You spend hours organizing your office, den, only to find a short time later you are back to the mess you started with. Sometimes this can’t be helped – the garage or basement or “that room” become the catchall when you are in a rush or you just got lazy. And for some reason basements seem intrinsically resistant to positive change. But many times, especially in the case of paperwork, it is because of a failure in the plan.

Organizing means to put in order, classify, arrange or sort out. But if you do that without a plan to systematize what comes in next, you will be quickly undone. You need a system – a plan of procedure, a body of methods, to keep what you have just organized from getting out of control once again.

For example, you have purged your files, made pretty folders with nice labels, no messy piles on your desk. Great, as long as nothing else shows up. You need to plan how will you deal with the next stack of papers that come your way. Try to identify your failure points.

• Do you have clear rules of what you can immediately toss?
  • If yes, do you have a convenient place to put it?  My main recycle bin for paper is downstairs so in order not to create another pile upstairs I have two small wastebaskets in my office – one for trash and one for paper.
• Do you have clear rules of what you will keep?
  • If so, does each type of document – bills, coupons, invitations etc. – have it’s own “home”? Keep a desktop file box as command central for those action items so you never have to guess where you put those tickets or that gift card. I like open top ones – lids tend to act as another place to grow piles. When there is no lid you are more likely to put things right into the proper folder.
• Do you have clear rules of what to do with the item after it is actioned?
  • Do you like to keep paid bills, or toss them right away? (whenever you toss it do shred!). If you like to keep the non tax related bills and receipts for a bit, set up a file system that is self purging . If you like to keep them for five or six months, set a folder for each month. When you have filled all six, toss the contents of the first and start over.

Even if you do everything electronically, you can apply the same concepts – a disorganized e-mail box is just slightly less annoying and cumbersome as disorganized paper.

So the next time you feel you are starting all over again, begin with the end in mind, as Steven Covey says. Have a plan, a system, that will provide an ongoing solution.

NOTE: I have never done this before, but because of the popularity of this piece last year, I am doing a rerun of my last New Year’s Second Thoughts.

I admit it; I have failed. Once again in 2009 I failed to lose weight, exercise more, keep my fingernails beautifully lacquered, my cuticles soft. I did not keep my own paperwork up to date, nor did I manage to save any money for retirement. I did not faithfully floss, whiten or use fluoride rinse. The whole house was seldom clean at the same time – in fact, the  many cob webs and dust bunnies have essentially won the war and we live comfortably together.

I did not drink 3 eight ounce glasses of water every day, nor have 6-8 servings of fruits and vegetables. I failed to give up potato chips. I have not read every book that I have purchased, nor have I watched less television. I did not get Christmas cards out. I still do not understand quantum mechanics or the string theory or the fuss about Schrodinger’s cat.

I realized all of these failures (and more) on New Year’s Eve. I said the list out loud and waited for the guilt to move in – had the bottle of wine open and was ready to wallow. After a few minutes – and more importantly, before I drank any wine – I noticed that I did not, in fact, feel guilty! HUH? The world did not come to a halt. There were no jeering mobs pointing and laughing outside my window. Hmm. SO I embraced my failures and laughed out loud as the words “SO WHAT?” flashed in my head accompanied by celebratory lights and the sound of noise makers. So what? Many of the things we beat ourselves up about don’t matter all that much.

I DID manage to keep focus on the things that are most important to me, things that affect others, and things that might have had serious immediate consequences if left undone, and I am satisfied with that. For the rest of it, I will quote Scarlett O’Hara “ I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy.  I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

Happy New Year, Guilt-Free Failures, and Magnificent Successes to you all.

Pretty ambitious sounding title but I am just going to give you one tip:

Abandon the notion of perfection!

Even if you do have the Martha gene – or the staff – to effortlessly attain the perfection portrayed in every holiday issue of every magazine you have been subjected to on the supermarket line, resist that urge. Why? Because your friends and family will secretly resent you for it. You are creating an unachievable goal for the rest of us to try to emulate. We don’t like that – at all. Petty? Yes, what can I tell you? We’re not perfect.

Should you actually achieve magazine cover perfection – either by accident or by ridiculous effort – just have the children scatter toys and the odd, preferably unwashed, sock around the living room before your guests arrive. This will instantly make the rest of us feel better, as well as providing us with fodder for the after event call to “Agnes”, the relative we call to dish with after family events. (Oh come on, you know we all do that.)

If you don’t have access to small children you might instead simply appear to have been imbibing all day – a dandy way to blemish your otherwise unnerving perfection as well as once again giving us something juicy to report. Of course if you don’t have small children you could actually become tipsy, but not enough to call into question the safety of eating the meal you have perfectly prepared. It’s all about your guests, after all.

Speaking of food – another good way of not being so perfect is to pretend to have burned the appetizers and offer the lowly chips and dip as the only available replacement. Many of us would prefer that to the grilled tofu and sardine ceviche anyway. It would also be nice if you could put on a little weight before the party – but then that may just be me asking too much.

So, relax. And, if you are fortunate to be a guest at a less at a less than perfect holiday event, don’t forget to call me when you get home. I’ll be all ears.

I am, at times, great big old slob. When I am involved in a task that has anything to do with creating something, like a craft project – I am solely concentrating on the task. I gather stuff from all over and have it in front of me in case I could use it. I end up with a great completed project, but also with a huge mess of glue and paper and tools to clean up and put away. I don’t take the time to put things back in their place as I go along so I often even run out of actual workspace by the time I am done. This drove me crazy so I took time to examine the situation to try to refine my process and correct the problem. With that came the light bulb moment – this simply IS my creative process. I am in the flow, as they say, and any attempt to introduce a tidying up step midstream actually interferes with this flow. For this type of work I must shut off my organized, logical, left brain and just let the mess happen and reorganize later.

