Hasta La Ideas

In the comments to last week’s post on organizing a job search, a reader asked if we might be able to put together a résumé organizing post. Since I haven’t put together a résumé in more than five years, I thought it best to turn to a professional. Today we welcome guest author Tiffany Bridge who worked for many years as a recruiter for a job placement company. Welcome, Tiffany.

Usually, uncluttering is about organizing your stuff in such a way that life is simpler for you. Résumé uncluttering is a special challenge because it’s about organizing your stuff so that it’s easier for someone else — most likely someone you’ve never met.

Common causes of résumé clutter and how to combat them

The One-Page Résumé. This is one of the most pernicious lies ever to haunt hiring managers. Yes, the Career Services people at your college were right that you should keep your résumé to one page when you’re just coming out of school, but once you have some real experience to talk about it’s needlessly constraining.

Solution: Your résumé should be exactly as long as you need to describe it, and no longer. For most people, this is about two pages, but even three are fine if you need them. You generally only need to cover about the last 10 years of your experience for most fields.

The Functional Résumé. This is another one of those things that your college Career Services people tell you about, which kind of makes sense when you’re getting out of school, but is completely useless once you’ve had a job or two. Hiring managers want a sense of career progression, how you got to where you are now, and a functional résumé completely obliterates any ability to observe it. It’s also commonly used to play down embarrassing gaps in one’s work history, so the hiring manager starts wondering what you’re trying to hide — firing? nervous breakdown? prison sentence?

Solution: It’s fine to have a functional component of your résumé if you have a job history that’s not a straight line toward your goal or if you’re trying to change fields and need to pull all your relevant skills together. However, you still need to be able to show the actual chronological history of your career.

The Objective Statement. This is a waste of an inch or two of space you are trying to use judiciously. If you’re bothering to apply to a job, clearly your objective is to get that job. No one needs to be told that.

Solution: A summary statement is a nice alternative, especially to pull together disparate experience, as long as you avoid tired phrases like “customer service-oriented,” “team player” or “seasoned professional.” Or you can skip it altogether and just jump straight into “Experience.” Your cover letter will explain your objectives better than a statement on your résumé.

In short, remember that the HR person or hiring manager giving your résumé the first review is going to be scanning, not reading. Keep the most relevant information (your experience) near the top, avoid pointless and outdated conventions, and don’t be afraid to take enough space to help the reader connect the dots of your experience and skills to get a complete picture of your strengths.

One of the most fun ways to motivate yourself to unclutter your home and/or office is to invite someone to visit. Whether you decide to throw a party or just ask your cousin over for tea, it’s nice to have a reward for getting your space into shape.

During the fall and winter, I often nest. Stuff comes into my house, but it’s difficult for me to get equal amounts of stuff out of it. My solution is to throw a holiday wine and cheese party every year. I have to clean out the refrigerator to make space for the hors d’oeuvres, I purge all the clutter in the house, and I make sure that everything I own has a “home.” I also call in a service a few days in advance to help me get all of the nooks and crannies that usually get overlooked a good cleaning. Then, after all of my hard work, I get to celebrate my orderly space with my friends.

When I worked in a traditional office, I would set up a meeting time with my boss and invite him/her to my space. The day before the meeting I would dust, go through what was on my bulletin boards, and get my office into its best state. Sure, my boss came by my office every day, but he/she didn’t usually spend more than a few seconds relaying information to me. The sit-down meetings were motivation to really improve my office.

If you’re looking for a push to get you uncluttering and organizing, check your calendar and send an invitation.

We want to welcome guest author Alex Fayle, the writer and professional organizer behind the helpful anti-procrastination website Someday Syndrome. This is his first post of three in a series on fighting procrastination.

Has this ever happened to you?

You decide to get your bedroom, kitchen, garage, or whatever organized. You get a book and read about it. You watch an organizing show and take notes. You then plan out how you’re going to tackle the room and what you want it to look like afterward. You know all the steps that it’ll take to go from start to finish. You even know how long it will take and you have resources lined up to help you.

And yet you do nothing.

You know that the block comes from a combination of inertia and a fear of the unknown, failure, success, or whatever. You could probably talk for an hour about why you’re not starting.

And yet you still do nothing.

If you think this post will give you some trick, or little game to play with yourself, I’m sorry to disappoint. There’s only one thing to get yourself started – and that’s getting started.

Yeah, real helpful, I know. Unfortunately it’s the truth. If you aren’t willing take action, take even a small step toward your dreams, then there’s nothing I can do to help you.

