Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy, will speak to seniors at the Fonteno Senior Center about organizing paper to get ready for tax time.
Clutter can be both a symptom and a cause of our inability to let go of the past and move forward. At the January 2016 meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup, Gayle Goddard, professional organizer and owner of The Clutter Fairy, will examine how our stuff can anchor us to unproductive habits instead of supporting our ever-evolving lives. We’ll talk about how to “set an expiration date” on clutter to open up space for new possibilities in 2016.
The Clutter Fairy invites you to visit Ikea Houston for NAPO Houston’s 2016 GO Month event on Saturday, January 23, 2016. Get your shredding done for free while you watch, courtesy of Southern Shred!
The key cause of the pileup is that paper never stops coming—not a day goes by that we don’t collect more junk mail, bills, receipts, magazines, invitations, advertisements, and so on. For our December 2015 meetup, we’ll examine the habits and beliefs that contribute to paper clutter. We’ll offer ideas to help you stem the tide of incoming paper, clear your backlog, and build a system to keep from ever falling behind again.
The September 2015 meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup talked about how the lines between you and your stuff get blurred in the first place, and how to start seeing the boundaries clearly again.
It’s easy to look at our own collections through filters of memory and nostalgia and to rationalize our attachments until our spaces are overflowing with the physical reminders of our pasts. Our August meetup will examine the rationalizations we use to hold on to things that we should logically let go. We’ll suggest an approach to decision-making that balances sentimental value with our real-world conditions of time, space, and resources.
Do you cringe when you look at—or even think about—your list of things to do? Does your list shame you for what you haven’t accomplished instead of helping and motivating you to manage your time and tasks? It’s easy to forget that the to-do list is supposed to work for you, not vice versa.
At our July meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group, we’ll explore sources of task-management resistance. We’ll talk about how to rethink your list as a tool for success instead of a catalog of failures.
For many of us, summer means travel, and travel brings a special kind of stress. You shove everything you need into luggage that never seems quite large enough and leave behind familiar surroundings and routines. In pursuit of rest, relaxation, and time with family and friends, we have to accept a certain amount of chaos—or do we?
At our June 2015 meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group, we’ll talk about ways to lighten your load and your stress level by organizing and “right-sizing” travel preparations.
Sooner or later, most of us find ourselves dealing with the stuff left behind by loved ones. Our Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group leader, Gayle Goddard, is deep in the process of handling her mother’s estate right now. For our May 2015 meetup, she’ll offer some of the lessons she’s learned—or relearned—from the experience of being both the organizer and the client on this emotionally challenging project. She’ll share her first-hand experiences and suggest ways to make this process easier for yourself, your spouse, your parents, and your children or other loved ones.
For the April 2015 meeting of the Houston Clutter Coaching Meetup Group, we return to the theme of psychological roots of clutter. We’ll explore the perception of value—how we assign value to our stuff or our information, and why our notions of perceived value create problems in our physical surroundings. We’ll examine value-based emotional responses and patterns of thinking that sabotage our ability to get or stay organized.
