Unwrap the gift of time – tips on keeping on top of the holiday season

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=ikIQLcMWJtE&b=4016859&ct=11516905

Recently I was featured in an article for the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Newsletter about preparing for the holiday season.

My mother died. Last year. It was such a shock, so sudden. I felt like an onion; every day a new layer of grief, of retrieved lost memories would unfold. It was all I could do to just keep going. And as an entrepreneur one has no choice. It’s my business, if I don’t work, I don’t earn. I had no choice but to keep going.

This is a very personal blog. And I guess that’s why I have written nothing, or next to nothing in over a year. How personal does one go with a professional blog? Would it be of relevance or interest to readers?

I think it is. A good percentage of my clients are people who have, or are going through, grief. It could be the loss of a loved one, but it could just as equally be the end of a marriage or career. And the majority of my clients are working professionals who run their own businesses. I can tell how long an individual has left it before seeking help just by the type of chaos that accumulates. It could be months, a couple of years or a decade. It’s usually a decade though. A decade of things building up, dreams being put on the back burner and health issues being ignored.

I remember the moment when it first hit me that my mother wasn’t just ill but was about to die. It was like my whole soul turned to dust. I explained to my clients what was happening and that I would have to postpone our work. They were amazing and so understanding.

I knew from my experience of working with people who had lost a loved one that piles build up, things get lost and before you know it you are surrounded and engulfed in documents, To-Do lists and chaos. I run my own business, an organizing business no less. I could not afford to fall behind. I also wanted to be able to be fully with my family at this time and not worry about my business. The biggest struggle with being self-employed is creating boundaries between your personal and professional life.

And so, a year later I am sitting down to write this blog.Of course the loss of my mother will always be with me. A client of mine put it this way: “Grief is like this backpack you are carrying, that you will carry your whole life. It’s always there. Some days it feels like you are carrying a backpack of bricks and other days it’s just lip balm”. Up until now it’s just been bricks I have been carrying. I so appreciate the days when it’s as light as lip balm.

There’s all kinds of help out there when you are struggling with grief and loss. But there’s little or nothing about how keep the day to day practicality of living your life together. Or even what to expect, what to be on guard for. The following are just some tips that I think you might find useful if you have been through or are going through a deep loss and feel like you are loosing control of the basic skills in managing your life.

MEMORY:

I found that my memory was no longer reliable (actually it’s still goes blank occassionally) and this causes enormous anxiety and problems…. particularly if you have arranged to meet someone, a potential client say, and you have no idea where you wrote down their number and address, to let them know you are running late (because you can’t find your keys!). It is important to keep everything in one place – a note book.

Get a note book. I like the one by Blueline (A9 Series) because it’s hard-backed and you can open it flat. Then get some of those tabs Avery sells called Note Tabs. In the front of this book you will write any messages, conversations, addresses of where you need to go, phone numbers etc. There is a space at the top right hand of the page for putting the date – make sure you do this every time you start a new page. Then halfway or so into the book put a stick-on tab that says “To Do’s”. This is where you will write your To Do’s. Again when you write a To Do list date it at the top right.

I also have an app on my iPhone for shopping because I would go blank when I got to the grocery store and come home with the oddest things. This way when I entered my drugstore or supermarket I would check my shopping list app and see what I needed.

If you have everything in one place then when you forget, which you will do a lot of, you know where to look.

DECISION MAKING

Another major problem that affects even the most mundane moments. It’s quite amazing how hard it is to make a decision when you are in a fog. Create some rules for yourself. Here are some that helped me.

Perishable Items:

At the beginning of every month go through your fridge and kitchen cupboards and dump anything that is past it’s sell by date. Don’t “if, and or but” yourself over this just do it. The goal here is to prevent a situation getting out of control. You don’t want to labour it – it’s a rule and a routine – do it and move on.

Housework:

This is a hard one. Housework never ends but during times of grief and loss it quickly gets out of control. If you don’t have a cleaner and can’t afford one then each week focus on one room, deep clean it and maintain it that week. Then the next week focus on another room. Maintaining a tidy house is easier if you know the deep cleaning is being done on a rotation basis.

