walk will help.  Getting outdoors, preferably in nature, will relax and rejuvenate you.  Your perspective will shift, and your problems seem smaller when compared with the grandeur of the great outdoors.  I particularly find the sound of water to be soothing.

My last tip: Make sure to take time to exercise.  This time investment will make a huge difference.  The endorphins will help relieve your stress, you will have more energy and be healthier.  It is a win-win-win.  And I personally believe your productivity increases when you exercise.  A morning walk will wake up your brain and get you ready to start your day.  You really can’t afford to skip exercise.

Reward yourself on the weekend by getting out on a hike, gathering with friends, or having a massage. Take the time to refresh yourself and try not to think about work.  On Monday morning, you will be fresh and ready to tackle the week.

To recap: when you are overwhelmed, start where you are.  Don’t take on projects or training, take a step back for perspective, re-evaluate what you must do,  pare down your tasks, take a restorative break, take time to exercise, and truly take the weekend off.  These 8 tips will be a lifeline to pull yourself back up onto solid footing.

Decisions, Decisions

How much time do you spend making decisions?  What to write about, should I exercise, who to call next, which task on your to-do list is next, which emails to answer, etc.  Each day we are faced with a myriad of choices.  Some decisions don’t take long, but some eat up our time.  By minimizing small decisions, I help my coaching clients gain 1 hour (or more) every day.  We accomplish this through use of a time map and weekly planning.

One of the great benefits of having a Time map for your week is that it saves so much decision-making time.  Here is an example of small decisions eating up your time.  Say you have a 7 hour workday and you switch activities 7 times. In the morning, you take 10 minutes deciding what to do first.  You work on Quickbooks.  Then, you take 10 minutes to decide your next action.  And so on.  If you use 10 minutes each time you switch activities, and you switch activities each hour, you have spent 1 hour and 10 minutes on decisions.  What a good time map does for you: instead of losing that 10 minutes, one quick glance at the map and you know what type of activity to do next.  And this is a plan you made deliberately by yourself or with a time coach, when the pressure of the day is not coming down on you.  You’ve used it, tweaked it, and arranged it so that your schedule makes sense to you.

What is a time map, you ask?  It is a customized guide to the week.  I create a custom time map for all those I coach.  In it, we have set aside time for achieving goals, and for the main activities they need and want to do.  Clients who use their map report being more productive, less stressed, and feeling a great sense of accomplishment at the end of each day.  They feel in control and assured that everything important has gotten done.

Before you can make a plan or Time map, you need to know where you want to end up.  What are your goals for your business this week, this month, or this year?  Once you have goals as a guide, your North Star to steer by, some tasks become a priority and others fall by the wayside.

That brings me to my next point: Take time to plan your week and prioritize your tasks.  Going back to the mariner term—if you don’t have a map, you will wander around the ocean of choices and take much longer to arrive, if you do manage to arrive.

Planning your week doesn’t have to be laborious.  Thirty minutes to an hour is plenty of time.  I encourage my clients to make time for planning either Friday or Monday.  They report their week goes smoothly and they feel more in control when they set aside the time to do this.  Planning is the most beneficial action you take to create a successful week. It leads to deep feeling of accomplishment each Friday.

Typically, I check my calendar for the week and make my to-do list during this time.  I then look at my goals, and my time map, to make sure I plan time for the most important activities.   It helps me keep a balance between work and family. If I start to get caught up in getting Everything done before 5, a glance at my time map helps me remember my main priority late afternoon is my family.  If I have done my job properly, the most pressing tasks of the day are done before then.  Another benefit of planning: by looking at my schedule first thing Monday, I notice if I have any overlapping appointments. Also I see if I’ve planned enough transition time between activities, including travel time.

To review: If what you are doing isn’t working, do something else.  Plan your week.  Map out a productive week by yourself or with a Time Coach.  Save at least an hour each day, using it to make more money or go home early!  It really is a formula for success.

What would you do with your hour?

Do you like stories? I do! My last tele-class with Margaret Lukens, veteran organizer, coach and NAPO educator, had a story about a cookie. I had signed up for the class to learn how to better help my Time and Organizing clients start new habits.

The story: Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, did an experiment on himself. He had a habit he wanted to change. Every day around 3:30 p.m. he would get up from his desk, go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and eat it while chatting with friends. Problem was, he started to gain some weight. He noticed, and his wife noticed. He decided to break the cookie habit.

