Faux Organizing

What do you do when you have just recovered from a bout of illness, clutter has gotten out of hand, AND you are expecting guests for dinner? How about some faux organizing accompanied by some light topical cleaning?

Faux organizing is the term we use for making a defined space look like it is not cluttered, even though there may be lots of chaos under the surface. The way to achieve it is to contain, cover and stow.

Contain those things that are scattered all over the place. For instance, mail my have accumulated on a counter and can be put in a basket on a shelf until after the party. Kids’ toys can be put in a plastic bin in the corner of the family room. Wayward plants can be grouped on a tray.

Cover by shutting all cabinet doors; place other loose items like cosmetics, jewelry, and other miscellaneous items in attractive stackable boxes.

Stow larger items in a closet or room that will not be seen by the guests. I have never met anyone who did not have a secret space they occasionally used for this purpose.

Then, do some basic cleaning. Make sure to dust surfaces and, if necessary, vacuum floors in the rooms that will be used for the gathering. Invest some time in thoroughly cleaning surfaces in the kitchen and bathroom. Sanitize the sinks and toilet bowls.

This routine takes about an hour to complete in an average house. The real trick is to recognize it for what it is—an emergency measure. When the guests leave and your energy returns, take the time to do it right, and find the right system to manage the mail, the toys and whatever else you had to hide.

A space that stays really organized is always easier to put back in order after brief lapses.

Beverly and Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Tips for Managing Holiday Gatherings

Getting together with friends and family is one of the joys of the season. It can also be a trial when personalities clash or the event arrives before you are ready. Whether you are hosting the gathering or attending it, here are a few tips to lessen the stress.

Deciding what to wear is one of the great stressors for gals who often plan the wardrobe for the whole family. Make that decision long before the day of the event and hang the entire cleaned and pressed outfit, including underwear and accessories, on one hanger. When it is time to dress, there is no second-guessing, the right underwear is not in the dirty clothes hamper, and you do not have to scramble to find the missing snowflake earring.

When giving a party, be ready a half an hour early. I have never hosted a party when someone did not arrive before the stated start time. If it is a dinner party, have a few help-yourself appetizers set out for the early arrivals to nosh on while you put the finishing touches on the meal and table setting.

Be prepared for an unexpected guest by having a place setting in reserve and a plan in your head for where you will seat the extra guest. Under the best circumstances, no unexpected visitor will show up, but if one does you are prepared and cool as a cucumber as you squeeze him in next to Grandpa.

A hostess gift is a nice gesture, but do not expect the hostess to set out your home baked goods or wine. It is her choice whether to share your gift or save it to enjoy later. I saw a party brought to a standstill last year because a guest insisted that everyone taste his homemade snickerdoodles and peppermint Schnapps, even though the party had a carefully planned Felice Navidad theme. As a guest, follow the host’s lead and let it go his way. As a host, just say “ Thank you for the lovely gift. I am going to certainly enjoy this later.”

Steer clear of confrontation by having a few stock phrases for irritating and disagreeable encounters. Some of them are: “ I can’t say I agree, but what an interesting idea.” or “ Let’s talk about this another time” or “Look, there is Leo. I have been looking for him. Excuse me.” Then go somewhere else quickly.

Planning and preparation are the first to steps to organizing and they are good ways to take stress out of holiday gatherings.

Have a terrific holiday and may all your gatherings be happy ones.

Beverly and Kristen
www.KeyTransition.net

Make Room for Love

“I moved out of my parent’s house so I could meet people and find a guy, but I am ashamed to bring anybody into this mess,” the young professional woman lamented as her eyes swept around her cluttered living room. After six months in her condominium, it was littered with a load of work papers, magazines and an assortment of shoes. Mail was stacked up on the table in the entryway and the view of the kitchen revealed dishes stacked in the sink and cartons on the counter. A tour of the bathroom and bedroom revealed they were in similar disarray. The spare bedroom had turned into storage space for everything that had not yet been put away. There were still unpacked boxes from her move-in.

“ I work hard and when I get home, I just crash,” she told me.

The first step for this client was finding a balance between work and personal life-a hard thing to do when she is trying to impress her boss and hang on to her job. She was able to identify four hours a week she could devote to gaining control of her environment without affecting work performance. She also identified four hours a week to devote to herself and fun things. Now she was ready to tackle the task of getting her home in shape.


The first step was to determine what was really important to her. She decided that she wanted to be able to invite some friends over for an informal gathering. She set a goal for two months to have her space in shape in order to send the invitations. That meant she had to organize the entryway, the living room and the bathroom. She also had to clean up the kitchen which could be viewed from the living area.

