Welcome to Simply Organized Life! I am so glad you are here. Make your self a cup of tea and stay awhile.
All My Best, Carolyn
All in simplify
What is "irrational clutter"? For me, it is things that I hold onto thinking I "might need them, someday" when in reality there is no need to hold onto these items in vast quantities.
Open Office Hours are complimentary, completely free of charge, no strings attached. I want to create a safe space for us to gather, build community and offer organizational support. You can ask questions or just come for the accountability. To protect participants' privacy, the meetings will not be recorded. This is a positive, open and inclusive environment.
Clutter has no deadline. Now that the kids have entered their summer break and things seem to be on the up and up, it's time to put our house in better order again. My goal is to let things go and recreate the spaciousness I crave. Maybe now we can get back to our usual way of dealing with the things we no longer need.
These can be hard times to keep a positive mindset, with many wrongs in the world and great suffering happening everywhere. At the same time, by taking care of ourselves, we are in a better position to right wrongs and to alleviate suffering. We can start with ourselves and work our way outward.
I thought I would share my current cleaning routine as a follow up to last month's post on gratitude and habit tracking. Hopefully, this will inspire you to create your own cleaning routine, or perhaps you have a few tips to help me stay more consistent with mine.
There are so many creative ways to track our gratitude and habits. If you go to Google Images and search for "gratitude log" or "habit tracker" a seemly infinite number of beautiful ideas will appear. Through trial and error in my dot grid bullet journals, I developed a tracking format that really works for me. Because many of you have asked, I will share the simple format that I use, no special artistic skills required.
Sometimes we just need a change of scenery. Most days I like to stick to my routines, stay close to home and do the usual things in the usual order. Other days, I feel the need to switch things up, just a little. This might be walking my dog someplace different, trying a new restaurant or participating in a local retreat. In January I both participated in and hosted retreats. The time away from my usual routines opened by eyes to new realizations.
For the last 31 days I have been walking through the FlyLady BabySteps over on Instagram Stories (currently available in the highlights section on my Instagram profile). This exercise turned out different than I expected. As with most of us when we start something new, the first few days I was eager to share each step. Around day 12 my excitement waned, as I realized that I had cherry picked the FlyLady habits and implemented them in a very different order than the website suggests. The "official" order felt convoluted to me.