Laundry:

Not only could I not decide what to wear but I couldn’t decide if I needed to wash it, iron it or purge it! I am not usually this anal but when you can’t decide what to wear because you don’t know how you feel because you are not sure that last time you felt anything then pulling out the “Martha Stewart” is not a bad thing. I did this simple thing in my wardrobe that really helped me. I categorised my wardrobe in the usual way one would (trousers, skirts, dresses, shirts etc) but then I organized them by colour. I did this with everything and it really helped me put an outfit together on the worst of days.

If you can’t face doing your laundry then drop it off somewhere to be done. It comes back all sorted, folded and perfect looking – and seriously you can’t put a price on that.

PAPER MANAGEMENT:

Paper and document management is a massive problem for everyone so its even more challanging during these times. You need to have a system in place for paper management. I can’t stress this enough. It is neigh on impossible to manage papers when you are in emotional upheaval let alone make a decision about them. Spend the money early on, on getting someone in to put a filing system in place. If you can’t find what you want in five seconds the method you are using is not working. If you do this early on it will be a fraction of the cost financially and emotionally than doing it two, five or ten years later. Opening up old wounds when you have finally found peace is doubly heartbreaking and takes ten times longer to sort (and therefore ten times more expensive). So get a paper management system in place.

When mail comes in break it down into two categories. One will be “Actionable” – i.e. a bill that needs to be paid, an event that has to be scheduled, a letter mailed. The other will be “Filing” – i.e. bank statements, manuals, warranties, cards etc. Don’t make it any more complicated than that. It’s hard to make a decision about something you don’t have a feeling for. So don’t. You just need to be able to find it. When the filing tray is full then file it away (which will be easy because the system you have in place takes care of that). Every day go through your actionable drawer/box and do what makes sense that day to do.

Newspapers, magazines and fliers:

Keep them one month and then recycle. I know you think you would like to read them when you have more time, or they’ll be good for future reference, or you think of someone you want to send the article to. But you won’t and you will just add to your sense of overwhelment and guilt. The grieving process can take years. And you need to put yourself first here… not something that really belongs on a “one day”  To Do list. Again, the goal here is  to prevent something getting out of control. Every month recycle newspapers, magazines and fliers etc.. that you have had a month.

TIME:

I had no sense of time – at all. Also I would get to the end of a day and it would seem like I had done nothing. When it came to scheduling clients I miscalculated how long it would take to get to their businesses. Or I would show up on the wrong day. I remember waiting in a doctors waiting room for over two hours before I realised I had come on the wrong day! I was so sure I was meant to be there, I never properly checked in – just said “Hi” and sat down.

Day Timer – doesn’t matter whether you have a smart phone or a wall calander – write it down. Then at the start of each day check to make sure you know what day it is. You can confirm this via your computer or smart phone. Sounds horrifying but time kind of morphs and you do have to make sure you know what day it is. Once you know the day and date then look over your schedule  so that you get a spatial awareness of what’s ahead.

Also I found writing everything I did into my schedule very useful. Because I would forget how long ago I had spoken with someone. Even if I was just out and about doing errands – I would mark it in my schedule. If I got together with a friend, I would put it in my schedule (even after we met). It’s just difficult to tell what happened recently and what happened…. well a year ago.

INVOICING:

This has got to be a well oiled machine. I invested in a great invoicing system that is web based and very user friendly Freshbooks. I would not have been able to stay on top off things had I not had such a system in place. My billings went out on time, clients got billed for the right days, times and supplies and I could do it from anywhere.

It’s hard going through loss but when you have to run and maintain a business on top of that… well it’s really hard. And I can say that now from personal experience. I was fortunate that I knew from working with and organizing individuals that I would  have challenging times ahead in keeping my business running smoothly. So I got all my systems, processes and environments in shape and today my business is thriving, my clients are happy and I was able to take personal time out for myself, my family and the grieving process and still maintain “business as usual”.

Seeing a solution. It’s interesting, I have been thinking about what we really see, what we think we see and how hard it is to see with fresh eyes.  When I begin my work with a client I do literally bring fresh eyes to a situation. I also bring a lot of other skills but it’s what and how I see that separates me from my client.

And until the other day I never really gave it too much examined thought. I was with a client, in her new home. We were working on her home office. She mentioned something about needing a hook for her tea towels in her kitchen. She brought up the subject of her tea towels and the hook quite a few times. She had bought a hook but it was the wrong hook – it didn’t fit on the door beneath her sink. We went into her kitchen and she stood, dumb struck, looking at  the problem of her tea towel. I asked her why she felt she needed a hook for the tea towel? “Well in my old kitchen my hook was right here under the sink. It worked so well for me”.

