Get Organized Conference

I saw a Facebook ad for a Get Organized conference, held on-line from 11-15 September. While there was an option to pay for unlimited access, I thought that the free access to the sessions (which was only good for 24 hours for each one) would be good enough for me. I didn’t make it to all the sessions I wanted to because I had important things to do (errand running, reading, napping), but I did make it to several. As one might expect, some were not really helpful, but there were some excellent tidbits mixed in. By the way, most of the sessions were on the order of 20 minutes or so, which was certainly more tractable than a full hour would have been.

Monday

On Monday I started by going to Decluttering for Beginners by Donna K. White. I don’t really consider myself a beginner seeing as I’ve been attempting to declutter for years, but I certainly haven’t made huge amounts of progress. My key takeaway was that organizing and decluttering are not the same thing. Organizing is problem solving, while decluttering is just getting things out of the house. She defined clutter as anything that consistently gets out of control in your house. You need to declutter first in order to get organized. The key is to just jump in.

She had what she said was a 5 step decluttering process. I’m not sure I actually captured her five things, there. But here’s what I caught:

1. Start with visible places, not hidden spaces. In my case, this means that I am free to ignore the filing cabinets.
   
2. The goal isn’t to store things but to give everything a real place to live. You should ask, “if I needed this item, where’s the first place I’d look for it.” This should be based on instinct, instead of analysis.
   
3. Give yourself permission to ignore emotional associations that things have.
   
4. Take things to where they belong now.
   
5. The goal should be to make the space better. Removing anything from the space counts as decluttering.
   

Overall, as a person who tends toward the perfect as the enemy of good enough, this was reasonably useful advice.

After that, I went to the Kickoff, which had been presented earlier in the day by Laura Smith and Tasha Lorentz, who ran the whole conference. They said some similar things. Namely, being organized requires everything to have a home. They advised beginning with the end in mind and focusing on what makes you smile. They also advised focusing on a few small things. Finally, they suggested that the way not to get overwhelmed by the conference was to prioritize watching the live events, instead of the prerecorded ones.

Next I went to How to Assess Your Routine to Avoid Overhauling Your Entire Life by Ashley Brown. I think part of my issues are that years of school and work imposed routines on me and I haven’t really established routines since I retired. She claimed that everyone does have routines, but I think I would say it would be more accurate that everybody has areas of life that should have routines, e.g. self-care, cleaning, planning, cooking, etc. Some of my takeaways were:

• Identify what routines will be most supportive for you to focus on and focus on one at a time.
  
• The goal is to solve consistent problems using consistent solutions.
  
• Use feeling vs. fact to decide where to start. Identify which areas of life feel chaotic and out of control and which make you feel anxious or stressed.
  
• Lead with curiosity. Pay attention to how routines make you feel.
  

The final presentation I watched on Monday was Chaos to Calm: Uncovering the Roots of Clutter and Creating a Peaceful Home by Katy Joy Wells. She identified several common causes of clutter and suggested how to deal with them.

1. Procrastination is really about avoiding stress, not the thing itself. Identify what you’re really avoiding and implement a starting ritual countdown to begin the task.
   
2. How we perceive value is not necessarily the real value. Some examples are frequency with which we use something, how difficult it would be to replace, emotional attachment, monetary value, and potential usefulness. It helps to reference your core values as a person, e.g. simplicity.
   
3. Scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset. The search for a good deal is associated with a scarcity mindset, as is keeping things in case we might need them later on. She suggested writing affirmations and keeping them where you see them and reading them out loud, which is the sort of thing I absolutely loathe. More usefully, she noted that it’s hard to get rid of things that represent who you used to be (e.g. college textbooks) and who you want to be.
   
4. Mainstream culture pushes acquiring things. To deal with this, focus on shopping more intentionally
   
5. Perfectionism, which leads to shame. Instead, remind yourself that your home should get messy and just because it’s not optimal doesn’t mean it isn’t beneficial.
   

By the way, there was a mid-day meet up every day, which included 10 minutes to focus on decluttering one type of thing. Monday’s was clothing. This is actually an area that isn’t a problem for me, so I used to time to try to clear out some email, which is a problem for me.

