The Clutter Diet Blog

Wall-E is a Great Organizer

Last night we saw the new Pixar movie, Wall-E. He is a waste management robot, alone on Earth still cleaning up our mess years after we've abandoned the planet. He is enamored with particularly interesting remnants of our culture and cherry-picks them out of the trash during his daily work, bringing them back to his home and treasuring them. (photo here from official Wall-E website)

There are so many important messages in this movie about our over-consumption and our "disposable" culture. In this imagined future, we've ruined the Earth with our rabid consumerism and have had to leave, and we're all enormously obese because we no longer even walk around...everything is done for us.

I watched this with fascination given my profession, and aside from the obvious message that we need to stop over-consuming, I wanted to point out several things that Wall-E does right with his collection (more thoughts on collections in this previous post, "Collecting for a Living").

• He has a system. Wall-E has a really cool system, actually, of rotating bins.
• He keeps like things together.
• He is choosy about what he adds to the collection. After handling tons of waste a day, he brings home only a few items that fit in his "lunch box."
• He takes care of his collection and enjoys it. He does not just throw it in a pile or in a closet.
• He can retrieve items quickly. When needed he can easily find what he wants, such as a new "eye" to fix himself.

Have you seen the movie? What did you think? There are SO many messages to discuss, even about fashion ("Try Blue! It's the new Red!"), pollution, advertising, and mega-shopping stores. I thought it was a great movie and was clearly a risk for Pixar that will pay off.

New Level of Detail Has Been Discovered!

"The Onion" just published a hilarious fake news article that I thought you would enjoy (if you have never read The Onion, be aware that some of their other fake news content is potentially offensive):

Researchers Discover Details Smaller Than Minutiae

PASADENA, CA—A team of Caltech scientists announced Monday that they have discovered a type of conversational detail smaller than minutiae, the class of particulars long thought to be the smallest possible building blocks of mundanity. "These tiny sub-minutiae, or 'boredons,' are so insignificant that they contain almost no information, useless or otherwise," said head researcher Dr. Nathan Yang, adding that the conversationally inconsequential details naturally occur in elevators and other enclosed spaces containing high concentrations of vaguely familiar acquaintances. "At least six must be combined to make up a detail that even remotely approaches the declarative weight of a triviality, and more than 200 are required to compose a viable trifle." Yang said that the basic unit of tedium remained undiscovered for so long because boredons are instantly forgotten as soon as they are heard.
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This article is talking about conversational details, but it did remind me of a previous post I had written about Micro vs. Macro Organizing. Are you going into the "boredon level" too fast in your organizing projects?  If you are sorting a large room full of inherited stuff and you run into a box with grandma's button collection, are you going to stop and sort out those buttons by color? Or if you are organizing your closet and run into some photos, are you stopping to look at the photos and sort them for a scrapbooking project? Catch yourself doing this... you need to stay on the "macro" level until major visible results are made.

Comment here on YOUR boredon level projects!

Save Time on Your Move with Our Contest!

It's that time of year again! People are loading up the truck and moving to new places and new spaces. I want to thank my friend Monica Ricci for showcasing our SpaceScaping® Kitchen Organizing System in her blog today! This is a product I developed after working on many move-in jobs with clients with boxes and boxes of kitchen stuff to unpack. The labels help you save time by planning your kitchen before unpacking everything and changing your mind... and then they help you find things faster temporarily until you get used to the new space. Monica advocates using them permanently on the INSIDE of the cabinets, so that others who might be cleaning or sharing your kitchen space can refer to the labels when putting things away. Great strategy!

In celebration of our appearance on Monica's blog, I will be giving away 3 sets of the SpaceScaping® Kitchen Organizing System labels to our readers! To enter, just comment here, and I will pick the winners by random number drawing on July 2nd. (one entry per person, please!)

I look forward to announcing the winners next week!

Collecting for a Living

This week I was here in Chicago and was on WGN on Tuesday. I am really enjoying exploring the city! Yesterday I was at the Museum of Science and Industry, where this massive structure houses objects as large as a captured German U-boat submarine. This museum has a "hidden" collection behind the scenes of over 60,000 artifacts, and they had displayed a few of them in a small exhibit. One of the signs in this exhibit said "Collecting for a Living" and described some of the jobs of curators, archivists, and others who care for this collection. (photo from MSI's website)

In our jobs as Professional Organizers, we see many people who collect things as a hobby, but the collections are often ignored, stored away, forgotten, and neglected. They also may be taking over the house. It occurred to me that the differences here are worth noting. Museum collections are:

• Indexed, organized, and stored in adequate storage space.
• Archived properly to preserve the items.
• Valuable, either in historical or dollar value.
• Important enough to display and maintain.

If you are a collector in your personal life, is your collection getting the best of you? Are you getting the best of it? Do you care about it enough to index it and store it properly, or display it to enjoy? Would others appreciate your collection?

Got an Organizing Problem? Hang It Up!

