Organizing Creative Professionals: Sorted

Gratitude and challenges

We've talked a lot about gratitude this month, about almost all its forms and benefits. Sometimes, it's hard to feel grateful for much, though, especially when you're facing a challenge. Ironically, that's when gratitude can be the most helpful.

When you know you've got a challenge coming up, it's wise to get your gratitude on ahead of time to give yourself a solid base. As we've already discussed, gratitude can help you pare down and manage your stuff and keep your obligations reasonable so you can handle some short-term extra demands. Gratitude can also help you build and maintain a solid network of people who can help you through the challenge, and it can motivate you to take good care of yourself, which will really help when you're on the ropes.

And sometimes, you can even deploy gratitude to help minimize a challenge. One of the classic mental exercises during tough times is to ask yourself "What's great about this problem?" You might be surprised at the solutions that can present themselves when you apply that perspective.

It also helps to remember that no life is free from challenges. Even my spoiled housecats had to deal with a new puppy earlier this year. Challenges are often how we grow and develop as human beings, and if you can find a way to be grateful for the chance to grow, that can give you a little more mental energy.

When you're going through something rough, it's likely to be hard to think of it as a gift, but if you can just practice gratitude for yourself, your surroundings and those around you, that feeling of peace and appreciation can help you feel more balanced as you face your challenges.

What challenges have you been grateful for lately? Let me know in the comments!

Gratitude and TURKEY

It's Thanksgiving for us Americans, so if you're in the U.S., I hope you're enjoying a wonderful day of giving thanks for everything that makes your life wonderful, rewarding... and "interesting." ;-)

If you're outside the U.S., I hope you're having a wonderful Thursday and encourage you to maybe take a minute to be grateful for all that stuff too.

I'll see you again on Monday!

Gratitude and yourself

Last week, we talked about what a great impact gratitude can have on the people whose work affects your business. But you know whose work probably affects your business the most? 

That would be you, dear reader. 

We've talked a lot about what gratitude can do for the people, stuff and obligations around you. But when it comes down to it, taking care of yourself is one of the most important things you can do, and most of us don't always do a sterling job of it.

We'll get so focused on our businesses, on our goals, on the "need to do"s and "have to have"s that we wind up on the bottom of our own priority lists. And if we stay there for too long, every other area of our businesses and our lives suffers.

Fortunately, gratitude can help with that. When we consider the people in our world that we're the most grateful for, we tend to feel a kind of caring and compassion for them, a desire to help them and, in a way, to cherish them.

I'd like to suggest that we do the same for ourselves, both directly and indirectly. The indirect benefits of gratitude can come from practicing all the aspects of it we've already talked about. Being grateful for what and who we have can relieve a lot of the pressure we put on ourselves to do and get more. And when we think about being grateful for who we are, for the gifts we have and the opportunity we have right now to enjoy those gifts, it can help relieve that relentless pressure we feel to "be more."

Honoring who we are right now and being grateful for that unique, amazing, wonderful person can motivate us to take better care of ourselves: to get up from the computer every so often, to get the sleep we need, to eat a meal instead of powering through on coffee.

And when we feel secure and appreciated in who we are, a lot of the fear that fuels the pressure to do/have/be more can be alleviated. We're more able to choose our options based on what we truly want to do rather than what we're scared not to do.

As the holiday season kicks into full gear and your calendars and to-do lists fill up, I hope you'll take the time to be grateful for yourself in all your one-of-a-kind glory and to honor yourself accordingly.

What about yourself are you grateful for? Let me know in the comments!

Gratitude and your human network

Thus far, we've talked a lot about the stuff that gratitude can help you with: physical items and demands on your time. But gratitude isn't just about what you have, it's about who you have.

No matter what business you're in, you don't do it alone. You have clients, co-workers, bosses, direct reports—but you also have vendors, bankers, insurance suppliers and other people who touch your business. Remembering and showing gratitude toward them can make a big impact in how you do what you do.

Think of gratitude as a part of building and maintaining your professional relationships. It's one thing to have a contact with someone, but it's a much richer contact if you have a genuine appreciation for what that person does and you let them know how much you appreciate their work.