I hear the control freak in you now saying poppycock – she is just making excuses. And though I am no stranger to self delusion and practice self indulgence whenever I can, I really have examined this. For those other types of tasks, like bill paying, for example, which is methodical rather than creative, I have specific systems that keep me organized throughout the process and I don’t end up with a mess to clean up.

So your own personal process may change depending on the type of task you are doing:

* Is the task creative versus methodical in nature?
– If you are doing accounting tasks you would want to be precise and methodical – ditto for brain surgery! But if you are making a collage or even brainstorming, you can be – and it may help to be – looser in your process.

* Is the type of system critical to the outcome?
– It may not matter if your home kitchen becomes a mess during the cooking process as long as the food comes out well (restaurants excluded for obvious reasons). But if you are sloppy while you are painting a room, it will most likely affect the result – think drips and paint footprints.

So next time your family is upset that scrapbooking supplies are strewn all over the dining room table, just tell them that your art requires you to embrace your inner slob.

“What are you doing?” Who in the world would have thought that giving people 140 characters to share some boring, sordid, funny or exciting moment of their lives with millions of total strangers would become a world wide phenomenon? Not only recreational, Twitter is now also an immediate source of breaking news around the world. Can you just hear the developer telling people about his idea? How would you have responded to it? I bet 99% of us would have thought it was a dumb idea. Kind of reminds me of the Seinfeld premise of a show about nothing – another seemingly dumb idea that is legendary.

How do people recognize good “dumb” ideas? What gave some store owner the courage or wisdom to place the first order for Pet Rocks – the craziest idea ever? Even I made money with it by selling mine on eBay last year for $15!!! What about Cabbage Patch dolls – remember those? People made money off of them in bizarre ways. I remember one business that provided summer camp for your doll. You actually sent the doll to them and they took pictures of it on a horse and in a boat etc. and returned it to you with the pictures and souvenirs! I had what I thought was a great idea for a spinoff business. As you might recall, you didn’t buy a Cabbage Patch doll, you “adopted” it. So I was going to help Cabbage Patch dolls find their “real” parents. I know – dark, but you gotta admit, funny. My son was a teenager at the time and threatened to go live with his father if I did it. I still think I would have made money on it – there are other dark humored people out there – but I liked having my son around. (If you are too young to remember Pet Rocks or Cabbage Patch dolls, go ask about them on Twitter!)

I think we all have “dumb” ideas from time to time but we don’t act on them or we let other talk us out of them – of course sometimes rightfully. But what if it really is a good “dumb” idea? How do you go about making it happen. I have an idea right now but I need a web application developer to do it – and I can’t pay one, so I am just sure that someone else with resources will have the same idea and I will be kicking myself.

So are you stifling an idea because you think it isn’t good enough, or you don’t have the resources? There is a great show on television now called Shark Tank. Would be inventors and product designers appear before a panel of venture capitalists and pitch their ideas to get money and partnering. It is a great learning experience and I highly recommend you watch it if you have an idea you want to develop.

As for me, all my friends know that I go berserk whenever I see a Shred-it truck on the road – stick a shredder in a truck and go place to place and shred people’s paper. A GREAT dumb idea! GOD why didn’t I think of that!!

Social Networking
The Gateway Drug – The Addiction

It starts with an inkling that maybe you had better get in on this social networking thing if you want to grow your business or be in touch with networking contacts – just in case a layoff hits you. So you sign up for LinkedIn. You justify this because it is about work. Your time is too valuable to fritter away on these things just for fun. But now as you look around on there you are finding people you worked with 15 years ago and it intrigues you, so you start searching a little more.

Warning – LinkedIn is the gateway drug. Just when you have taken LinkedIn about as far as you want to, you start having people tell you that now Facebook is the place to be. Much easier to use, more people on it. (Wait, wasn’t that for kids? No, that was pretty much MySpace.) So you just stick your toes in the water in Facebook. Again, easily justified because this is purely for professional reasons. But you notice that a lot of your friends and relatives are on there too. And you start pulling out the college yearbook to get names to look up – even the people you didn’t actually like in college. Because now the actual number of “friends” you have becomes something of a status symbol.

Eventually you start checking your Facebook page before you have your coffee. Then you start to become maybe just a little tiny bit, well, annoyed at the people who haven’t taken the plunge yet and you become a Facebook pusher. And then you find you don’t want certain people “all up in your Facebook” (a phrase totally coined by yours truly so if used, please credit) so you block them or even worse, de-friend them.

Now we come to what I call the current heroin of social networking, Twitter. What a dumb sounding thing, you tell yourself. People around the world just saying what they are doing in 140 characters. Who cares, you say. Oh but again it is a very good marketing tool you are told. So, off you go to check it out. Now you start “following” people – people you know, or total strangers whose “tweets” intrigue you. You start watching these entries that change every single second. EVERY SINGLE SECOND. You, a once private person, are baring your soul to the entire universe, littering the world with your misery, happiness or profound thoughts.

Now, my friend, whether you like it or not, you are officially part of the great social experiment. You will not have a good bagel, bad day, a pimple, or a tragic breakup that you will not share with friends, friends of friends, everyone on out to all 6 degrees. It is inevitable.

SO, see my profile on LinkedIn, join me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter. But, I beg you, if I mention that I am considering a Crackberry – please, arrange an intervention.