A friend of mine sent this product website over to show me (thanks, Kim!)... this product collection of clear hanging bags might be just the thing for people who are very visual, "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" folks. Read my previous post "Are You an Abstract or Concrete Thinker?" for more on this. (photos from hangupbags.com website)

They are demonstrating the product for kids' toys, games, craft supplies, and household items. I think it's particularly good for anything creative, because creative people like being able to see all of their choices when creating something new. You can also store your projects together as shown here with cross stitch supplies. (Aby Garvey, do you know about this?)

I also like their hanging file bags. This would be great for manuals, CDs, and other bulky items you'd like to see readily in your files and stored securely. It looks like you have to call them to order- they don't appear to have a shopping cart on their site.

Are you a concrete thinker? What organizing problems do you have to solve because you need more visual cues? We help people every day in our member message boards with access to our team of experts, at less than the cost of a pizza. We'd love to help you with your specific situation.

Organize Your Happy Campers

It's time for summer camps again... and you, the parents, will be packing for a week! I have been astonished how much time it takes to gather the supplies, label everything, and pack it up as instructed (in the right trunk that is the right size they specify!). My kids did not go this year, but previously they have gone to two-week camps that required a lot of stuff. Here are my tips for organized camp packing:

• Set up a staging area for putting this all together. For us, it was the dining room. Be prepared to feel like it's out-of-sorts for a while until they leave. You need room for footlocker trunks, an ironing board, and a flat surface like a table to sort things into piles easily.
• Camps require everything to be labeled, so buy iron-on labels. Here is a resource I have used successfully:  http://www.irononmdlabels.com/ They have rounded corners and the product works very well. (just try pulling those things off later-- whew!)
• Label dark items with metallic Sharpie® markers. Things like navy blue footlocker trunks and black shower sandals can be hard to label, and the silver metallic writing shows up great.
• Use color-coding for more than one kid. We had one color for the towels and sheets and blankets for each of our sons.
• Consider buying the linens you need. It was worth it to me to buy new (cheap!) towels and sheets, one color for each kid, because those would be the "camp towels" year after year, and we could tell them apart from our normal household linens quickly and easily. Your child will also be able to identify his/her stuff very easily at a glance in a crowded cabin. After camp was over, they were then already labeled for next year, and we just kept them in the trunks and they were ready to go. We bought two extra towels and washcloths than they needed, since it was likely they would get lost from year to year (we were right about that).
• Use Rub-A-Dub laundry markers for labeling clothing if you don't have the iron-on labels. I love these and use them around the house all the time.

Get those kiddos off to camp and then take advantage of some peace and quiet! Enjoy!

Stop the Souvenir Insanity

On my vacation I was just reminded of the importance of PREVENTING clutter in all of our purchasing decisions. "Wow, so many shiny objects! Made by artisans! And they are bargaining with me! What a good deal! And I am really in a buying mood!"

Souvenir literally means, in French, "to remember." Think about what you are bringing back with you from your travels-- when you see it years later in your home, will it still bring you pleasure, and will it really help you remember your trip?

I really stopped to think about each thing I was buying. I bought only practical things that were either consumable or extremely useful in my everyday life.  We bought pounds of coffee from the plantation we toured, hand-woven colorful cloth zippered bags (small ones that are perfect for camera bags and other small electronic gadgets), and a hand-carved set of salad servers (because the "fork" of our set was broken recently and we actually did need to get another set-- now they are special!).

What I did NOT buy:  A bunch of cheap t-shirts that would never get worn, various carved wooden animal trinkets, shot glasses, little bottles of liquor with drunken clay people attached to them, big straw hats that would have to be carried onto the plane, etc. I have seen so many of these things in clients' homes, never used, ending up in the charity donations pile (or the trash).

We say in my "See How It Works" videos on the Clutter Diet site that getting organized is a lot like losing weight-- for many reasons-- but mainly because they both require a program of PREVENTION, REDUCTION, and MAINTENANCE.

Preventing clutter is something you can practice on a daily basis. Click here to read my article, "7 Ways to Prevent Clutter," including the 5 questions you should ask yourself before purchasing anything.

Can you make a better choice today to prevent clutter coming into your life?

I'm Back from Vacation!

Hi everyone! I was gone for a week in Costa Rica, ziplining around the forest and doing some whitewater rafting, seeing a live volcano... it was definitely a change of pace.

Here's a new tip for your family summer travel: It can get pretty confusing when all of your family's passports look exactly the same. It only took me two times of opening and closing all 4 of our passports, trying to identify one person's in particular, to realize that was pretty darn annoying! I travel with a little goody bag that includes some Post-It flags, so I put a different colored Post-It flag on each passport. Now I know at a glance that the orange one is my husband's, the yellow one is mine, the red and blue ones belong to my sons. Problem solved!

It's always great to be home! I just wrote a new article for Connections for Women called "An Organized Home is a Peaceful Home." It includes two ways to reduce the stress of disorganization and the three biggest reasons that disorganization "disturbs the peace" in your home. I hope you enjoy it!