Most of us have a pretty good crap detector and can tell when someone's blowing smoke up our butts about what a great job we do; we tend to find it off-putting and a little suspicious. By contrast, cultivating a true sense of gratitude for the people around us allows us to be more authentic when we interact with people.

Even contact with people we might not think of being grateful for can be an exercise in gratitude. Think of the last time you had to call tech support for a product that wasn't working correctly. It probably wasn't a completely pleasant experience. However, if you can try to think of how much more unpleasant it would have been to try to figure out the problem (and a solution!) on your own, perhaps you can view the tech support system in a more grateful light. And if you can bring that sense of gratitude to the next such call you have to make, you might find that the experience is a little less unpleasant and that the tech support operator might go above and beyond the usual to help you.

Because everyone loves to be appreciated. Everyone loves to know that what they're doing has some kind of positive impact on the client base they serve, or just on the world in general. When you let someone know that their work has had that impact, you are giving them a beautiful little gift. That gift not only helps strengthen your relationship with that person and probably improves the level of service you're already receiving, it feels really good to give.

Who are you grateful for in your business life? Have you told them lately? Let me know in the comments!

Gratitude and maintenance

If you've spent much time reading books or sites about simplicity or frugality, you're probably familiar with the importance of taking good care of the stuff you currently have. It's a spectacularly simple concept, but it has a powerful payoff in terms of time, energy and money saved.

Peter Walsh, the home organizer extraordinaire of TLC's Clean Sweep would regularly ask homeowners if they were respecting the items in their homes (usually when the homeowner would protest the discarding of a dilapidated, dusty or otherwise grungy item). In businesses, respecting your stuff is usually less emotional, but it can have just as much of a benefit as honoring your treasured home possessions.

Take the humble printer. Admittedly, printer prices have fallen considerably in the past 10 years or so, but it still makes a lot more sense to check your toner levels, keep extra cartridges on hand, run the "self-clean" program and clean the drum as recommended by the manufacturer than to buy a new printer and not take care of it. Besides, it's a scientific fact that printers are never more likely to fail than when you're printing something crucial on a tight deadline.

All that maintenance sounds like a lot of work, though, doesn't it. Especially for a piece of equipment that probably annoys you on a semiregular basis (studies report that about 50% of printer owners are dissatisfied with their machine). What a pain to have to take care of something like that!

And that, as you've probably grown tired of me saying, is where gratitude comes in. If you can take a step back and realize how fortunate we are to be living in a time when printing technology is affordable for so many of us and what a positive difference having that printer makes in your business, perhaps taking the 10 minutes a month to run the checks and programs might not seem like such an onerous task.

That perspective can apply to the rest of the items that help your business run: your computer (back up your data, people!), your email (clean it out), your office furniture, the items you use in your business, the car you drive to appointments, even your office supplies. Taking care of your possessions is a way of showing respect and gratitude, and it calls to mind the classic maxim: "You take care of them, they'll take care of you."

What about you? What stuff around your office have you let fall into disrepair, and how could you change the way you look at it to make its maintenance more appealing? Let me know in the comments!

Gratitude and time management

On Monday, we talked about the push to have "more" that seems so prevalent in our society, and how that push can drive us to acquire things we don't need or even really want. A similar force can drive us to take on projects and obligations to the point of being overwhelmed. And one way to stop those forces in their tracks is to practice gratitude.

There's a lot of pressure to do as much as we can, both for others and ostensibly for ourselves. We work at an office or for ourselves (or both), we go to school, we take care of family members, we pursue our spirituality, we socialize with friends, we take care of our own bodies—and most of the time it feels like that's the bare minimum of things we have to do.

And yet, there's always something more that we can add to our schedule. An exercise program "guaranteed to reduce those love handles in just 15 minutes a day" or a new social media tool we feel we have to use to stay current. 

Some of our obligations are foisted on us by others (clients, bosses, co-workers, family members, etc.). But a lot of the additional stuff we take on, the boxes we stack way higher than we can possibly see over, is done of our own volition, and it's done out of a feeling of needing more.

