Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    31 Words to Create an Organized Life: A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More
    31 Words to Create an Organized Life: A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More
    31 Words to Create an Organized Life: A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    31 Words to Create an Organized Life: A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More

    By Marcia Zina Mager

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Books about organizing the clutter that plagues most people can be as daunting as the clutter itself. 31 Words to Organize Your Life streamlines this process to its essence by tapping the power of a single word. Drawing from a variety of spiritual traditions, ancient wisdom, and contemporary psychologists, the book helps readers uncover and cultivate their own hidden powers of focus, determination, and concentration to eliminate clutter in their lives. Each entry includes a single word, an accompanying essay, along with three thoughtful tips or exploratory questions, plus an affirmation or meditation. Whether the challenge is in time management, office clutter, or disorganized closets, 31 Words to Organize Your Life shows how to harness the power of a single word to transform a project — and a life — from the inside out. Designed for portability, the book helps even the most disorganized person conjure peace and order from chaos.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateOct 14, 2010
    ISBN9781577313991
    31 Words to Create an Organized Life: A Simple Guide to Create Habits That Last — Expert Tips to Help You Prioritize, Schedule, Simplify, and More
    Author

    Marcia Zina Mager

    Marcia Zina Mager is the author of 11 books including the international bestseller, Believing in Faeries: A Manual for Grown-ups and Hawaii Cooks with Taro. Her articles, stories, and essays have appeared in national publications, best-selling book series, and been featured on American and Japanese television. A seasoned seminar leader and inspirational speaker, Marcia is also the founder of the original Write from the Heart ™, a national seminar series created in 1986. She resides in Oahu, Hawaii with her husband and son. www.marcia-zina-mager.com.

    Related to 31 Words to Create an Organized Life

    Related ebooks

    Self-Management For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Goodbye Things, Hello Life

      May 19, 2020

      Goodbye Things, Hello Life
      7 min read

    • Article

      Possessed By Possessions

      Mar 8, 2020

      Possessed By Possessions
      6 min read

    • Article

      88 For Inspiring Us To Clean House

      May 30, 2018

      Margareta Magnusson Author Death cleaning—known in Sweden, its country of origin, as döstädning—may sound morbid. But it’s really an act of love, says Margareta Magnusson, the 84-year-old first-time author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleanin

      1 min read

    • Article

      Safekeeping Yearbooks

      Apr 21, 2020

      Safekeeping Yearbooks
      2 min read

    • Article

      Do less, ACHIEVE MORE

      Jul 29, 2021

      Do less, ACHIEVE MORE
      3 min read

    • Article

      ORGANISE & CONQUER

      Jun 9, 2019

      When we first launched The Home Edit, our professional decluttering service and consultancy (or THE, as we are often called), we had a very clear objective: to transform the way people think about organisation. When spaces are efficient, user-friendl

      4 min read

    • Article

      The 7 Emotional Clutter Blocks

      Jun 27, 2019

      The 7 Emotional Clutter Blocks
      5 min read

    • Article

      Get Organized Now!

      Dec 20, 2019

      Get Organized Now!
      6 min read

    • Article

      Get Organized With Nirvana for GTD

      Oct 11, 2017

      REQUIRES Nirvana for GTD YOU WILL LEARN How to create and manage projects and tasks. IT WILL TAKE 30 minutes ? GENIUS TIP Use tags and timescales to make searching for tasks easy. You can create as many tags as you like. DO YOU EVER look at your to-d

      2 min read

    • Article

      Clutter, Be Gone!

      Dec 28, 2020

      Clutter, Be Gone!
      4 min read

    • Article

      Make Your To-do List Work For You

      Mar 31, 2020

      Highlight all of the tasks on your list that will take two minutes or less, and do them straight away. It will shrink down your list in a matter of minutes. Get honest and ask yourself: ‘What tasks can I let go of and remove from my list altogether?’

      1 min read

    • Article

      Everything In Its PLACE

      Feb 3, 2022

      We all understand that our surroundings affect how we feel on a daily basis. The way our homes are organised can impact our mental health a great deal. Chaos around us causes chaos within us – and this is even more so for those of us who are neurodiv

      2 min read

    • Article

      New Year DECLUTTER

      Jan 4, 2022

      New Year DECLUTTER
      6 min read

    • Article

      Organise Your Home In 30 Days

      Mar 3, 2022

      1 Organising your home is simple, really – it’s just about making sure everything is grouped together and in the right place. First, walk out your house and walk back in with a notebook and pen and try to work out how each room has strayed from the o

      1 min read

    • Article

      Not To Do List

      Jul 29, 2019

      Not To Do List
      1 min read

    • Article

      The power of THE SORT OUT

      Feb 4, 2021

      The power of THE SORT OUT
      4 min read

    • Article

      6 Disciplines to Regain Control of Productivity

      May 26, 2022

      Here are six disciplines Sales Managers can leverage to help their Reps build productive sales weeks: Urgent issues get our attention (and therefore time) – clients who require information, problems that require solving, requests by senior management

      1 min read

    • Article

      A Life Worth Living

      Jan 27, 2020

      A Life Worth Living
      2 min read

    • Article

      100 Hoarding

      Oct 30, 2019

      100 Hoarding
      3 min read

    • Article

      Stay Focused on Your Work

      Nov 28, 2017

      REQUIRES Be Focused, OS X 10.9 or later YOU WILL LEARN How to get into a better pattern of work and rest with the help of a neat little menu bar utility IT WILL TAKE 10 minutes BE FOCUSEDis a free app from the Mac App Store that helps you stay focuse

      3 min read

    • Article

      Decluttering in Retirement (or at Any Age) Frees Space and the Soul

      Jun 7, 2018

      Death cleaning, a common practice in Sweden, sounds harsh. But the purpose of dostadning is to ease the burden on relatives and friends by getting rid of your stuff now, instead of leaving them to deal with your clutter after you die. Margareta Magn

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for 31 Words to Create an Organized Life

    4/5

    7 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      This is a good book with a lot of ideas of how to organize your life and presents several practical advices.

