My favorite advice from the list of 100 declutter ideas in the book One Thing at a Time by Cindy Glovinsky was to keep things moving. This can be applied to your house, to your work space, and to how you live your life.
(This gorgeous piece of art is from www.galleryreina.com.) Continue reading
I get more questions about decluttering than any other organizational issue. What to me is great fun is, apparently, quite a chore to most people. If you’ve got a drawer, closet, room, or HOUSE to declutter, it helps to have motivation and a deadline.
I had two brilliant motivators descend on me this week: a theater where I work is holding a garage sale and is looking for items to sell, including clothing items. And our library asked for art supply donations for an upcoming project.
My house is mostly decluttered but two areas where things seem to stick are my potential-costume rack, and my art closet. The potential-costume rack includes things I’ve worn in past shows, dress-ups for the kiddos, and clothes I “demote” until I’m ready to part with them. The art closet includes bits and pieces of recent and past craft and sewing projects. Continue reading
If your closet or drawers are so packed with clothes it’s hard to get anything in or out, the underlying problem could be you don’t want to get rid of anything. Or you love to buy new things. Or both. And it’s possible you don’t have enough space – but you’ll only know that after you pare down some of what you have.
Here’s a cool exercise to help you purge, inspired by the book One Thing at a Time by Cindy Glovinsky.
Set your phone or a timer for 10 minutes and do a deep contemplation about the image you’d like to put forward with how you dress. When the timer goes off, jot down ideas about your ideal:
I’m traveling in Virginia this week, and a good friend told me about a study out of UCLA that explains four ways to make you to feel happier. The Dalai Lama worries that Americans don’t feel they have a right to be happy and that being happy shouldn’t be a goal. He says that’s nonsense, and if the Dalai Lama says “Go for it – it’s okay,” who are we to argue?
Here’s what’s important about happiness as explained by UCLA neuroscience researcher Alex Korb:
If you’re feeling out of sorts and a big project is too much to focus on, try fixing a small thing to boost your energy.
Here are a few energy boosters that work for me: Continue reading
A few years ago, it occurred to me that I had said the same phrase several times without taking action on it: “We should get together sometime.” Mostly this came up in the theater where I met folks in a show, got to know them, and then didn’t spend time with them again until I worked with them on another show and would once again hear myself saying, “We should get together sometime.”
As much fun as theater is, you don’t get a lot of time to talk and I was hungry for a good conversation with many folks I had met.
And I got to thinking about other friends and family I saw often but always in big groups. Big groups are fun but aren’t always great for conversation. Continue reading
I’ve been looking for a local meditation class and stumbled on this site with 100 wellness exercises. The videos are short, 4-6 minutes each, and focus on different aspects of feeling better – by being more grateful, clearing clutter, getting more sleep, beating sugar, and… you get the idea. It’s a great list.
Being a “get it done” kind of girl, I was like, “I’ll do all of these today,” and started to click through one to the next. But I decided instead to stop and spend a day on each one. I’ve tried to remind myself lately that I have time. I don’t have to get everything done right away. It’s a huge temptation for me to think, “Yes. Check. Got it done. Move on.” And rarer for me to take the time to deeply contemplate a thought or idea – especially if it’s a challenge or something negative about who I am or how I think. Continue reading
