Hasta La Ideas

As much as I dislike going to see my dentist and doctors, I go for all of my preventative care appointments (every six months or once a year or whenever is recommended) to keep my medical costs low. I know from experience that regular checkups are less expensive than emergency care, which sincerely plays the largest part in all of it. These regular appointments are also there for early detection, so small problems don’t become large ones (also saving me money).

The easiest way to stay on top of these appointments is to schedule your next visit before you leave your dentist or doctor’s office. The same is true for hair appointments, car maintenance, and your pet’s veterinarian visits. Along similar lines, appointments for annual servicing of your heater, chimney, and other house work can be scheduled for the next year before the technician leaves your home (assuming you liked the work that was done). If your family enjoys going skiing every winter and you have a favorite place to stay, make your reservation for next year when you settle up your account for this year’s trip. Even though you have no idea what you’ll be doing 12 months in the future, it’s better to get an appointment on both of your schedules early. You may have to move the appointment, but you at least have one to move if you need to.

Regularly scheduling appointments will free up your time (you don’t have to call multiple times to try to get squeezed into someone’s schedule or call multiple providers hunting for someone who can help), alleviate stress (you don’t have to worry about your heater not turning on the first cold day of fall), and likely save you money over the long-term.

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Reader Mary submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

My parents divorced when I was quite young, and little evidence of their past relationship remains in our lives. Being the most sentimental of the three kids, I am in possession what is, to my knowledge, the only remaining wedding photograph, a framed 8×10 that has been sitting at the back of my closet for years.

I am now in the process of permanently cleaning my possessions out of my childhood home, and I feel like it would be weird to display this framed photograph in my new home, since I am basically the only person left on the planet who feels sentimental about this long-since-ended marriage.

In addition, I live with a partner who does not have the same sense of sentimentality as I do, who does not tend to favor displaying family photographs in the home (an uncluttered philosophy I generally support), and who in fact has never met one of the parents in the picture.

Do you have any suggestions for what to do with this framed photograph that nobody but me wants to look at, but I could definitely not get rid of? I suppose I could digitize it, but then what? I don’t know if I could bring myself to throw out the original. One more consideration is that it’s not a very high-quality photograph, so it wouldn’t even really be that attractive to display–its value is purely (but extremely) sentimental.

I’d start by removing the image from the frame and having it digitally scanned. I wouldn’t have it scanned for the purpose of getting rid of the original, but rather so you have a copy of it in case your home is ever destroyed in a disaster (fire, flood, tornado, etc.). Upload the file to a secure and private online account (like you can do with Flickr), so if you ever need to make a copy you can easily do it.

As far as the original is concerned, I’m greatly in favor of keeping it. Being an unclutterer doesn’t mean your home has to be void of any personal or sentimental objects, it just means you’ve chosen not to let these items overwhelm your space and distract you from pursuing the life of your dreams. One photograph of your parents’ wedding day is unlikely a distraction.

The frame seems to be a little bulky, though, and unnecessary if you don’t want to hang the image on your wall. (Heck, even if your parents were still together, I doubt you’d be hanging up their wedding portrait.) I recommend heading to your local camera store and talking with an employee about all of your image preservation options.

For the print photographs I have decided to keep (in addition to their digital backups), I have them stored in an archival quality, acid-free, photo storage box. Also, because I’m a believer that if I’m going to keep something I’m going to care for it as best as I possibly can, I got a pair of darkroom photography gloves to handle the images. The employee at your local camera store might have more options, so definitely find out what she suggests, too.

Thank you, Mary, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Be sure to check the comments for even more suggestions from our readers.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

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Do you ever lose hours? I don’t mean you’ve lost hours because you have blacked out, I simply mean have you ever zoned out for awhile without realizing it? Have you looked up at the clock and thought, “Whoa! How is it noon already?”

There are times when daydreaming is a good idea, like when you’re on vacation and your mind deserves a break. It’s also important to pack some variety into your work day by alternating between mindful and mindless work. (Doing so will increase your creativity.)

Zoning out isn’t helpful, however, when you need to get work done. Staring off into space and losing time kill your productivity. If you need to get stuff done but are having a tough time of it, try one or more of these techniques to help regain your focus:

• Set an alarm for 10 minutes, and keep hitting snooze. When the alarm sounds, make a mental note of all the work you completed and then hit snooze. Do the same thing when the alarm sounds again in 10 minutes. The alarm helps to keep you on track when you mind is eager to wander elsewhere.
• Pretend to be a lawyer, and log your work in 15 minute billing intervals. You can download basic free time-tracking software from numerous companies to help get you started. Programs that automatically prompt you to input your progress are similar to an alarm that reminds you to stay on track.
• Identify very specific action items each hour. At the top of every hour, take two minutes to write out exactly what you plan to accomplish that hour. Then, work as diligently as possible to finish those action items. It’s a lot easier to get where you want to go when you know where you’re headed.
• Make yourself accountable to someone else. If you have a colleague or buddy who is game, tell her you want to be finished with a task by a specific time. Then, when that time rolls around, the person checks in with you to see how it went. Be kind and return the favor when the other person needs your assistance.
• Race a colleague to see how much work you can both get done in 30 minutes or an hour. Set an alarm, and go. Make the prize something small and fun, like the loser is responsible for refilling both of your coffee mugs.