I asked her why it couldn’t go on the handle of the stove? She looked at her stove as if it were the oddest place to put a tea towel. “But I always kept it on a hook under my sink – it worked well there”. She tried hanging the tea towel on the stove and it worked. And it made sense because it would also dry.

But the interaction over the tea towel really struck me. And over the next couple of days it kept coming back into my mind. What had really happened for my client is that she was “seeing” her old kitchen, relatiing to her old kitchen. It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to organize she just wasn’t seeing with fresh eyes.

We all do it. Think we are seeing but really we are not. Here are some tips on “seeing”

1.  Take a photo of the area in question. Sometimes it helps to look at something through the eyes of a camera.

2.  Itemize every single item in the area. Say it’s a mantlepiece. Write down everything thing that is on it. Including match boxes, pens, bits of paper – everything. I can assure you that when you itemize everything you will realise that in fact you had not seen at least 25% of it.

3.  Don’t group things in your mind when looking. If there are candles on your mantlepiece then count how many.

Let me know how you get on! And drop me a line if you have any questions.

Give me a call or drop me an email and let’s get started together.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

1. Taking stock of the year gone by in a purely factual way. How did it all add up, how did all the work, the effort, the dreams and the disappointments – how did they all add up and what do they reveal on paper? When you look back and reflect over another year gone by it is with feelings. Tax time forces you, as a business owner, contractor and artist to reflect on the past year as the sum of its worth. There is a terrific opportunity here – it might not have been the year you were hoping for but the perspective you can get when doing your taxes will give you insight into how to make next year the best ever.

2. Dealing with a lot of receipts of all types, shapes and memories.. and adding them up. There is so much paper to deal with when sitting down to “doing” your taxes.

Here’s the thing about receipts: You have to keep them, you have to categorize them and you have to add them up at the end of the year.  I think most people just stuff them in a really large envelope and at the end of the year pass them off to their accountant to have someone else sort them. But if you don’t do that, and I don’t, and I think it is an important part of taking stock of where you spend your money, how you spend it and where you could be spending it more effectively as a business then you will need a system of keeping your receipts so that when it comes to you adding them up, it’s not such a dreadful and boring ordeal. Here’s a solution that looks good on a shelf, is easy to maintain and was very quick to add up at the end of the year.

The Binder & Box

Get a binder and a nice box – maybe match it to the colour of the binder and the box should be no bigger than the binder – or deeper. Choose a large binder, 2 inches or bigger. In the binder you will put clear sleeves which are individually labelled by category (Research and Development, Travel etc). The idea is to put your receipts in the box at the end of the day/week. When the box is quite full of receipts then that is when you transfer the receipts into their categorized clear sleeves.

The reason I found this method to work personally was because the box means that there’s one place and one place alone where receipts are put when they first leave your pockets, bags and car. It is also portable so when you go to categorize your receipts in the binder you can take the box and binder and do it while you watch TV or chat on the phone. Some people keep their receipts in categories in the filing cabinet but I find means inevitably that the receipts never get put in. Categorizing your receipts is something you can do in your least productive times.

And the reason I have a binder to put receipts in a categorized fashion is that at the end of the year when you sit down to do your taxes it is the worst part of the whole process and you also forget what a receipt was all about anyway or it’s faded. It really does pay to do the categorizing during the year.

Hope this helps. Drop me a line if you have any specific questions.

I switched off the engine of the car. I had no idea what to say or if I should remain silent and wait for the dreaded news that I was a hazard on the road. He looked down at the form he had been taking notes on and said “Well, I have to tell you… you passed, congratulations”. Seriously, I was so stunned I didn’t even get excited. I looked at him as if he insane and said “Are you sure?” Apparently it was true. We shook hands and he hopped out of the car. I saw my driving instructor was making his way over to me. I opened the car door and fell flat on the ground – my legs had turned to jelly! I had to laugh then.

I mention this because it made me think about fear and why I had put off learning to drive so long. Well, I knew why. I had been in a few minor car crashes in my youth and also lost a favorite teacher at school because she was killed tragically in a car crash. And the subconscious conclusion I had come to then was that cars are like tanks and they kill people and animals. And this belief stayed with me my whole life!