Tuesday

The first session I went to on Tuesday was Three Easy Things to Declutter in Each Room by The Carla Project. I had a significant issue with this presentation because she went room by room and asked people to find 25 things to declutter in each room. She did have some example suggestions which were, in some cases, just three categories of things (e.g. for the bathroom, she suggested packaging, anything expired, and anything you don’t like). But, overall, I thought this was misleading and not particularly useful.

Next up was Time Management Tips for Empty Nesters by Suzy Mighell. I’m not really an empty nester since I was never actually a nester per se, but I’m in the right age group. There were a few potentially useful takeaways:

• Don’t make decisions when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired = HALT. (Advice givers and self-help types love acronyms.)
  
• Make lists every evening for the following day.
  
• Only start things you know you can finish. Keep your schedule realistic and don’t compare yourself to other people.
  

Tracy Linn presented Organize Your Home With a Home Hub. She defined this as a a designated place for coordinating events. She showed some options for types of calendars. Things she included in planning are calendar, scheduler, chores, cleaning lists, and menus, and suggested identifying the top 5-8 areas you plan to streamline. Frankly, her presentation skills were not great, e.g. she didn’t know how to screen share, so I wasn’t impressed.

The Tuesday mid-day 10 minute decluttering challenge was a 10-minute tidy up. I spent a little time going through a backlog of unopened snail mail. Given how much I am away from home, that is an ongoing issue for me.


Wednesday

I started with watching Three Steps to a Sparkling Home by Becky Rapinchuk Her main point was that you should just start and do something. Then she did go on with her three steps.

1. Quick declutter. She suggested aiming for 5 bags of trash in 15 minutes, which seems like an awful lot to me.
   
2. Then clean the kitchen sink. Since I’m a “wash dishes as I go” type of person, this is about a one minute task.
   
3. Finally, catch-up on laundry. This is actually another non-issue for me. I do my laundry roughly every 1-2 weeks, depending on how much I’m home and I always put everything away right afterwards.
   

She went on to daily and weekly task lists. While there are many things I could definitely stand to do more often (e.g. nature abhors a vacuum and so do I), her issues were not the same as mine. I did like her statement that consistency is the key, but, overall, her talk wasn’t particularly relevant for me.

Organizing Your Photos by Casey von Stein (aka Miss Freddy) was definitely one of the best sessions of the conference. Her advice was the start with digital photos and write a list of everywhere your photos are. Ideally, you want your digital photo hub to be on an external hard drive. Then follow these 4 steps:

1. Centralize all your photos in one place (this is the digital photo hub). You can use copy and paste to do this.
   
2. Get rid of duplicates.
   
3. Sort. Note that software can do steps 2 and 3.
   
4. Back-up. Best practice is to have 3 copies. She suggested hard drive, one copy off site (the cloud counts), and services like Amazon photos or dropbox.
   

Then you can create albums, photo books, and custom videos. Note that albums reference photos but don’t create additional copies. After the digital photos are organized, scan printed photos. It’s also worth playing with facial recognition and keyword search. She also mentioned having a consistent naming scheme.

She also suggested doing a daily clean-up, which seems excessive to me. It’s a good idea to save screenshots to your notes app rather than keeping them in photos.

Next, I watched Surviving and Thriving with Chronic Illness by Sarah McDonald. I’m not dealing with chronic illness, but I thought she might have something to say about having limited time to deal with housework. Overall, this wasn’t particularly useful for me, but I did capture a few takeaways:

• Not all chores are equal.
  
• Sometimes, convenience is a matter of survival. I interpret that as not feeling guilty about things like buying pre-chopped vegetables.
  
• Simplifying things is not inferior.
  

Justine Hovey’s talk, titled You Don’t Need a Craft Box was more relevant. Her focus is paper crafts, but I think her ideas are more broadly applicable.

• One of the things she showed off as not being needed is a Brand Box. This is an absolutely gorgeous German product that I definitely don’t have room for. But, ooh, if only. Of course, her point was that you don’t need it, but then she has one.
  
