Changing lifestyle, changing priorities

**This post was originally published in my monthly e-newsletter, Lelah's News. Don't subscribe? Sign up here!

There has never been an undertaking that has so drastically changed my life as having a baby, and he hasn't even arrived yet! Getting married was a drop in the bucket compared to the way my life is changing with a child on the way. Physically, the changes are obvious. I can’t do everything I did before. Professional organizing is a very active job, and it was a bit scary to have limitations placed on my physical work. Mentally, the changes are different. I have to limit my commitments and make sure I have time for the most important things. I am reprioritizing. I’m planning even farther ahead in some areas of my life (meal planning, stocking up on supplies) and not planning at all in others (leaving entire days free so I can be rested enough for the demands of pregnancy and motherhood). All in all, it’s been a challenge, which is something I actually appreciate. Life should be challenging, otherwise how we will grow and learn?

For me, the biggest key to this transition has been realizing that it is just that, a transition, that it takes time and I have to give myself the room to make mistakes and learn from them. The rewards of doing so are great, I find, even as I miss certain things about my old lifestyle. I'm used to being able to take on a lot and accomplish it with energy to spare. But pulling back and taking on less is showing me that I don't need to do it all in order to find satisfaction or success.

**Update: My son was born April 9. Life is changing every day in even more incredible ways than I could have imagined.  Stay tuned to this blog and my newsletter as my organizational approach is informed by being a new parent!

Room switching and life changes

A little over two years ago, when my husband and I were still living in our previous apartment, we spent a couple of days switching most of the furniture between our upstairs and downstairs rooms and changing the configuration of my desk area and some of our other spaces. We did this a couple of months before we got married, and I documented it with this blog post.

A few weeks ago, shortly before the birth of our son, we did something similar in our current apartment. We moved my husband's office configuration to a different part of the house and moved a bunch of furniture around, repurposing some of it. The result is a dedicated baby room and a new set up in our living room/dining room area. 

Empty bookcases -- look familiar?

Books everywhere during the move.

The resulting baby room. Pretty cute!

New bookcase configuration.

One of my favorite observations about organizing is by Julie Morgenstern who says, "Every time we go through a major change, we experience a breakdown in our organizational systems." Last time that change was marriage, this time it was a baby, and each time reorganizing our space and shedding some of our stuff was a huge help in preparing us for those major life changes.

 

Spring forward

Today is the time change! Change your clocks by moving them ahead one hour. We lose an hour, but gain quite a bit of sunlight at the end of the day, which always makes it feel like summer is just around the corner.

Quote: Life is constant change

Karen Kingston's book Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui was the reason I got interested in organizing professionally. Here's one of my favorite quotes from that book:

Life is constant change. So when something comes into your life enjoy it, use it well, and when it is time, let it go. It is that simple. Just because you own something, it doesn't mean that you have to keep it forever. You are just a temporary custodian of many things as they pass through your life...

Everything material is merely energy in transition.

 Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

 

A year ago: NaNoWriMo, change and Halloween

NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, starts November 1, and I'm participating for the third year in a row. (If you are attempting it, too, friend me!) Last year I wrote about balancing the hours it takes to actually write about 2,000 words of fiction a day with all the other things that a person has to do.

Change affects us all, practically all the time, and I love Julie Morgenstern's take on change and organization: “Every time we go through a major change, we experience a breakdown in our organizational systems.”

This time last year I also wrote about the benefits of a paperless, automatic billing. It really does help to stem the paper tide and keep things simpler and cleaner if you can switch most of your bills to this format. Try it, and see what a difference it makes.

Regarding organizing for Halloween, I put together a holiday-themed Organizer's Blog Digest. Check it out.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com


      

My reading list: Summer 2010

I talk about books a lot on this blog, books I'm reading, book reviews, how to organize books. Forgive me, I like to read.

I'm in the middle of a fascinating book on change called Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I first heard about this book from Lorie Marrero at The Clutter Diet blog. Anyone who has every failed at breaking a bad habit, gotten discouraged over some huge problem like world poverty, or simply wanted to change something in their life and didn't know how to go about it should read this book. I'm only on the third chapter and I have about ten a-ha moments every page.