Recently I started with a couple of new clients who remarked that they had put off calling me because they were too embarrassed or too frightened or waiting till they felt more positive about things. It’s very common for people to say to me “I know this is easy, I should be able to do it”.  Why do we fear asking for help with the basic things in life? Because they are basic and somehow we make the conclusion that if something is basic then it should be easy and not require any help.

I find that men feel less unease in asking for help with their home office or home than women do. As women feel we should have this “keeping house” down pat. But our offices, our jobs, our lives and our homes are more complex now than they were for our parents. Doesn’t mean that life wasn’t harder for our parents but the boundaries of the different roles they played in their lives were clearer. Sunny Bates explains it so well in this video post.

Sunny Bates on Linchpins, Passion and Fear from Seth Godin on Vimeo.

Putting off asking for help because of a belief system that says you should be able to do this on you own is limiting. It limits you from having the environment you need to thrive and relax in and it limits you in that it avoids growth and change occurring. Life always welcomes forward action.

So many of my clients get professional and life-style magazines. They love them. The main problem with magazines is that they take up a lot of space and are really difficult to store effectively. The other problem with storing magazines is that most people keep them because they want the articles in them for future reference. Finding that article when it is 6 months or 1 year after you read it entails going through an awful lot of magazines and creating a huge mess as you do so. But not with Kindle:

Newspaper and Magazine Reading

Using Kindle’s 5-way controller, you can quickly flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper or your monthly magazine. Want to remember the newspaper or magazine article you just read? Clip and save entire articles for later reading with a single click. Newspapers are auto-delivered wirelessly to Kindle before they hit news stands.

Bookmarks and Annotations

By using the QWERTY keyboard, you can add annotations to text, just like you might write in the margins of a book. And because it is digital, you can edit, delete, and export your notes. You can highlight and clip key passages and bookmark pages for future use. You’ll never need to bookmark your last place in the book, because Kindle remembers for you and always opens to the last page you read.

I really think this is a fantastic solution for individuals who want to keep all their magazines and periodicals.

A great solution for keeping your magazines

My brother Eugene hosted Christmas this year for the family and extended family. All the children bounced, ran, rolled and laughed around the house in a constant hum. And it was really only the dogs who broke up conversations with their power struggles. The subject of home offices came up in conversation – mainly because yours truly was there and everyone wanted advice on their own home office. It got me to thinking about the design of the office as opposed to the functioning of it.

The home office goes in the space or room that is available. Sometimes, that is a corner of the kitchen, bedroom or living room, sometimes (if you are lucky) it’s got it’s own walls, and sometimes it’s split between different rooms.

I did some browsing on the web to see what’s out there on this subject. Most of the information I found assumed you had a room with walls and a door. Check out the following link from MakeUseOf.com:  http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/home-office-design-ideas-and-tips-that-every-web-worker-needs-to-know/  There are some useful tips and web resources in this article.

However, what if you don’t have one room for your office?  How do you even begin to design your home office when it has to be split up?  It comes down to defining the actions involved in your work and the environments best required for them to be accomplished and the time of day involved.

Computer and desk: Only put the computer and desk in the living room if you think you definitely will have consistant and scheduled time to be alone there. If you can’t control the environment then you won’t be able to control your work output. Think about when you work – daytime or evenings. Where you put your desk and computer is VERY important as this is usually the back bone of your work processing.

Paper/File Management: And if it is to be in your living room or bedroom then you will want your “office” to be invisable when it is no longer required as an office. I have found that having a drawer for “Action” (any bills you have pay or items you have to take action on) and a drawer for “Filing” (needs to be put in the filing cabinet) means that papers are kept from becoming piles or getting lost. Being in a drawer also means that they are hidden from sight and are quickly accessible.

Filing: Whatever your filing system – binder or filing cabinet – you will need to assign somewhere for it. The most important thing here is that you can get at it. If you are hiding your filing cabinet in the back of a storage locker then you will never do your filing. When papers get out of control your stress levels go way up. There are many attractive filing solutions out there that don’t look like ugly filing cabinets and can live in any room in any home without offending. A working filing system means that you can find any piece of paper in five seconds but if it takes 15 minutes to get to the cabinet you are kind of setting yourself up for failure. My filing cabinet is in my kitchen and no one would know.

Good luck and drop me a line if you have any specific questions on the design of your office.