• What she did suggest was a bunch of 12 x 12 inch boxes, each of which has the supplies you need for a specific technique, e.g. embroidery.
  
• Paper is tedious to organize, so limit buying a lot of it. Buy a multipack of cardstock and don’t buy more until you use up a given color. Buying a sampler lets you figure out what you will actually use.
  
• Pieces of paper smaller than about 1/4 sheet get tossed. Er, not gonna happen. They’re useful for collaging.
  
• She uses evernote to keep a digital inventory of supplies.
  
• Instead of going overboard buying a bunch of organizers first, take out what you need to organize and then look for the right bin or box for it.
  
• Avoid micro-organizing.
  

The Wednesday mid-day 10 minute challenge was a digital declutter. I spent the time working on deleting email.

Thursday

I started by watching a Wednesday presentation by Michelle Brooks titled Get Out of Your Own Head and Make Progress Towards Your Goals. She had a fairly obvious step by step approach:

1. Dream big. Acknowledge where you want to go and write it down.
   
2. Identify where you are. This will change over time.
   
3. Get to work. Do one thing every day. If you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards.
   
4. Celebrate. Figure out what motivates you and make rewards fun.
   

This all sounds easy, but the devil is in the details.

Then came Folding 101 by Sophie Liard. I found it hard to believe that I actually watched a 17 minute video of someone folding clothes. Actually, it was somewhat reassuring. In short, my folding methods are generally pretty good. She is excessively fond of folding things in thirds and loves drawer dividers, but aside from that, most of what I do is similar to what she does. I was, however, disappointed that she didn’t demonstrate folding fitted sheets.

Crystal Paine presented 3 Simple Shirts to Radically Improve Your Productivity. This was mostly an attempt at motivational self-talk, most of which completely defeats the purpose as far as I’m concerned. Her three shirts were:

1. Change “I have to” to “I get to.”
   
2. Instead of saying “I don’t have time,” say “I am choosing to spend my time differently.”
   
3. Ask the question “what will it matter at the end of my life?”
   

I don’t know about you, but that’s the sort of thinking that got my place into such a mess.


The last talk I watched was Get a Game Plan: 3 Steps to Design Your Winning Week by Anna Deamon Koranick. This appealed to me because I tend to like planning things, sometimes more than I like actually doing them. At any rate, here are my notes from that session:

• To decide what matters most, apply the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Frame things to do in terms of roles.
  
• Prioritize in three categories:
  
  
  
  1. Boulders are immovable, important but not urgent, and routine
     
  2. Big rocks are high priority, important and/or urgent
     
  3. Pebbles are everything else
     
  
  
• Watch out for productivity pitfalls and consistently underestimating how long tasks will take. To overcome these, batch tasks together. Block time by placing boulders first, then adding in standing meetings and routines for morning, evening, workday startup, workday shutdown, and weekly planning.
  
• Building a weekly game plan is the most important thing you can do. You should decide what it will include, what tools you need, and when to make your plan. But you should also make it fun.
  

The mid-day challenge for Thursday was a 10 minute decluttering frenzy. I continued working on my inbox.

The conference continued on Friday, but Rosh Hashanah started that night, so I had other things to focus on. I still think I got a fair amount out of at least some of the presentations I watched, though I am glad I just went for the free option. As for immediate actions, I decided to focus on getting rid of things by listing 5 things a week on my local buy nothing group. I started that this week and so far have given away an alarm clock I never even opened and a digital thermometer that my former employer sent me at the beginning of the pandemic (which was never opened because I already had / have a perfectly good one). I have a taker for the plastic horse I was going to use as a hat decoration before I took a different direction and she plans to pick it up on Monday. If nobody wants them, a pair of shoes will go into the thrift shop donation box and a koozie will probably just get tossed.

Getting Caught Up Here

First, a bit of shameless self-promotion:

Saturday night (tomorrow!) I’m part of a storytelling show at The Stagecoach Theatre in Ashburn, Virginia. The theme is Wild West and stories about frontiers. It’s being live-streamed, so you don’t have to be local to attend. Tickets and more information are at
the theatre’s website.

Speaking of which, did you know that Mr. Spock had 3 ears?
There was the back left ear, the back right ear, and the final front ear.

