Be generous ...

These days, it is a lot easier to get rid of your old things all while helping someone else that might greatly benefit from your unwanted items.

Many charitable organizations have made it easy for you to donate more than just your time and money, by creating drop off locations around the city, offering free or small-fee pickups of your items directly from your home etc.

I encourage you to take advantage of these. Do your research, contact the organization directly to inquire about the items you are thinking of donating. A lot of these organizations already list a whole list of items they are in need for, or are willing to accept on their various websites and offer further consultations and advice in case you can't find your particular item there.

Dropping off your item to a charitable organization would ensure it gets to someone that would really need it, and will in turn make you feel great that you have made a small, but significant difference for someone that needed help!

Checklists

I feel that it's a common misconception that organized people do a lot of planning ahead of time and lack spontaneity. Similarly, we often think of people who seem somewhat disorganized as free spirits who lack discipline to plan ahead.

I have learned that this is actually not the case at all. Being organized actually takes a lot less effort than people might think. As a professional organizer, I would categorize myself as a planner only to a degree. I think I have the ability to distinguish between what is important to plan, and what doesn't require extensive planning and how much time I would need for planning.

One useful tool that might replace actual large scale planning are checklists. I find this works great at home and at work in the office. I write down the tasks and draw a little square beside each one that I can happily thick off when the task is complete. This keeps me informed on what lies ahead, it keeps me organized and it takes up very little of my time to write these tasks down.

Checklists are a form of planning. If you are planning an event or a trip, you can start writing down what you need to do, or what you need to take with you on your trip, couple of months ahead of time. As the day of your event approaches, you will have better idea of how prepared you are and what is left to accomplish. Similarly, for traveling, packing for your trip will be easy if you have already invested your time in thinking through all the things that you might possibly need for your trip. You would have already purchased or prepared things that you needed, and as a result avoided last minute scramble to get everything. As we always say, breaking down tasks and plans in smaller entities always helps achieve the ultimate goal faster and more efficiently.

New Year Resolutions

It is very common to make new year resolutions and even more common to fail at reaching them within first couple of months of the year.

There are few things that I have learned from my failures and successes over the years that I would like to share with you. First, I started looking at new resolutions as my "goals", something I wanted to achieve that year, but as goals had to come up with an actual plan of how to achieve them. Last year, I decided I wanted to cook more. I wanted to eat more cooked meals at home, and actually try new recipes and add more variety into my repertoire of things that I already knew how to make. In order to meet my goal (or a resolution), I had to do some planning ahead of time. If I wanted to make something for dinner, I had to check the day before what I needed, write it down, and then buy all the ingredients on my way back home from work. Thinking ahead also helped me with the problem I seemed to have of having food in my fridge go bad and having to throw it out. I hate throwing out food, but when you live alone and not eat much, every week you find yourself with something that has moulded or rotted its way out of eatable state.

Keeping a quick diary of your steps and things you are doing to achieve your goal is also a great way in making sure that you are going to achieve it. That way you also give yourself assurance that you are doing everything you can to make your goal a reality.

Finally, it's important to have support in order to achieve your goals. Let your friends and family know what your goals and resolutions are. That way they can check in with you from time to time to see how you are doing in achieving them, and even better, help you along the way.