For the entryway we set up a mail station using attractive baskets with lids that allowed for the sorting of mail on the spot. One basket was for bills and other mail that needed immediate attention. The other was for mail that could be handled at her leisure. If that basket got full, it needed to be dealt with immediately to make room for the next bunch of mail. This system allowed bills to get paid on time and put a physical limit on how much mail could pile up.

The clutter culprits in the living room were paper, magazines and shoes. She confessed to taking off her shoes at the door and neglecting to tote them upstairs to the bedroom for several days, or weeks. To deal with the shoe problem she bought a hall bench that contained a hidden shoe rack in the base. She put her favorite shoes here so she could pick them up and put them away on her way in and out of the house. She also purchased a step basket that fit on the stairs and allowed her to drop off things that she wanted to carry upstairs on her next trip.

She already had a magazine rack that she didn’t use. It was too small and was not near the sofa where she usually did her reading. A large flat basket on the bottom shelf of the coffee table helped corral the periodicals and gave the appearance of order.

She did her paperwork all over the house, an apt metaphor for work taking over her life. We identified a corner of the room for work purposes and organized all work materials in an attractive trunk that had been in the storage room since her move. She could still review projects sitting on her couch or at the dining table, but they went in her briefcase or in the trunk after review.

The kitchen was a matter of cleanup and adopting new habits of washing dishes at least once a day, since she had no dishwasher. Moving utensil and dish storage nearer to the sink made the job a little easier. A larger trash can with a lid helped minimize used containers on the counter and kept garbage out of sight.

The bathroom suffered from a lack of storage space for toiletries and makeup so these items ended up on the limited counter space. Under sink storage shelves and shower shelves helped provide additional space for toiletries. Makeup was sorted and outdated and unused items were discarded. What was left was stored in the medicine cabinet using plastic and magnetic containers.

She had a successful gathering for her friends and has now started working on upstairs space. Her goal is to have that done in two more months. It seems there is a special guy in the picture and she needs to make room for love.

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

READY FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Ready or not, here they come! The Holidays are here. Chanukah has begun, Christmas arrives in a few days and the New Year will be here right after that. If you are one of the lucky ones who have everything done and you are just hanging around waiting to welcome guests and attend the gatherings, good for you! If you are like most of the rest of us, and still have a few things left to do, take a deep breath and decide what is important.

Priority setting is a fundamental tool for getting organized and staying organized. Knowing what is essential to accomplish keeps us focused and on task. To use this tool to maintain calm during the holidays, get a piece of paper or index card and write down the five most important things for you to accomplish. It might be prepare dinner, pick up Aunt Tilly at the airport, help Santa build a toy. At the top of that list put “Enjoy the festivities.” Once you have established these priorities avoid the traps that will keep you from accomplishing them.

Don’t get distracted by other urgent tasks. They might be important, but they are not the MOST important. Take care of the priorities first.

Don’t let others change your priorities to meet their own goals. You want to be helpful, but not at the risk of not getting done what you need to get done.

Don’t be afraid to change your priorities as you evaluate new things that develop. The difference is that YOU are the one deciding what is important to you.

Don’t pick up the slack for other’s responsibilities. It is a sure way to end up harried and resentful that you shortchanged your own priorities.

Refer back often to priority number one, “Enjoy the festivities.” Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. The ultimate goal is to experience the love and joy that the season brings.

Happy holidays!

Beverly & Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Organizing Meals

During the past week, three different people have talked to me about the difficulty they have getting all the dishes for a meal ready at the same time. One was talking about hosting a large dinner party and the other two were lamenting their inability to get a meal on the table for their families.

There are a few guiding principles for timing a meal so that the various items are ready to serve at the same time.

The first is planning. You know what you plan to serve and you have all the necessary ingredients available. Another aspect of planning is to consider the complexity of the menu and what items may be prepared ahead of time. For instance a salad may be put together prior to preparing a meal or while the roast rests prior to carving. A wonderful frozen desert can be made a day prior and kept in the freezer. Planning a mix of hot and cold dishes gives the cook more flexibility in preparing the meal

The second principle is preparation. Some sauces, deserts and sidedishes can be prepared prior to cook time. Caprese salad is an old stand-by that improves with some wait time prior to serving. Slicing, dicing and peeling of all items is best done prior to beginning to combine the items for cooking. Some exceptions apply of course. If you are cooking a turkey, for instance, you have time after you put the bird in the oven to peel potatoes or cut up squash. When in doubt, have every thing sliced, diced and ready to go before beginning cooking.