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A couple months ago, I was at the pharmacy picking up a medication for my son because he had a truly disgusting sinus infection. I had him in a stroller because I didn’t trust him to keep his bug-ridden hands to himself and because a 22-month old loose in a pharmacy is rarely a good idea (especially one who enjoys impersonating a tornado).

While we were waiting on the prescription to be filled, a woman came up to me and told me that my son was “too big to be in a stroller” and if “I knew how to properly control him” I wouldn’t need to use it. I didn’t know this woman, I hadn’t even made eye contact with her, and I certainly wasn’t wearing a t-shirt that said, “Please critique my parenting choices.” Irrespective of this, she still felt the need to reprimand me for using a stroller.

I thought about lying and saying that my son had polio or a congenital spinal deformity in an attempt to make her feel guilty for being rude to me, but I didn’t. Instead, I simply offered up my son’s snotty hand and said she was welcome to walk around with him while we waited.

She declined.

This is by no means the first time I have been chastised by total strangers for raising my child differently than how they think I should. And, I’m doubting it will be the last.

It has been a wonderful reminder to me, however, to not clutter up my time worrying about what other people are doing as long as they’re not actually injuring themselves or others, putting another person or themselves in harm’s way, or violating another person’s rights.

As annoyed as I might be by a person driving a few miles below the speed limit, I just assume there is a reason and give the person the benefit of the doubt. As irksome as it is when someone’s cell phone rings in a movie theater, I just assume it must be an emergency and go back to enjoying the film. If I see a tall child in a stroller, I know the kid is safe and don’t let it bother me. Not letting these minor frustrations get to me frees up my emotions and time to focus on things I enjoy and want to do.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and I have decided not to fill that time being frustrated by other people and negative situations that are out of my control (again, assuming nothing really bad is occurring). I barely have the energy to do all of the things I want to do, and giving people the benefit of the doubt helps me to stay in control of my emotions and time.

In light of practicing what I preach, from this point forward I’m just going to assume that the woman who criticized me about having my son in a stroller was having a bad day. She likely felt the need to yell at me because someone had probably screamed at her. I ended up getting a good reminder out of the situation (give people the benefit of the doubt) and an introduction for a post (this one), so at least a couple good things came from the tongue lashing.

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Does this ever happen to you: Your home is functioning at its best and chores are getting done when they need to be done. Then, the light bulb burns out in the laundry room (or something similar which is seemingly minor, like you run out of dish detergent or you throw your coat over the back of a chair instead of hanging it up in the closet). Less than a week later, you have dishes piled up on your kitchen counter, clothes spilling out of the hamper, and old newspapers piling up in your driveway. All it took was one itty bitty cog in the machine to break for your entire system to fall apart.

I refer to this breakdown as the Keystone Demise. In architecture, the keystone is the center stone of an arch. It is the piece that is vital to the arch’s success because it makes it possible for the arch to hold its shape and to bear the weight of the ceiling, wall, bridge, and/or doorway. If you remove the keystone, the arch fails, usually bringing down the entire surrounding structure with it.

The Keystone Demise is almost always the cause of an organizing system failure. One small piece is disrupted/broken/compromised and in a matter of days it is as if the organizing system didn’t exist at all. One day’s mail being thrown on the dining table can be all it takes for full-house chaos to erupt.

When you or others who occupy the same space notice the keystone isn’t working properly, its as if the keystone gives license for you and others to abandon your efforts to keep everything organized. In a sense, the Keystone Demise plays a part in the Broken Window theory. The tiny, out-of-place keystone sends a signal that it’s okay for disorder to rule the home or office.

As someone who wants to keep your home and office organized, it’s your job to immediately identify when a keystone is out of place or broken and fix the situation. There are a few easy ways to do this:

1. Printed closing duties or a chore chart. It seems elementary to write out chores and end-of-day assignments, but these lists can be very beneficial for helping you avoid Keystone Demise. Before leaving the office or heading to bed, review your printed list of closing duties or daily chores to make sure all tasks were completed properly. If they weren’t, quickly do the chore or re-do it. Don’t leave work or go to bed with an essential task undone.
2. Keep an easily accessible shopping list. Again, this is pretty basic, but having a grocery shopping and errand list can be a huge help in avoiding Keystone Demise. This list needs to be in a place where any of your housemates can effortlessly add to it (right when they notice something is running out or broken, don’t ever expect housemates to have to email you because they won’t), the writing implement needs to be in working order, and you can take the list with you when you go to the store or to run errands.
3. Having the right tools. This is mentioned constantly on this site, but it needs to be mentioned again in this context. If clothes end up on the floor of your bathroom, then you need to put a hamper in your bathroom. If clothes end up on the floor of your bedroom, you also need a hamper in your bedroom. If you want to shred junk mail by your front door and also shred sensitive documents in your home office, have a shredder by your front door and also a shredder in your office. Having multiples of something isn’t clutter if you actually need multiples of something to stay organized and keep from avoiding Keystone Demise.

In my house, receipts on the top of our bedroom dresser are our broken keystone. If we empty our pockets and just set the receipts down on the top of the dresser, within a week we have absolute chaos in the house. It’s amazing to me how something as small as receipts can cause complete disorder, but time and again they are the culprit. Rather, I should say receipts used to be the constant cause of our Keystone Demise. We now have all the tools necessary to keep this simple type of clutter from accumulating. Plus, getting ready for bed more than an hour before we plan to go to sleep also helps a great deal because we have enough energy to properly process these little slips of paper (and get our dirty clothes into the hamper and all our other end-of-the day chores).

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