In his book he says to change a habit you must identify the routine surrounding the habit. So he broke it down to each small action this time of day. He described every small thing he did at this time of day, trying to discover the cue, the trigger for the cookie habit.

Well, after weeks of experimenting, he discovered the cue was the time of day. But what was his reward? Every habit has a reward, he postulated. Did he feel just as good if he ate an apple, for example? He did. After trying lots of combinations, he realized his reward was actually chatting with friends.

His next step was to create a plan to change the habit. His plan included following his cue to get up from his desk, but instead of getting a cookie, he just went straight to his friends’ offices and chatted with them for 10 minutes. In this way, he still got the social reward he craved without the weight gain! Of course, his discipline wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t able to quit “cold turkey,” but eventually he kicked the cookie habit.

What I love about Lukens’ class is this: she always asks each of us great questions that cause us to think about our own habits. The habit I want to change is to stay focused on tasks that require concentration even when I think of something else that needs to be done. It was a powerful moment when she helped me realize the strength of my fear that I will forget that newly remembered task if I don’t write it down right away. My reward is the peace of mind that I have it captured.

So what I decided to do: instead of getting up to write personal to-do’s on the whiteboard, I will capture them on a Post-it at my desk, and stick it to the whiteboard later that day. It’s not perfect, but it is better.

What is one habit that is stealing your time? Angry Birds, TV, Facebook? Try Duhigg’s method on yourself. Experiment. Be patient with yourself; it can take up to 254 days** to establish a complex habit. It usually helps to have someone to keep you accountable, and I would be happy to be there for you. Tell me your habit and I’ll check in with you monthly.

**research by Phillipa Lolly, Great Britain

Recently, I had the pleasure of picking pears at a pear farm run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The light passed through green leaves in the morning light, and it seemed a green glow surrounded the trees. We worked quickly, trying to fill as many bins as possible (the pears go to an LDS cannery from which they get distributed freely to needy people throughout the world). It is a bit tricky to find some of those pears, because they are hiding in and under the leaves. But even a novice can fill many containers quickly when there’s a plentiful harvest. The big aha for me: sometimes when I would reach for a pear, I had two pears sharing a stem. At first I randomly selected which of the two pears to pick–whichever one I reached first. If I chose the smaller of the two the larger one sometimes fell to the ground, making it unusable. (Once on the ground, pears cannot go to the cannery.) Faced with a choice, I trained myself to pick the biggest, most plump pear. If I could only have one, I wanted it to be the biggest pear.  If I had to sacrifice a smaller one, so be it.  So I learned to get the most pears possible–or have success–I had to reach for the biggest one.
With all the reaching, bending, twisting and heavy lifting I did that day, my shoulders and back were sore the next day! Whenever I used those muscles over the next few days, I definitely remembered picking pears. My effort caused some pain, yes, but the success and sense of accomplishment was well worth the effort.

This has application in life and business. They say it’s better to aim for the stars and miss than aim for the mud and hit.  I aimed for the biggest, best pear, and I need to do that in business too in order to be a success. It’s easy to say, I’m not ready for that market yet, I’ll stay in this smaller, comfortable one, serving the same kind of clients I have been for years. I recently had a conversation with Barbara Hemphill, an organizer I respect greatly.   She advised me to decide on the direction I wanted my business to go and focus all my advertising, networking and budget there. Otherwise, she argued, I am really trying to promote two services and my resources are divided.  In order to follow her wise words, I would need to let go of marketing for home organizing.  That is a scary move because right now a large percentage of my business comes from homeowners.  So in order to grow in the direction I see Efficient Spaces going, I have to sacrifice some comfort by seeking out larger companies.

Reaching for success is just like reaching for the best pear. You have to look for the opportunity, sometimes looking underneath the leaves, at all the possibilities. You also have to want it. You need to be ready to sacrifice, even go through some discomfort or growing pains in the process. Ask yourself why you are reaching for that pear, that goal. Why is it important to you? What is your motivation?

My motivation for getting a multitude of  pears was to serve others, to give a hand up from unemployment or poverty. My Number 1 motivation for Efficient Spaces’ success is to make my clients’ business more productive and profitable by sharing my unique spacial and time management skills.

Success: Are you willing to reach for it even if you have to stretch to get it?  What is your next step to take your business to a higher level?

What did I do on vacation? I played, of course! I went to my Dad’s, the home in Maine where I grew up, and organized about 2500 photos.

This is a great summer project for those long, slow summer afternoons when you just want to stay close to your air conditioner.