I’m also going to be part of a Halloween show on Monday October 30th. More details on that to follow.


So, let’s see, what I have done over the past couple of weeks?

Globe Life Field: I’m now back to having gone to a game at every major league ballpark. The coolest part of this is that, when I posted to the Ballpark Chasers Facebook group to ask about transportation options, a women there (Jenn, which must stand for Jenn-erous) offered to pick me up and take me with her and her daughter! My flight into DFW was delayed by weather and I then had to deal with the confusion of getting to the Hyatt, which is a short walk from Terminal C, but lacking in signage until you’re halfway there. Apparently driving there is equally confusing. But we got to the game in plenty of time.

We walked around before the game, including Texas Live, a busy entertainment district. I had to have a photo with Nolan Ryan’s statue, since I remember his days as a relief pitcher with the Mets.



Here’s the obligatory clock photo.



And the obligatory picture of the field.



Overall, I’d say it was a middle of the road ballpark. I understand the weather problem in Texas, but baseball is not intended to be an indoor sport. And the weather was perfectly comfortable, so there was really no excuse not to have the roof open. I also thought that the concessions were rather weak, emphasizing quantity over quality. Blue Bell ice cream is a good nod to local tastes, at least.

As for the game, at least the people around me were actually paying attention to the game and talking about baseball, instead of texting everyone in creation telling them how cool they were to be at a game. (That was my experience at the previous Rangers’ ballpark.) I do wish that more people sang along to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” however. And I really wish the Rangers hadn’t beaten up so badly on my Red Sox, who lost in a 15-4 rout.

After the game, we walked up to the Rangers Hall of Fame plaques, so I could take this picture. I knew my father had a namesake who was a sportscaster, but I was still amused.



My trip home went smoothly. My next baseball focus will probably be on going to all the AAA ballparks. I also want to go to next year’s season opener in Seoul. I need to research how to get tickets for that.

NSO Gala: I went to the 2023 season opening gala of the National Symphony Orchestra. I just went to the concert part, but it was fun seeing people dressed to the nines for the reception beforehand. The reason I braved the rain to go was that the main feature was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Before that, there were short works by Gioachino Rossini, Edward Elgar, and Carlos Simon. Simon’s piece, Fate Now Conquers was intended as an homage to Beethoven - essentially, a response to his Seventh Symphony. It was also interesting to see him come out for a bow at the end. Wow, is he young!

As for Pictures at an Exhibition, they did the Ravel orchestration. I actually prefer the solo piano version, but I realize that’s a slightly eccentric preference. At any rate, it’s one of my favorite pieces, largely because it is so evocative of how I react to walking around art exhibitions. I don’t think Mussorgsky knew what a great suite of music it was and I have this imaginary conversation in my head in which Rimsky-Korsakov tells him it’s a masterpiece and, when Mussorgsky protests, Rimsky-Korsakov says, “oh, don’t be so modest, Modest.”

The Medicare Saga: My phone appointment with the Social Security people was a little stressful, since they called about 15 minutes late. And, midway through, the fire alarm in my condo complex went off. I was able to get through the call by going out to my car for it, but it was stressful. And I still have to go down to their office to provide them with some documentation. Er, no, I am not going to put my birth certificate and such in the mail. My appointment for that is Monday. That may get seriously screwed up if the government shuts down.

On the plus side, I got the benefit payments site working for me, though it took nearly 40 minutes on the phone, roughly 30 minutes of which were trying to persuade the person I was talking to that I was getting an error message when I tried to reset my password. Eventually, she tried it herself and she realized she needed to transfer me to the person who could send me an email to reset it.

I also succeeded in creating an account with a company they’ve now contracted with that has something to do with Medicare open enrollment. But, fundamentally, I still need to get my medicare card in order to move forward.

Other stuff: Other things I’ve done included Yom Kippur services, one of my book clubs, and a Travelers’ Century Club meeting.

Also, a friend posted a copy of this wonderful painting by Phil Lockwood on Facebook.

The Office at Night. It’s an amazing homage to Edward Hopper. I see new details every time I look at it.