REPLACEMENT TIME?

All material things, whether homes, cars, garbage disposals, lamps, or shoes, eventually need to be repaired and/or (at some point in time) need to be replaced.  

Sure, museums have specially-trained staff to help preserve documents, furnishings, and other artifacts, but those items are not USED, simply admired from a distance either behind glass or roped off with thick velvet cords and little signs saying "Do Not Touch." 

But in our lives, we actually use our possessions, not admire them from a distance.  So it's a good idea, then, to begin looking at your things as ultimately replaceable, and to decide whether or not some item, when its useful-to-you life is over, is actually worth replacing.

The great secret is that most of the things the average person owns are not worth replacing.

Possessions often hinder our living vibrantly and fully, simply because there are too many things around us that steal our time and attention away from doing what we most want to do with our lives.  We slog through our days burdened by too much, and all of it in the process of either deteriorating through age and exposure to air, dust, bugs, humidity, etc., or through actual use.

When you come across the next breaking/broken item in your life, think about whether or not you really want to replace it.  You just might surprise yourself and say, "No! Out it goes, and I don't want another one.  I choose open space and a bright, clean, vibrant future!"

A PATH FOR EVERYTHING

A quick and easy-to-learn technique for staying focused when confronted with a royal--or even just an everyday--mess is to say to yourself, "A path for everything and everything on its path."

Let me show you an example of how this works.

Many of my clients are Type A's:  high energy, high performance, and driven to succeed type people. They reached their level of success in business and in life by many methods, including hard work, tenacity, and (get this) task completion.

So it is fitting that my Type A clients would attempt to complete every task we come across while decluttering their offices, homes, cars, and storage areas.

But immediate task completion is not the most efficient route to take when decluttering.  It wastes time, energy, and fractures the focus needed for decluttering effectively.

One particular client could not stay focused.  A high-powered sales woman, and parent of a hyperactive toddler, she darted here and there during our first visit, taking each item that we found out of place and running it across the house, up the stairs, or out to the garage or her car to its designated home.

I helped her refocus by teaching her to keep all items going to the same place together in "staging" areas, and then to make one trip to the garage, one trip to her car, one trip to the guest bedroom, and one trip to the kitchen to put away all the things we'd discovered out of place while decluttering the living room. 

Michelle Passoff, a professional home organizer and author of Lighten Up!  Free Yourself From Clutter, has the best phrase for this process:  A path for everything and everything on its path*.  I use it as a mantra when helping clients get organized.  It keeps them focused, and saves enormous amounts of time and energy.

You can use it too!  Instead of ignoring the dry cleaning piling up on your closet floor because you don't have time to drop it off at the cleaners today, simply bag it up and put it in your car.  You haven't taken the clothes to the cleaners yet, but they are one step further down the path to the cleaners.  A path for everything and everything on its path.

Or maybe you still have your Easter decorations out. Instead of procrastinating taking them down, packing them up, and hauling them back out to the garage or up to the attic, simply group them all together today, in an area closer to their final destination.  Seeing them there tomorrow may inspire you to go get the boxes they belong in, and put them in the boxes.  Perhaps the day after that, you'll be inspired to carry them to their final storage spot, and voila! Easter decorations put away.  A path for everything, and everything on its path.

You can apply this mantra to many areas of your life, not just cleaning, decluttering, and getting your stuffed Easter rabbits safely packed away in the attic.

Try it and see how much time you save, and how good it feels to move things forward along the path to their ultimate destination.


 * Passoff, Michelle.  Lighten Up!  Free Yourself from Clutter. HarperPerennial. New York, 1998: pg. 57.