2500 photos: For me, projects like that are fun. I got to look at all the photos my Dad had in albums, which spanned from ancestors in the 1700s to the birth of my brother Dan’s most recent baby. That is why it’s fun for me, I’m really into pictures. They tell a story that words sometimes cannot capture.

I’m not going to tell you it was all perfect and I didn’t have some rough moments, especially with the odds and ends, the pictures that didn’t seem to fit in any of the categories I’d set up . . . that is the hardest part for me.
And I was wishing for a more flexible album type, one which had clear pockets pages that could be removed and shuffled around when I discovered photos later that should have been in that album. But as my Dad reminded me, it doesn’t have to be perfect!

Photo Safety
First things first. And that would be . . . photo safety.
Make sure to get your photos out of magnetic albums. To spot a magnetic album, look for sticky pages that have a whole-page plastic sleeve that peels back. Also, the glue will have a striped look. When you bought the magnetic albums, the glue was white. In a few of my Dad’s older albums, the glue around the edges of the page was a deep yellow color. And a few of the photos I removed had some “tracks” from the glue.

When that yellow spreads so that it is under your pictures, the acid in the glue will start a slow aging process in your pictures. If left in there long enough, pictures will show the stripe pattern of the glue that is underneath them. Yuck! It is time to get them out!

Seriously — It is better to take them out, rub off any glue residue from the back of the photos, and stick them in a shoebox than to have them in that album. Preferably a shoebox lined with acid-free paper, of course.

Finding Patterns
In order to sort that many photos, I did just one album at a time. I took out the photos that were out of order or didn’t ‘fit’ in that album, which sometimes meant most of the album.

After a while, I noticed patterns–which is what organizers do !–and each album became a certain time span or theme. For example, my Mom had started a Christmas album, which had all the Christmas pictures from our childhood to the present. In my picture search, I discovered several years’ worth of earlier Christmases, so I added them at the beginning of the album. It’s important to work with what you’ve already got and make it better.

At the end I had several small stacks of photos that didn’t ‘fit’ in any of the albums, or that should have gone in an album which was full. This was one of the times when Dad reminded me it didn’t have to be perfect. I had to make some hard decisions. One of those stacks of pictures was from the weekend we had Kate blessed. She is our first child. I felt a little guilty for taking them out of the album they had been in. But in the end, it worked out well and she got to be in an album with her cousins.

It all turned out well by the end of the day. Dad’s pictures were safely separated from the magnetic pages, and well organized into pocket albums. A good day’s play–I mean–work!

I saw so many Garage Sales and Yard Sales this weekend! Spring has definitely sprung. I love to see sales around the city, because it means people are cleaning out their surplus.

Good for you! I say.

We tend to accumulate “stuff” in the good old US of A. Trends, gadgets, great deals that cause us to buy way more of one item than we would ever use and our own desire to surround ourselves with pretty things and feel prosperous– all contribute to our society of over-indulgence.

A lot of that ‘stuff’ we buy, we love it for a little while, and then we stop using it. After some time passes, we realize we haven’t used it in a while, so it either stays where it is, becoming clutter, or you take it out to the garage, to sit there for who knows how long.

Oh, I know how long–until your next garage sale, that’s when!

See what I mean? THAT’s why I love garage sales. When you know you are hosting your annual spring garage sale, you tend to really evaluate the stuff in your closets, attic/basement and garage. For me, I know I actually go through the house LOOKING for things that we haven’t used in a while (especially kids toys and clothes). There’s nothing like an upcoming garage sale to motivate you to purge! It actually creates a sense of urgency to find things you haven’t been using, things that don’t have a future with you.

Though I’m not an expert at garage sales, I am an expert at purging. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you are evaluating what stays and what goes to the garage sale.

Ask yourself:
• Do I use this?
• Do I love it?
• Does this item have a future with me or just a past?
• Am I ever going to be this size again?
• How many golf balls do I need, anyway?
• Does (insert name) even care about this _____ I am saving for him/her?
• What’s the worst thing that could happen if I sell this/ throw it out?

A final word: Be disciplined with the things left over from your garage sale. Take the lot to a thrift store or the dump that day or the next. DON’T save them for next year’s yard sale, despite the temptation. The cost to

This organized Garage brought to you by Efficient Spaces organizing!

store that ‘stuff’ will outweigh any amount you might earn selling it later. Think of your garage as prime storage space. You don’t want to clutter it with stuff you already know you no longer want or use.
Be ruthless!

Photo courtesy of Monkey Bar Storage