The Happiness Project

Check out this cool blog - The Happiness Project - chock full of serious thoughts and fun ideas about getting happy.

I especially like a quote from author Mark Frauenfelder who wrote "Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World". When asked "Do you work on being happier, and if so how?" His answer included "...buy some happiness - we hired a person to help us organize our house. Clutter causes stress, and getting rid of clutter is liberating!"

Can I get an Amen?!?!

Q&A - Organizing Tween Room

I've decided to start posting some of the questions that I get about organizing along with my answers. Here is the first about a messy 10 year old's room - never a simple solution since "wait till they move out" does not seem to satisfy most parents. :)

I'm changing the name to protect the innocent (or otherwise), so don't worry if I post yours here sometime in the future!

Question:
My daughter, "Jane", age 10, needs some major help in her room. Her tiny space so messy and unorganized. If we get her room in decent shape, it doesn't take her long to wreck it. What's the best way to begin?

Answer:
Dear "Frustrated Mom",

The biggest problem I see with most children's rooms is that they are just too full of stuff. You can put away once, but if everything is full and it's hard for THEM to put it away (cramming into drawers, moving things around to get to the proper storage area, etc.), the chances that they'll keep it up go way way down.

Also, parents sometimes set up a system that makes sense to them, and possibly it does not to the child, so they must memorize where everything should go. Include her in the organizing process so she both understands it and takes some ownership.

The key is to make it super easy to put stuff away. Store like things with like (based upon their version of similar categories), with plenty of empty space. Think of resource vs. archive, and move out anything that is simply being stored there long-term. Box up the sentimental outgrown things and store them elsewhere if she can't put them "back into the Universe". Only the most used items should occupy "prime real estate" in her room.

Finally, understand that it takes discipline and leadership by example to keep it neat, and most tweens and teens struggle a lot with this. Keep expectations realistic, try for a few minutes a day of maintenance, and congratulate even very small victories!!

That's a quick synopsis of what I do for a client. Hope it helps some!

Becca

"Eat That Frog" Excerpt

Here's a great summary of a famous book (available at Simple Truths website) that addresses procrastination. I often talk about the 80/20 rule, so here's the backstory on that. Enjoy! Becca

An excerpt from
Eat That Frog!
by Brian Tracy

The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also called the "Pareto Principle" after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the "vital few", the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the "trivial many", the bottom 80 percent.

He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle as well. For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times or more than the other eight items put together.

Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks
Here is an interesting discovery. Each of the ten tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks will contribute five or ten times the value of any of the others.

Often, one item on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, Not Accomplishments
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

Before you begin work, always ask yourself, "Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?"

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

Motivate Yourself
Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and helps you to overcome procrastination. Time management is really life management, personal management. It is really taking control of the sequence of events. Time management is having control over what you do next. And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is. As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much happier as a result. This should be your way of working as well.