Sep 19, 2017 9:59:01 AM
In this video you'll see my pathetic garden in spite of help from a master gardener who showed me exactly what to do to grow enough to feed the harvest to an entire neighborhood.
WELL, the biggest lesson learned is in this video. Watch to find out.
Sep 18, 2017 6:28:00 AM
If you have a home-based business (38 million Americans do and $427 billion per year is made by them), or you are a full-time peacekeeper and peacemaker at home, or you’re doing both, this blog is for you.
When you think about it, every institution has its “costume.” Prisons, hospitals, courtrooms, restaurants, car repair shops, beauty salons and the list could go on-and-on. But if you Google, Dress for Success at Home you’ll get a gob of photos of people in offices, outside big city buildings and walking on sidewalks all dressed for success for business outside the home.
Hey, you don’t need to look like a Wall Street tycoon to work at home, but there are some important guidelines for you to follow if you want success and to feel good about your work and yourself.
When you’re home all day, if you’re not careful you’ll end up in recluse attire! You know, your pajamas. God knows they’re comfortable and cozy and if you don’t have some style boundaries, you could hang out in them for days. That’s probably what’s happened when you see an adult in the grocery store in pajamas. Just remember, this person could be contributing to that $427 billion dollars!
Actually working at home as a full-time caregiver or an at-home entrepreneur or both, you actually need a wardrobe that changes during the day. Before you panic, the changes are simple, and will save you time, money and peace of mind in the long run.
1. Pajamas are for sleeping.
Dress in your jammies right before bed as part of your before bed routine. In the morning, get dressed for the next activity which might be exercise, housework, office work, yard work depending on your daily schedule. When you work at home, if you stay in your nightwear, you invariably have that somebody-might-come-over monkey on your shoulder. For your peace of mind, get dressed first thing in the morning.
Topics: On Being Organized / Disorganized, succeed, stay at home mom
Sep 16, 2017 7:42:00 AM
Watch this 2.52 video and Pam will show you how to save a lot of time in the next year by NOT folding your sheets.
Topics: Organization
Sep 15, 2017 5:30:00 AM
Do you like to putter?
When you have time to putter, it gives you a stage to come up with new ideas! That's why creative people love to putter around. But it's hard to putter when there's too much clutter. So if your only reason to declutter is so you'll have more free time to putter, it's a good enough reason. The best question to ask yourself when you have a decluttering session is:
Would I buy this at Goodwill?
In deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, ask this question: ‘Would I buy this at Goodwill?’” Just that question opens your eyes to the item you’re looking at. If you were at Goodwill, would you buy this? Because when you’re buying something secondhand, you take your blinders off and put your examination lenses on.
I Was Blind and Now I See!
At home, your blinders allow you to relax in private and not see what you don’t want to see, just like your sunglasses keep the sun from hurting your eyes. Your home isn’t subject to scrutiny until you’re going to have company at which time you get out your examination glasses and see with “company eyes.”
If you'll put your timer on for 15 minutes and spend that time looking for stuff you wouldn’t buy at Goodwill, you’ll probably be able to fill up a box to give away or pitch. As I wrote that sentence, it inspired me to do just that. So, I’ll be back in 15 minutes if I don’t get sidetracked and end up taking a bath or sweeping the deck.
Topics: De-Cluttering
Sep 13, 2017 6:00:00 AM
Flylady says; “The most common clutter hot spots are children's bedrooms, home offices, attics, and garages.” What does it take to create a clutter-free space? Here are my 10 best home organization strategies straight from my book, The Joy of Being Disorganized.
One of the main reasons stuff piles up on counters, dining tables, coffee tables and floors is that it’s homeless. When an item has no "home," it gets added to an IPOD
(Important Pile Of Decisions). The free chapter I'm giving you has great information about the IPODs in your home and how to eliminate them. That’s why it’s important to make sure everything in your home lives somewhere. “Homing” items in the room where they're used, helps ensure that they get put away when you're finished. For example, I keep a sewing kit in a drawer of an end table in my living room, because I like to mend garments in that room and not in my sewing room in the basement.
Use that, waiting-to-buy time when you’re standing in line at the cash register, to re-think what’s in your hands or cart. Imagine it as clutter. What you buy today can turn into clutter tomorrow. The better you are about keeping things out of your home, the less likely you’ll be to create IPODs when you get home.
Start with the room that’s bothering you the most. (In my 40-year career helping moms get organized, the kitchen is the room most picked.) Marla Cilley, the Flylady
says, “Start by shining your kitchen sink.” That’s so brilliant! In order to keep your sink shiny, you have to keep it empty. In order to keep it empty, you and your family have to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher. In order to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher, it has to be empty!
