Physical Clutter | Organizing Goddess - Part 5

Paying for Postponed Decisions

It’s funny how my work with clients takes on certain patterns. I recently wrote about multiple clients with whom I worked on organizing their jewelry. Lately, I have been visiting storage units with my clients. As I’ve mentioned before, my very wise organizing colleague, Barbara Hemphill, declared that “Clutter is postponed decisions.®” When you decide to put items into storage, you are not only postponing the decision of what to do with that stuff, you are also paying handily for…

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Use What You Have, Part 3

When I got the idea to write a post entitled “Use What You Have”, I thought to myself that I certainly must have expressed that notion before. Well, I did, and more than once. In 2013, I wrote Use What You Have and in 2020 I wrote Use What You Already Have. Rather than come up with a creative title, I decided to just consider this one as part 3 of a series. Here is what happened to make me want to write…

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Clothes You Don’t Wear That Often

When my clients and I review their clothes, I advise them to get rid of any item they haven’t worn in an entire year. I make an exception with clothes that are only worn on special occasions, as we don’t always get a chance to wear those every year. I offer two guidelines for deciding whether to keep the special occasion clothes: they have to still fit, and they have to still be in style. If you have seen me…

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The Best Way to Store Jewelry

People always ask me what’s the “best” way to do something. I also say — it depends. Different methods work for different people. When it comes to jewelry, the most important factor is that you want to see everything that you own so that you can decide to wear it. (This goes for clothes as well.) There are multiple ways to accomplish this. I’ve recently helped three clients organize their jewelry, so I can tell you some caveats. Let’s start…

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My Mother’s Books

When I was a child, my mother owned just a few books that she had amassed during her girlhood and early adulthood. Having grown up during the Depression, neither she nor my father owned a lot of books despite being voracious readers. The public library was a godsend for them growing up, and that habit continued through their adult years. From her college years, there was her textbook from her class on the Romantic poets as well as the complete…

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