    Book preview

    31 Words to Create an Organized Life - Marcia Zina Mager

    step.

    SECTION I

    Focus

    Getting Clearer on Who You Are and What You Really Want

    If you’re not sure where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.

    —ANONYMOUS

    Before you throw away a single piece of clutter, you need to realize that getting organized is an inside job. It’s a job that requires facing our inner clutter even before we face the piles of magazines and shelves of knickknacks. We need to understand why being organized is truly important to us and to the people around us, and how it can impact our everyday life. In order to do so, we have to get to know ourselves better. And that’s what this section is all about—how to focus more clearly on who you are and what really matters to you. You’ll get in touch with your life dreams, vividly imagine those dreams and desires coming true, acknowledge the uncomfortable feelings that rise up when you try to bring more order into your home, learn how to work with your unique personality, and discover what really motivates and pleases you—all of these are foundational steps that lay the groundwork for creating a more organized life.

    Understand

    Comprehending the Consequences

    of Disorganization

    Did you know that Americans waste millions of hours every day looking for misplaced or lost items such as keys, mail, eyeglasses, receipts, and other mundane stuff? And the average business executive wastes weeks every year searching for lost documents in messy files and desks?

    When we’re not searching for our stuff, we’re buying it. According to the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), we never even use 80 percent of the things we purchase! Yet cleaning experts suggest that if we simply reduced the amount of clutter surrounding us, a whopping 40 percent of our housework would be completely eliminated. And most of us feel overwhelmed from too little time and too much to do.

    Okay, so we’re messy, we’re disorganized, and we mismanage time. In the grand scheme of things, does it really matter?

    Absolutely, insist organizational and time management experts. The word clutter actually comes from the verb to clot. Feng shui consultant Kathleen Thurston explains, It’s like having clogged arteries. The heart of the home gets choked. Our life intentions get obscured in a sea of random clutter.

    And mismanaging our schedules is no different, adds organizational expert Don Aslett: Wasting time means less quality time to spend with your family, your friends, and yourself.

    In other words, clutter and disorganization—whether it’s in our closet or on our calendar—rob us of the harmony and happiness we and our loved ones deserve. Clutter leaves us feeling tired, says Thurston, and keeps us stuck in the past, creating mental patterns of procrastination, and feelings of overwhelm. It restricts and confuses our possibilities. Disorganization makes us feel busier and more pressured than we actually are.

    Time is life, points out time management expert Harold Taylor: To get the most out of life, we must manage time well. Simply put, we’re mortal. The time we spend with family and friends is not unlimited. Do we want to waste it because of bad habits, poor management, and disorganization?

    The negative impact of being disorganized isn’t limited to missed appointments or misplaced keys. Not knowing where to put things, not understanding how to plan our time, and not being able to meet our goals can contribute to depression, anxiety, anger, low self-esteem, failed careers, unhappy families, divorce, and even death. In fact, according to the Institute of Medicine, tens of thousands of people die every year, due in part to confused, mismanaged, and disorganized medical data and information.

    But, hey, if death and illness don’t inspire us to tackle those messy files, what about the cost in cold, hard cash? According to NAPO, more than one-fifth of us pay our bills late because we can’t find the necessary paperwork, and 20 percent of our annual income is spent on crisis purchases—duplicates of papers, misplaced items, rush shipping costs, credit card finance charges, and impulsive shopping for things we don’t actually need.

    When we don’t know how to manage our time and balance our lives, we become victims of a new social phenomenon called job spill. Job spill means that instead of taking a racy novel to our timeshare in Maui, we take our cell phone and laptop. And since the majority of all our medical expenses are directly stress related, it’s no surprise that job stress costs U.S. businesses billions of dollars annually.

    So getting organized can make a tangible difference in the quality of our lives. It’s liberating and empowering, reduces stress, and frees us to spend more time enjoying the people and things that are important to us.

    But don’t panic. I’m not saying you need to color code every pair of socks in your sock drawer or account for every second of your day. There are degrees of organization, and ultimately you get to decide how organized or spontaneous you want to be. This is about enhancing your life, not enslaving it. Give these simple techniques and strategies a try and then see how you feel afterwards. You might be delightfully surprised! And if you don’t want this book to end up as another piece of clutter collecting dust in your bookcase, it’s time to get started.

    Clarify

    Uncovering Your Dreams and Desires

    Suzanne was fed up with her apartment and her life. For years, she’d been living with tattered used furniture and piles of stuff everywhere. Entering the living room made her feel awful. She was single, not by choice, and battling clutter and chaos everywhere. So one night, after a pity-me-party for one, she grabbed her journal and began writing furiously. Where did she really want to go with her life? What were her deepest dreams and desires? What kind of person did she want to be? What kind of life did she truly want to have? What was preventing her from creating it? Her writing unleashed a powerful burst of I’m-not-gonna-take-it-anymore energy, and she began to clean up her act. Piles of unopened mail, faded receipts, half-knitted sweaters, and unread books were sorted, tossed, or filed away. The Salvation Army happily carted off her mismatched furniture while a brand-new elegant couch and love seat found their way into her home. Slowly, her surroundings became more serene and welcoming. Then, one day when she least expected it, the man of her dreams knocked on her front door. (It was the UPS driver who was delivering her new closet organizing system.) No longer embarrassed about her home, she invited him in for a cup of coffee. And they’ve been snuggled happily on her new couch ever

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1