My family knows me well, and I received two early birthday presents in the form of cookbooks. One is The French Laundry by Thomas Keller. The book is stunning, and the recipes are so unique and interesting. The only problem is it makes one want to eat at the French Laundry all the time, not an option for most of us. The second is The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. The book is chock full of good cooking techniques and elegantly simple takes on common dishes like onion tart (five ingredients) and roast duck (one ingredient: the duck).

Finally, for fiction lovers, this month in my book club we read Memoirs of a Geisha, which was a lovely story full of beautiful details. I wasn't terribly excited about reading it, but in the end I really liked it and it made me think about visiting Japan, which is a country I've never been particularly interested in traveling to. August's pick is The Time Traveler's Wife, which I read last year and thought was amazing. Audrey Niffenegger's follow up, Her Fearful Symmetry, was really enjoyable as well.

Got any recommendations for me? What have you been reading this summer?


Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com
Note: The links on the book titles will take you to Amazon.com; if you buy something, I will receive a small percentage in affiliate fees.

The Other Side of Organized

I'm in the middle of the book The Other Side of Organized by Linda Samuels. I heard about on professional organizer Monica Ricci's blog, and ordered it from Amazon recently as I wasn't able to get it from my library system. The slim book is organized by season and its subtitle is Finding Balance Between Chaos and Perfection. It differs from other books about organizing in that it doesn't focus on lots of concrete tips and specific ways to get organized, rather the author takes you on a journey about the different things being organized means.

A couple of things have stood out at me so far. One was about change. Samuels writes about her childhood being very stable and living in the same house for her entire life until she went away to college. She feels that this might be one reasons she says she has to work hard toward being flexible and embracing change instead of shying away from it.

I've been thinking a lot about how the things we see and do in childhood affect us as adults. People often ask me how I decided to be a professional organizer, and as part of the story I tell them that I have always been naturally disposed to being organized. This is true. I wasn't obsessive or extraordinarily neat, but I had a system for things and I was content when I had the clothes I wanted to wear to school laid out the night before, when I had my homework assignments all written out in a to-do list and every week I'd spend part of Sunday afternoon straightening my room and getting ready for the week ahead.

We moved every four or five years when I was growing up, sometimes more often. I think one gets used to saying goodbye to a space one has loved because you learn that you find different things to love about the new space you will inhabit. It makes you less afraid of change when you are exposed to it and it doesn't turn out badly at all.

Similarly, my mother never used the words "clutter clearing" or "purging," but every year or so we'd gather all the stuff we were no longer using or loved, from toys and clothes to artwork and furniture, and put it all outside for a garage sale. By the end of the day my mom would sell a book for 10 cents just to not have to bring it back inside the house! It was our version of clutter clearing and I always looked forward to it. It's funny to look back and realize the feeling of letting go, of renewal and finding the best in a changing situation is something I get to help people find through my professional life now.

My father is a different type, one who buys junk at garage sales and keeps empty (clean) peanut butter jars to store all his gnarly old screws he's picked up over the years, just in case he needs them someday. I feel lucky that I didn't inherit that inclination, but also glad that I've learned compassion for people who think like him.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com

An empty shelf

Whenever I'm working with a client and we empty a box (during the sorting and purging stages of organization), I always stop and do a little cheer. An empty box is a sign of progress. It means things are moving, changing, and the stuff is no longer in a box where it can't be used or loved.

Gretchen Rubin, of The Happiness Project, talks about always having an empty shelf. The emptiness of the shelf implies room for growth, a symbolic invitation for new ideas, inspiration and riches to come into our lives.

For some people, an empty shelf or box makes them nervous. They might have a desire to fill the box or shelf up. Maybe they think they need to be using up all their space. But there is nothing wrong with an empty box, shelf, or drawer, or even closet (assuming you don't have stuff strewn across your living space). The empty space is a promise of growth, change, of new possibilities. If all your surfaces, drawers and boxes are full, how can you accept new things into your life?

