When I am helping a client organize, one of the statements I always hear is, “Oh, I was looking for that!” Usually it’s after we come across an item buried under a pile of stuff, or else we’ve found it put away in a place that the owner had long forgotten. I’ll ask the client, “Where were you looking for it?” That location is where this person expects to find this item — it’s this item’s “home”. So I’ll say, “Let’s…
Read more →I recently had the experience of being photographed by the New York Times. I had been interviewed earlier this month by a Times reporter for an article on tackling clutter in the new year. The author decided which of my quotes she planned to use, then arranged for a photographer to come to my home and take pictures of me in the act of organizing the areas I spoke about. (You can see the article here.) The first thing we…
Read more →For years, I have been saying that the best gifts are experiences, not things (see Better Ways to Spend and Putting the Holidays in Perspective). Now it seems that the rest of the country has caught up to me. The storage company SpareFoot has just released the results of a survey: “79 percent of the U.S. population, and 89 percent of millennials, say they never use some of the gifts they receive each year.” As a result, “a whopping 81 percent…
Read more →I made a small change in my kitchen yesterday and it is making me ridiculously happy. What did I do? I used a Command™ hook to hang a strainer above my sink. It only took me a few minutes, but every time I walk into the kitchen, I am practically giddy. You see, I use this strainer almost every day. Sometimes I use it twice a day. I may use it to rinse blueberries at breakfast, or to rinse cherry…
Read more →My dog Alfie recently illustrated for me an important lesson on how being overly attached to material things can be harmful to your well-being. Alfie is a 13-pound Havanese and Maltese mix. Most of the time, he is a relaxed, affectionate, and happy-go-lucky little fellow. However, after we adopted him two years ago, we found that he would guard his toys to the point of biting you if you tried to take them away. As a result, we don’t usually give…
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