A life of well-being, meaning and purpose.
Continue reading “How To Be Organized Enough”Excelerated Organization™ – being well-enough organized – means you are free from clutter, everything has a permanent home, and you are able to put your hands on what you need when you need it.
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Continue reading “Ben Franklin On The Excelerated Life”“Dost thou love life?” Then, be sure you are living your Excelerated Life™.
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Continue reading “How To Automate Your Best Behaviors”Research shows that up to 45% of our actions are automatic, driven by habit. A good number of these are daily activities such as eating, drinking, driving, and so on. Without the power of habit, most of your mental capacity would be taken up by these mundane but necessary activities. Another reason why habits are important is that they can be used to automate your best behaviors.
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Continue reading “Simplify To Remove Unnecessary Complexity”The aim of Excelerated Simplicity™ is to free ourselves from unnecessary complexity. The desired end result is a simpler, not simplistic, life. Not all complexity can be done away with, nor is that desirable. But unnecessary complexity can be simplified and our lives made simpler by having fewer trivial details to deal with.
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Continue reading “How To Declutter Your Life And Why”Knowing your “Clutter Archetype” can help you get a handle on the barriers you may be facing when you try to declutter your life. Don’t fall for the flashy illusions of affluenza.
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Continue reading “Freedom From Choice”Too many choices can keep us from the Excelerated Life™. When we are focused on living a life of flourishing and well-being and a life of meaning, purpose and service, then we do not have so many choices. We don’t make the same decisions again and again. We make them once and cut off other options.
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Simplifying your life doesn’t have to be complicated but it does require thought. In Keeping Life Simple, Karen Levine shares 7 guiding principles to help us have more time to do the things we love – and to figure out what those things are.
It was Saturday morning and Kelly woke up in a foul mood. She was tired of juggling a demanding job, a house that was in constant disarray, and a husband and children that always seemed to need something – forms completed, lunches packed, arguments settled, and on and on.
Although she didn’t really need anything specific, she decided to give herself a break and go shopping; it seemed to be one of the few outlets available to her to make herself feel better. She left her husband in charge of the house and children and headed for the mall.
Continue reading “7 Principles To Keep Life Simple”Our default behaviors are, by definition, those things we do without thinking about them. It’s a good idea to step back from time to time and examine your defaults. You may want to change some of your “settings”.
My phone is old by cell phone standards. But I still remember when I got it, trading in my old flip phone for a smart phone. And it was smart. The technician at the store took about 15 minutes to set it up and save all my contacts. He handed me the phone and it was ready to go. Such convenience.
Continue reading “Change Your Default Settings”Being well-enough organized does not mean you have all your possessions stored picture perfectly. It does mean you have a place for everything and everything is in its place . . . mostly. Well-enough organized means you are able to find what you need when you need it. It means all your spaces bring you pleasure and a sense of control. And it means no stressing about things you forgot to do.
Once upon a time, I had the idea that I would become a professional organizer. I enjoyed turning a cluttered closet or room into a neatly organized space and this seemed like an interesting profession. So I bought a book on becoming a professional organizer from Maria Gracia at Get Organized Now and I became a devoted reader of her newsletters. I began working on the exercises in the book and drew up a business plan of sorts. I even purchased a truck with the idea that I could use it in my business to cart away discards when I helped clients organize their homes.
But as you can probably tell, I never did launch that professional organizing business. Somewhere along the path, I realized my visions of turning a messy, cluttered space into a picture from House Beautiful had a flaw. A picture perfect room or closet or garage was not worth the effort, nor necessarily even functional. I moved from the idea of being perfectly organized to being “well-enough organized” . . . clutter-free and able to find what you need when you need it.
Continue reading “How To Be Well-Enough Organized”Motivation is fickle. Willpower is unreliable. Don’t depend on motivation and willpower for changing behaviors. Make the behavior easy to do. Then repeat to make it a habit.
When Melissa[1] came to me for coaching, she identified several goals she wanted to work on. Her most important goal was to get her home office organized. This was the area that was most disruptive to her life and the one causing her the most stress.
Melissa shared that she could get one section of the place organized, say her desk top or the stacks of paper on her bookshelves, but within a few days, everything was chaos again. She wasted a lot of time looking for papers or other items she needed which caused undue stress.
“I guess I just lack the self-control to make myself do what I need to do,” she lamented. “I spend so much time and energy looking for articles I need, that it is impacting my life. It is hampering me from getting important tasks done yet I can’t keep myself motivated to keep things organized.”
Continue reading “Turn Behaviors Into Habits – Even If You Lack Self-Control”