Sep 11, 2017 5:35:00 AM
You've probably heard the cliche, "get off your high horse." We all know someone who's on one and they're not that fun to be around. But if someone can be on a high horse, then being on a low one is certainly possible! Being around a person on a low horse isn't fun either. In my career helping SHEs get organized, I've never had to suggest getting off a "high horse" but much of my help has come from getting a person off her "low horse." Being on a "low horse" is that feeling you're not good enough. Feeling that way can come from thinking you've failed at something and especially when it comes from the subject of being organized.
How many times have you made "get organized" be your New Year's Resolution? When it comes to getting organized, it’s such a juicy project complete with visions of peace, joy, beauty and order in your home.
But if you’re not careful, the thrill of the thought of victory can end in the agony of feeling defeated. It’s hard being human, but it’s even harder when you beat yourself up because you're disorganized and didn’t achieve what you set out to accomplish because of it.
Getting organized just enough to please you is so simple, but being a creative, you can blow the whole project up like it’s a major motion picture.
Because you are creative, there’s nothing you love more than a new project, except for maybe breakfast, lunch and dinner! You get so excited and enthusiastic as you dive into a new mission with astonishing glee. But like the poem you learned when you were a kid, “First came love, then came marriage, then came pushing a baby carriage,” projects have a honeymoon period and then the reality of the situation kicks in and the work can be a drag if you're not careful.
Sep 5, 2017 5:30:00 AM
Have you ever been close to a “blue blanket” moment? (If you don't know what that is, you'll learn about it if you read on.) When we got home from Italy last week, at 2:00 am (11 the next day in Italy) we walked into our home, exhausted after 24 hours of travel. The first thing I did was go out on our deck to see if the Wisteria had engulfed it. (It grows up one leg of our deck and completely surrounds the railing on three sides.) While surveying the 20 inches of new growth on that busy bush, a bat flew into our house and for the next ½ hour, Terry and I took turns ducking as it recklessly flew at us from the living room to the kitchen frantically searching for an escape route. (Sounds like a great computer game to play...Bat the Jet Laggers.)
It was a big bat with a furry wing-span of about a foot! (Having a bat in my house is as terrifying to me as having a terrorist in it, leaping from chair to table to counter itching to use his oozy.) At one point the bat's radar must have miss-fired for he and Terry bumped heads! That’s when we decided to leave the sliding, glass door to the deck open with the light on outside, turn off all lights on the inside, hope he'd go to the light, take our chances chipmunks or raccoon didn’t decide to move in and flop into bed, thoroughly exhausted.
Sep 1, 2017 5:00:00 AM
Do you remember a long-running Ladies’ Home Journal column that started in 1953, called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”? It featured real-life couples and the juicy details of their marital issues.
As I recall, the columns were split into three parts: a wife’s viewpoint, her husband’s perspective and then a final judgment by a counselor from the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR). AIFR was a successful, but now defunct, center founded in the 1930s by “Dr.” Popenoe. (He wasn’t REALLY a doctor or even a psychologist. He did have an honorary degree as a eugenicist, which is one who believes and practices improving the genetic quality of a group of individuals. He must have been more concerned about improving the male of the species, because more often than not, the pretend doctor’s counselors found a way to pin problems on the wives, calling them “childish,” “juvenile,” “emotionally immature” and “frigid,” for example.
I remember my mom reading the column and when I was a young mother, I would've been interested in it if it had addressed the issue of being disorganized, and how it affects marriages. That problem certainly affected my first marriage, big time!
Has disorganization affected your relationships in a negative way? If Dr. Popenoe were still alive, I wonder what he and his counselors would conclude from this letter from a very distraught woman.
Aug 30, 2017 5:00:00 AM
Aug 28, 2017 5:00:00 AM
Hello Everybody,
Do you dream about traveling to exotic places? Do you ache to see famous points of interest like the Eiffel Tower, the Tahj Mahal or to meet Michael Angelo's David even though he's naked? When you hear about a friend or neighbor getting to go on a cruise or spending time in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Hawaii or just about anywhere short of North Korea, do you find yourself craving to go and feeling bad because you can’t? Do your travel dreams get squashed because of your workload, lack of money, too many kids to take along or a bunch of other reasons?
Mom always wanted to travel when my sister Peggy and I were growing up, but we never got to go very far because we didn’t have the money and Dad couldn’t take time off from work. But that didn’t stop Mom from planning! Bless her little, organized heart; she subscribed to “Holiday Magazine,” a glitzy periodical for the rich (and we weren’t)! It even looked and felt expensive because it was in full color and heavy because every page was almost as thick as the slick cover. Also, it was filled with lots of ads for diamond jewelry and fancy cars in addition to the places it urged us to go. Mom plotted out trips complete with itineraries, destinations for dining, recreation, accommodations and such, and collected them all in her cherished box of travel dreams; her version of a bucket list, where they all waited for the day they’d take us away. We never went.