Organizing Your Home by Grouping Like It

A basic concept around which organizing works, is that items are grouped together with like items. This is pretty basic, and applies to home organizing or any other kind of organizing, but it’s easy to forget this simple thing and end up with various places where an item, or more of those items, might be. Home organization begins with having a place for everything. Once you have that done, then everything can be in its place. Grouping items can be done in stages, beginning with getting things into the correct room, for example personal items belonging to each family member ...

How to Organize a Year's Worth of Paperw

After a long bout of being unwell some time ago, I one day felt compelled to dig out and organize my desk, as I must so often do, and catch up with my filing so that I could more easily get on with my work. Feeling inspired is one thing, but fortunately I know how to organize a year’s worth of paperwork, as organizing is my thing. I jotted down how I did it as I went, so I might inspire or help someone else who has gotten a little (or a lot) out of control with papers piling up ...

Finding Pleasure In Your Daily Routine

My basic approach to being organized and having my home and my time run as smoothly and easily as possible is having a good, workable daily routine and establishing good habits (and re-establishing them over and over again if necessary). Our routines are the stuff that holds our life together and keeps it functioning, and prevent the need for floundering around wondering what we should be doing. Good routines kill self-doubt. When we manage to get a routine going which is working for us, something really cool that can happen and which should be encouraged and nurtured, is that we somehow, accidentally, ...

Scanning Photos

Does the idea of having all your family photos organized seem like an impossible dream that might take a lifetime to achieve, or would require hiring a team of experts for a month? I know it can seem like an impossible task, but it can be done. I’m not saying it will ever be finished, as you’ll always be adding new photos, but you can get all your old ones sorted out so that you can enjoy them more and have them stop bugging you. I’m not a scrap-booker, and I’m no kind of photo expert. All I have done is scan ...

Fear of Childbirth Pain

Talking to people about childbirth, as I often do whenever the opportunity comes up, I have found many people don’t understand the nature of the pain we experience during labour. Men often feel fear, frustration, and worry for their partner. Wishing there was something they could do to help her, and feeling useless is a common comment.. When speaking to women who are pregnant with their first child, their fear of the pain of childbirth is often made worse by not really understanding the nature of it. So I like to take the opportunity to explain my experience and understanding of it to ...

Organizing Your Washing (Laundry)

How good would it be if you never had to worry about your washing again? I hate being hassled by the kids about items which I “should have” washed by now, lack of school socks and so on. By the way, in Australia we say “doing the washing” when we are talking about washing our clothes and linen, rather than cleaning laundry. “The laundry” is the room where the washing machine goes, which is usually a separate room here. We hopefully already have a rough idea how to do laundry or washing. Washing laundry is just something we need to keep up...