by Christine Hayden

Created on: May 05, 2009

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

J. K. Rowling

Well, let us hope that after becoming organized, death will not be next on the list. Unfortunately, many of us feel like we are living a death sentence when faced with the impending doom of having to organize ourselves. Fortunately, organizing does not have to feel like that. There are ways to get a handle on organizing everything from our homes, to our offices, to our personal selves without the Grim Reaper ever having to make a hint of an appearance in the process.

If it is your home your looking at redoing, choose one room at a time. A smaller job to start works well as it can get you into the rhythm of organizing. A bedroom closet or kitchen pantry is perfect for a beginner organizer.

Get yourself 3 recycling boxes. Label the boxes, GIVEAWAY, KEEP and THROW AWAY, line them up and get tough with yourself. If you are in your closet start with your purses, shoes, accessories. Take a good look at every piece and think about the last time you used that item. Do you still wear it? Is it dated? Will you wear it in the next 6 months? If any of those questions are a resounding no, put them in one of the boxes. Proceed with the process for everything else in your closet.

Once the closet is cleaned out and those boxes are full, take the GIVE AWAY and THROW AWAY boxes down to the car, drive to the Thrift store or dump and GET RID OF THEM! Out of site is out of mind. When you return to your closet you now have the KEEP box to deal with. Envision how you would like to see your belongings. How would you like your clothes to hang? By color, by length, by formal to informal? You can even draw out a plan for your closet. If you need to purchase extra hangers, shoe boxes, labels or shelving, go for it. All of those things will aid in obtaining the best organized space possible.

Remember, holding onto THINGS, is normal. They remind us of someone we love, a terrific vacation, a smaller, skinnier "me". However, attaching importance to things can also be holding us back or weighing us down. It keeps us from moving forward or from facing and accepting something negative in our past. Whatever the reason for keeping something, you must delve deep into how important it is to you, why you've been keeping it and then decide on it's fate. "Stuff" can sometimes cause a lot of "emotional stuff" that we really no longer need to carry with us.

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