Achieving your dreams requires work. Once you get into it you might not think of it as work because you enjoy it so much, but it’s hard work.

My passion is writing and yet every time I go to start a new project, I create a huge monster out of Getting Started and play at running away from it, doing everything but actually typing words into the computer. And then by simply opening up my computer and writing the first sentence the monster disappears and my passion for writing takes over again.

In the meantime, however, I’ve let the Getting Started Monster distract me for huge blocks of time.

Don’t let the Getting Started monster hold you back from your uncluttering projects (or any other project you haven’t got around to yet).

Fortunately it’s easy to beat the Getting Started Monster: simply write down each time you start something and keep a log of all the projects you’ve successfully started. Then post the log wherever you most procrastinate about not moving towards your goals. That might be the living room, the bedroom, the back deck, but I highly doubt it’s the office, so don’t post the log there.

This log celebrates the moments when you started taking action and serves as a reminder of the number of times in the past that you have started something so that when you feel the big scary Getting Started Monster creeping up behind you, you can look at your list of new starts and say “Ha! You don’t scare me! I start things all the time!”

By choosing to get started, you take active control of your life and you don’t let your fears or inertia keep you from achieving your goals.

So tell me – what version of the Getting Started Monster have you vanquished recently?

Professional organizer extraordinaire Monica Ricci returns to Unclutterer to offer us advice on curbing shopaholic practices. You can follow Monica on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog for more organizing tips.

Ahhhhh, the siren song of the mall. Doesn’t it feel nice at the mall? Isn’t it pretty in the mall? Doesn’t the mall smell all yummy and delicious, thanks to Auntie Anne’s Pretzels and Cinnabon? Doesn’t being at the mall just make you wanna get a Starbucks latte and go buy stuff? AAAARGGGHH STOP IT! That’s what got you in trouble in the first place!

If your clutter issues stem chiefly from shopping, here are a few helpful tips to change that reality so you can conquer your clutter once and for all.

1. Be aware of how you feel. If you use shopping, and specifically BUYING to alter your mood, notice it! If buying something new gives you an emotional high that temporarily takes you away from your troubles, makes you feel safe, worthy, loved, or gives you some other rush, it’s important to be aware of it. Once you’re aware of why you’re buying, you can take other steps to make yourself feel better besides buying. I would recommend a few sessions with a counselor, a hypnotist, or therapist to get to the root of your buying.
2. Imagine yourself at home. When you’re OUT of your cluttered home and inside the gorgeous four walls of Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, it’s easy to forget how stressed your home makes you. Again, that’s the idea. They WANT you to forget about your house and just open your wallet. And listen, when you really need something, great. Go buy it! But before you do, vividly imagine yourself back at your house with your new “thing”. Where in your already cluttered home will your new thing live? Who will clean it? How much space will it consume? What will it give you back? How long will it be valuable? Asking yourself these questions will help you make better buying decisions.
3. Calculate the TIME cost. If money isn’t a motivator for you, and unnecessary spending doesn’t inspire you to reduce your shopping, think of how much TIME your new “thing” will cost you. Let’s say you make $20 per hour, and your new “thing” costs $100. In time currency, your new thing will cost you FIVE HOURS of your life. Thinking of new purchases in this way will help you decide if you REALLY need it or if you just want it to make yourself feel better.

The next time you’re out shopping, try these simple tips and see if it doesn’t help shift your shopping mindset so you can make better, more powerful choices and reduce the clutter in your life.

Journalist Kara Morrison’s article “8 tips on how to declutter and let go of sentimental items” for The Arizona Republic on August 5 included great advice for people struggling with memorabilia clutter. A number of the tips really struck home with me and made me think, “why don’t I do that?”

One ah-ha tip from the article:

8. Correspondence and documents: There’s no way you can hang on to every Christmas card or letter. McGivney suggests treating holiday cards like kids’ art. Keep only the best. Then make a holiday album you store with the seasonal decor to remember great holidays past.

Morrison interviewed Julie Hall, author of The Boomer Burden: Dealing with Your Parents’ Lifetime Accumulation of Stuff, for the sixth decluttering tip. In this section, Hall provides a very practical definition for how to decide what is clutter and what isn’t:

“Keep the stuff that really, really means something to you, and let the rest go,” Hall said.

“Really, really means something to you” isn’t a scientific definition by any account, but it is one that all of us can relate to our lives. I call this the Cry Factor — if losing it in a disaster would make me cry, I don’t get rid of it.