Organize IT

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Welcome to another post in my Clutter 101 series, and the second post focusing on dealing with individual rooms around the house. This time it is the turn of the bathoom. Most of the focus on this room typically revolves around keeping it hygienic and clean. It’s the one place in the home you can lock yourself away from the world and pamper yourself. But it can also be very hectic, with the morning rush to get the family ready for school and work being a common concern. With that in mind it’s doubly important to keep it organized and de-cluttered and that’s what I will cover in this post.

Review:

• To examine with an eye to criticism or correction.
• Going over a subject again in study so as to fix it in the memory.

The weekly review in GTD is one of the most critical elements of the entire methodology, and also one of the hardest to implement regularly. While most aspects of GTD are open to individual interpretation, the weekly review is the one element that David Allen is clear and specific on. You need to do it weekly, you need to do it thoroughly and you certainly can’t cut any corners. Despite your best intentions, stuff always slips through holes in your system. Next actions go undefined, projects don’t get updated and loose ends pile up in your inbox. The review is the one clearly defined period in your week where your primary goal is to catch up on those leaks, get up to date and clear the decks of any loose ends.

Thanks to the help of everybody at my local branch of Borats Anonymous, I was able to overcome my addiction. You can do it with the right support!

Organize IT recap for 26th May 2007.

• In the next few weeks I am going to write a lot more about de-cluttering your home and life. In the meantime you really have to check out Unclutterer. In particular, read their post on having landing strips in your home. It’s certainly something I’m going to try!
• The Positivity Blog has an impressive total of eightween ways you can improve your body language. I like this post because it covers  m ore subtle, less obvious things you can do. After looking at this list and thinking back to my last few job interviews, there is certainly room for me to improve. What about you?
• I’ve talked about how to make the most of your free time and turn your holidays into something productive in a previous post but Leo of Zen Habits has also covered the topic and it’s a great accompaniment. In it, he suggests some simple but useful chores you can do like catching up on your filing or making some phone calls to your friends.
• There are plenty of tips about how to make our online life easier by – managing our email inbox is a popular topic – but what about our offline life? I recently came across this substantial list of offline tips and tricks that might just cover your needs. Do you have any extra tips from your own experiences you’d like to share?
• Why are bad habits so difficult to stop? We know they have negative effects on us, yet we continue to do them. LiveScience has a fascinating article about why exactly bad habits aren’t so easy to break. It’s interesting to note that it isn’t always a simple matter of lack of motivation.
• A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality and this post covers twenty six reasons why what you think is right is actually wrong. It’s further proof that we should always keep an open mind about everything.

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This is the first in a number of posts where I will take all the learnings from previous Clutter 101 posts regarding de-cluttering and organizing and apply them to specific rooms in your home. Firstly, I will focus on the bedroom. With so much clothing and personal belongings often stored here it can be a hotbed of clutter and disorganization so I will give some specifict tips on how you can create more space and use existing storage more efficiently.