Happy New Year

Best wishes to all our readers for a healthy, happy and prosperous coming year.  May all your goals for the year be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and accomplished by this time next year!

Merry Christmas

To all of our readers who celebrate Christmas, we wish you a very joyful and peaceful time with family and friends.  Merry Christmas.

Hannukkah Greetings

To all of our readers who celebrate Hanukkah, we wish you a peaceful and joyful time with family and friends.

Organize with a Camera

Many of you are opening up the holiday decorations, unpacking boxes and bins and joining in festivities with lights, wreaths, Christmas tree ornaments and those special holiday decorations that live on the mantel.  Problem is, every year there are a few more to add to the mix.  Can anyone remember how to get them all back in the box?  Packing up those boxes in January can be worse than that 1,000 piece puzzle at the cottage, full of sky and water, that no one has ever finished.


Taking a picture before everything comes out of the box can be helpful.  Take a quick photo, print and tape to the top of the box.  Letter the photo be the memory.  Now you can enjoy the festivities.

ADD Time Monitors

For individuals managing ADD, learning to manage time can be an ongoing challenge.  Professional organizers and ADD coaches often encourage the use of timers to make sure hyper-focus doesn't cause the swallowing of hours and hours of time scheduled for something else.


Here's an idea I created for a young client whose tremendous creativity sent me searching for an alternate timing device.  Create a set of playlists for yourself on your mp3 player for various lengths of time.  One might be 5 Min Playlist, another 10 Min Playlist etc.  When you have a task to complete or a job that you need to focus for a designated time, plug in and turn on your playlist that matches that period of time.  It may take a couple of attempts before you figure out the genre of music that works for a 10 minute end-of-day-get-stuff-off-the-floor task versus a 30 minute I-really-have-to-enter-in-my-expenses-today-if-i-want-to-be-reimbursed-this-month type task.


Have fun with it - its a perfect personalized tool to support your time management.

How to Win Friends: Still great at 75 years

Dale Carnegie first penned his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in 1936.  I'm reading it as part of my Program Mentor training with the Institute for Challenging Disorganization.  Imagine my surprise when I sourced a copy at the Toronto Public Library, I found there were 17 copies and all were on loan or on reserve.


I highly recommend this read.  It is easy to get through with short, succinct chapters.  The material is as relevant today as I think it must have been over 75 years ago.  The behaviour Carnegie recommends of us does not take a university course to apply and could be initiated by anyone immediately.  A surprising amount of his directives are good common sense that we fail to remember and therefore neglect to apply with authenticity and sincerity.


Happy Birthday "How to Win Friends..."

Happy Thanksgiving

To our American readers best wishes for a health, happy and joyful Thanksgiving with your family and friends.

Weigh-in Wows at the Airport

Just returned from an Ontario Sailing training camp in Miami at the US Sailing Centre.  The trip was great but the luggage is not.  We still use a super strong, two part suitcase designed to protect ski gear from air travel.  I've weighed the darn thing and it comes in at 10lbs before I put in a single pair of shorts.  The last three times I've travelled, despite pre-weighing here at home (has anyone checked those scales at the airport recently?) I've been overweight on luggage and paid the consequences.


Any suggestions for light weight, high volume, strong travel luggage on wheels?  Has to be big enough to carry personal sailing gear - the dagger board etc is all in a the rigid equipment case with "fragile" luggage and they never seem to weigh that "almost too heavy to carry" piece.  I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Book a Meeting with Yourself

I have 4 hours all to myself today: that is, all to myself and the mound of paper work that accumulated while I was off tending to clients.

We schedule our meetings with clients, with staff and all manner of other related services for our lives but how often do we book time with ourselves to clear out the clutter?  Unfortunately we know from decades of time management publications, that unless a priority activity is booked into our schedule, it will not get done.  Is that why perhaps, some administrative or maintenance tasks in your life don't get done?

Consider booking a regular meeting with yourself to accomplish some of the mundane tasks that life asks us to complete.  It might be clearing kids school paperwork, catching up on correspondence, filing (electronically or otherwise) the bills that have piled up.  If you book time on a regular basis, you will be surprised how some of this stuff doesn't get a chance to pile up.  Depending upon the task, it may be only 2 hours a week or perhaps one day a month is all that is required to clear out the backlog and keep up to date.

A Boost for the Winter

The recent car battery troubles of my neighbour, and our own car last month, gave me a chance to ponder the need for battery booster cables here in Canada.  As the car I drive often takes us out of the city and around the province, if not the country, we have booster cables that never leave the back of the car except to boost someone's battery.  We have a set for the second car which KLR drives but when that car was dry docked for a couple of months, the cables ended up in the garage.

After the neighbour's distress call came in from a few blocks away, complete with young son in the car and freezing rain on the dash, KLR was dispatched since he was already out and about and the car was out of dry dock.  The cables however, were still in the garage.  Yours truly headed out instead.

Lesson learned: regular checks of your winter box are a good way to stay organized and ensure that your car will be fully supplied when life throws the proverbial curve ball.  Items to carry in the box might include: booster cables, blanket, matches, candles, flashlight, first aid kit and hazard sign.