Clear off a shelf or clean out a drawer today. See how it makes you feel.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by surekat
Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com 

Resolution in progress

One of my 2010 resolutions was to "refresh my apartment by de-cluttering and rearranging the space." As a professional organizer, I naturally go through my life enacting those organizing principles that I find to be the most helpful, so my apartment wasn't a complete disaster area, but, after having lived in the same one bedroom townhouse for four and half years without significantly changing the layout of the furniture or the storage spaces, it was time to shuffle things around to refresh the space and the energy within it. Luckily, my fiance was even more gung-ho about this project than I was (always good to have help keeping you on track), and we spent a good portion of each night of the last week taking things off of shelves and out of closets, vacuuming and cleaning an embarrassing amount of dust, dragging furniture up and down the stairs, and then putting everything back together again. We still have some refining to do; for instance, there's a large pile of stuff to be gotten rid of in the new space between the car collection case and the coffee table, but we've made a lot of progress. Here's a few photos to show you the before and after:

The plan.

Where did all the books go?

Oh. There.

And there.

The new space under the stairs.

What's awesome about this process is we knew that if we changed our spaces, purged them of stuff we didn't need, cleaned them up, set them up in a new configuration, that we'd be giving ourselves a new way to live our lives. (Moving the television set from across from our bed upstairs to across from our couch downstairs was a big change.) But I didn't count on how much just sitting down at my desk, which is now across from the kitchen and gets tons of natural light from our main window, would feel completely different, as if I'd not only changed the direction my computer faces, but I'd changed the direction of my entire life. 


I suppose in a time of a transition (I'm getting married in a few weeks), things can feel somehow more difficult and more important. As Julie Morgenstern says, "Every time we go through a major change, we experience a breakdown in our organizational systems." I'm hoping to ease that breakdown by navigating this time in my life with the knowledge that my systems are flexible, and change is good.

Organizing and resolutions

I’ve been writing a lot about why January is such an appealing time to take stock of one’s life and feel the freedom to make some changes for the better. Many people’s resolutions involve organization in some form, such wanting to manage their time better, deciding to clear out a closet, wanting to finally finish a long-delayed project, or having a garage sale. 

I highly encourage people to add organizing to their list of resolutions (or their to do list), but to do it in a highly specific way. Don’t put “get more organized” on your list. Put something like “go through file cabinet and shred anything that isn’t needed anymore” (or maybe a few things like that). That is a tangible task that you’ll know if you’ve completed. I strongly advise you to put an action verb into each resolution. By taking action, we make change. If our resolutions are intangible, we can’t have the satisfaction of pointing to something and saying, “I accomplished that.”

When it comes to change and making our lives better, fear is something that holds a lot of people back. I implore you to not let that happen to you. In my profession, I meet a lot of people who are paralyzed with fear. Calling a professional organizer is a huge step for them because they’ve done the very serious emotional work of preparing to make a major change.

People can be scared to hire a professional organizer even when they know they need to because if they have a professional come in and make changes, they worry that even then they won't be able to change themselves, or they won't be able to maintain it. Once they have the professional help, if they can't keep the organization up, they feel they've failed. So they avoid that step entirely.

I hate the word failure, because to me it implies the end of something. I think every time we don’t succeed entirely at something, it creates another opportunity, not the end of the road. Not maintaining organization is a problem, but attacking the problem head on is the first step to change. You can’t be afraid of something that might or might happen in the future.

So take action. Put action verbs in your resolutions for the new year. Declare that you will go through your closet and get rid of all the clothes you don’t wear, you will recycle all the plastic containers in your pantry that don’t have matching lids so they won’t be spilling out every time you open the cupboard, you will hire a professional organizer to come in and help you with your filing system because you just won’t/can’t/don’t have time to do it on your own. Good luck!

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by sflovestory

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com

Change and organizing

Here's one of my favorite quotes about organizing, from the veteran organizer Julie Morgenstern's book Organizing From the Inside Out:

“Every time we go through a major change, we experience a breakdown in our organizational systems.”

This is really true, and it means that when you know a big change is coming, you can anticipate the havoc it is going to wreak on your systems and plan for that. Expecting this can make it so that when the change and the disorganization happens, you don't feel so out of control and you can get back into the swing of things, or adapt to your changed circumstances more easily.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com