When we examine our overcrowded schedule and finally start thinking of obligations we can cross off, there's often a twinge of reluctance. "But I need to do that," we think, even though we can't always come up with a good reason why. It's as if we worry that our lives won't be as full without every single thing we're trying to do.

That's where gratitude comes in. Gratitude allows us to recognize the fullness already in our lives and truly feel how lucky we are to have whatever individual permutation of health, family, friends, work and spirituality we already have.

Being grateful and having a sense of the true value of what we already do can help us resist the siren song of "do this and have more... something in your life." It can help us embrace the radical concept of "this is enough right now" and gain a deeper enjoyment of what we're doing, allowing us to be fully present in our lives.

What about you? When you think of cutting back on some obligations and you feel that twinge, does gratitude help? Let me know in the comments!

Gratitude and acquiring stuff

It's no secret that we live in a consumerist society, and never is that fact more apparent than during the holiday season. There's so much stuff out there for us to acquire—more stuff than has ever been available at any other point in human history.

And a lot of it is marketed by very smart folks who understand that we're more likely to buy that stuff if we believe it will make our lives more something: more interesting, more rewarding, more exciting—even more efficient. It seems like part of human nature to want to keep pushing for "more," even to the point of having too much.

Gratitude can help keep that drive to acquire in balance. When we take a little time to say "thank you" for what we have, we also have a chance to get a good look at what we have. And that can help us recalibrate our desire for more.

Sometimes we might realize that we have plenty of stuff, that in fact we're surrounded by stuff that we lost sight of in that push for "more." Sometimes we realize that the stuff we've gotten while we were in the grips of "more" fever hasn't actually delivered what it promised more of, and that maybe what we're looking for can't be found in stuff anyway.

When the zeal to acquire something seizes you, see if you can't take a minute or two to think about what you already have, breathe deeply and feel a sense of gratitude for your current possessions. You might find that the zeal has diminished and you're okay with what you already have.

What experiences have you had with acquiring stuff in the name of having "more"? Have you ever taken the time to do a quick gratitude check to see if you truly need something? Let me know in the comments!

How gratitude can help you get Sorted

Yes, it's another month with a theme, but not only do this month and this theme match up really well (for obvious reasons), this particular theme can make a huge difference in every single area of your life, not just in your office.

We'll be talking about gratitude in November. Not just the sentence or two you say around the Thanksgiving table when grandma asks everyone to talk about what they're thankful for this year, but an approach to life that can be used and enjoyed all year.

And gratitude can help you get organized and stay organized, as you appreciate what you have and feel less of a need to pursue items and activities that you're drawn to out of anxiety. It can strengthen your relationships—including your relationship with yourself, which can have some amazing benefits. And gratitude can help you make the most of what you have, and prepare to face what's coming.

So stick around this month, and let's get grateful. (And I ain't just talking turkey.)

Item! Two local desks get Sorted

I'm so excited: the magazine section of yesterday's local paper, The Virginian-Pilot, had a cover story about two volunteers who got one hour of coaching each to get their messy desks Sorted. The coach in question? Me!

Here's an excerpt from the story:

Whatever the cause, Lee knew there was a problem and cried out for help.

He agreed to a one-hour session with Catherine Cantieri, a workplace organizer from Portsmouth who runs a business called Sorted.

Cantieri approaches her task with the demeanor of a cheerleader, not a schoolmarm. Clutter, she said, "doesn't mean that you're a bad person. You just don't have a system that works for you."

She had a system rather early in life.

"I was a very creepy child," Cantieri confessed. "I always had to-do lists that were color-coded."

She swears she doesn't grit her teeth and tighten her stomach when she enters the world of mess. "I think, 'OK, I can't wait to see what it looks like when we're all done,' " Cantieri said. "It's like sitting down to a really rich meal."

I had a great time working with both Ron Lee and Sally Hartman, and I believe they've got systems in place now that work for them. Check out the whole article if you'd like, or if you want to get Sorted yourself, drop me a line!