The third principle is execution and that is where timing comes in. If you are fixing a simple meal of chicken, asparagus and potato, you might consider that each of them takes the following times to cook:
Chicken: 25 minutes
Potatoes: 30 minutes
Asparagus: 12 minutes
Therefore, you start the potatoes first, the chicken five minutes after that and the asparagus thirteen minutes after the chicken. They should all be ready at the same time.

The fourth principle is serving. You may choose to plate the meal for each individual or you can serve it family style allowing your family or guests to pass the serving plates and help themselves. You could also serve buffet style by setting the food in an area away from the table and open for self-service. Simple buffets make serving easy, especially for a large group.

The last principle is enjoying yourself. Folks don’t mind if they have to wait a few minutes for the lasagna to cool. They are there for the pleasure of your company.

Getting yourself organized prior to the meal allows you to relax and have a little fun.

Beverly and Kristen
www.KeyTransitions.net

Organizing Events

This is the season for events. Invitations to golf tournaments, charity fundraisers, weddings and (especially in our families) birthdays arrive in the mail. The planning and execution of events takes a lot of organization. Even when all plans have been carefully made and the execution is skillfully done, there is a lot of room for things to go differently than planned. Notice I did not say they could go wrong-just differently than you planned. The difference is the line between organized and delusional.

There are just some things that are out of the organizers personal control. The most obvious is the weather. A few week ago a friend's daughter got married at a lovely ceremony that was planned beside the river. Unfortunately, that was the weekend in April that we experienced gale force winds and unseasonable snow flurries. Even though the planner had arranged for tents and heaters, the wedding had to be held indoors. A change in plans had to be improvised just hours before the wedding. It was still a lovely wedding and pictures of the couple surrounded by falling snow will be the catalyst for the sharing of warm memories.

That led us to reminisce about Kristen's wedding seven years ago. We had planned events together in the past, but this was the most elaborate. It was planned oceanside in sunny September until Hurricane Dennis did an about face and slammed up the coast at ceremony time. We had meticulously planned the seating of family and friends on the expansive deck and the reception tents for the 500 expected guests were up and waiting for the caterers to fill them with the food and beverage stations. An auspicious spot had been selected for the sandcastle wedding cake and mounds of seashell ornaments and mesh wrapped treasure chests were ready as favors for the crowd. A special kite with names of deceased family members was set to fly above the site and beautiful flowered topiaries were waiting to be placed on the table rounds. It was shaping up perfectly, until high winds foiled the kite flying efforts of the staff and all the strong men in the wedding party. Then the wind driven rain pummeled and flooded the tents. The steel drum band that was to provide the wedding music did not show up. (Hours later I got a call from them saying that flooding and car trouble prevented them getting to the resort and "What can we do? God is God!") Then the electric power went off and by some miracle our site was the only spot for miles that gained power before the ceremony.

We had a plan B for inclement weather but this went beyond the expected. If we recounted everything that we modified to enable the event to happen on schedule it would take much too long to write and for others to read. Suffice it to say, the wedding still took place and the guests were unaware of the many adjustments that had to be made in the hours and minutes before the bride walked down the aisle. Everyone had a great time and the bride and groom survived to look back on the adventure with amusement.

Here are a few principles that we use for event planning that help us get through the things beyond our control:

List everything that needs to occur to make the event happen. Include everything you can think of no matter how mundane or trivial. We often use brainstorming to come up with lists for unique events.

Develop a time line for the tasks. For instance selecting and reserving the site and scheduling the officiator for the ceremony needs to occur before you order invitations. If there is a particular entertainer, caterer or florist you want to use, you should also reserve their services before printing invitations.

Develop a contact list for all the services you schedule and contract. Include names, addresses, telephone numbers and services you expect to receive.

Develop a checklist for completion of tasks leading up to the event.

Develop a check list and time line for completion for the day of the event

Review the plans and determine what may happen to change your plans. What if the clown is late? What if the band does not show? What if the deejay's equipment is incompatible with the electrical set up? (We know that this should not happen because it is checked out before the event day, but personal experience tells us that the deejay can bring one set-up for the check and arrive with another at the event.)

Develop contingencies for those possibilities. Even if something happens that you did not expect, you have had an exercise in possibility thinking that enables you to tackle the new problem with alacrity.

Finally, remember the event is planned for folks to enjoy themselves. As long as that happens, the event is a success. Have fun!

Beverly and Kristen
www.keytransitions.net