PRODUCTIVE FROM HOME

Have you ever completely zeroed out your email inbox only to look up and see that within seconds, three new emails have popped into your clutter-free space?

I mean, is it just me, or does it seem like the more you try to control your inbox, the faster it fills back up? 

For many of us, email can be a big time-suck. The relationship we have with our inbox can be a love-hate one - often causing us unnecessary stress as we try to manage it.

The good news is that email clutter doesn't have to control you. Let's look at some solutions to help you take back command of your inbox.

Tip #1: Designate Certain Times

When dealing with emails, it is super important to manage the time you spend on them. Stopping to look at every email that comes in during the day is a productivity killer. And, even worse, if you check AND reply to each email immediately as it comes in, others will get the impression that you're always available to respond right away.  

One solution is to add...

Can you count how many times you have started decluttering your office? And then quit before actually finishing the job?  

Like most of us, you probably have a myriad of reasons why you might abandon an organizing project before you've gotten to your goal. You don't know where to start, you experience decision fatigue, your idea of how much (or little) time it should take is way too ambitious. You feel overwhelmed.

Eventually, the project feels unmanageable - after all, total clean-outs can get really messy during the sorting and deciding phases. It doesn't take much to find an excuse to stop the project altogether and shove everything right back into piles, drawers, and cabinets. Just one more failed attempt at getting yourself organized and one more reason to beat yourself up.

Old Habits

Indeed, the only way to get and stay organized is by making permanent, sustainable changes to the way you treat your time and workspace. When you change your...

Like many women, putting yourself first is a habit that you don’t always make time for. As a matter of fact, you may not have practiced self-care for years – or perhaps even decades. You probably know that you should be doing it - what’s the saying? “You have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others.”  

The good news is that when you do commit to putting your own needs as a priority, it becomes so much easier to get the results you want in your life. Sure, it might feel awkward, or even indulgent, at first, but the more you practice focusing on your needs, the easier it becomes. And before you know it, you might be surpassing your monthly income goals, losing that last 10 pounds, or gaining the confidence to finally join a local networking group. When you prioritize your own needs, it allows you to shine in many areas of your life.

Therefore, to become the best version of yourself, it is crucial to regularly...

Making a commitment is the first step to achieving a goal. When you first decided that you wanted to go to college, you made the commitment to study hard, get good grades, and do your best on the SATs.

When you wanted those designer jeans in high school - that your mom wouldn’t pay for because they were too expensive - you made the commitment to find lots of babysitting jobs and save your money until you had enough to buy those gorgeous jeans yourself.

And after getting laid off from your job, you committed to search, connect, and interview until you landed a new one.

Behind every commitment, you had a compelling reason. The compelling reason was what drove you to study, babysit, and send out one more resume, even when you didn’t want to.

The compelling reason was that you really wanted to get into a competitive college.

The compelling reason was that you desperately wanted those designer jeans that everyone else had.

The...

For most of us, becoming organized and productive requires changes in various facets of our lives. It means changing things like habits, systems, and priorities. In most cases, the first and most important thing that needs to change is our mindset about being an organized person.

When trying to shift our thoughts to more productive ones, I think it’s necessary to understand how the brain works.

The Motivational Triad

In the beginning, our human brain had one primary purpose – to keep us alive.  

And to make that happen, our primitive brain focused on three essential functions: seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving as much energy as possible.  

Together, these three prongs make up what is called the Motivational Triad, and they were vital to our evolution. Together, they guided us to kill our food, escape our enemies, procreate, eat when we needed fuel, and rest to conserve our energy.

Seeking Pleasure

Our...

It’s March 27th, and you have exactly five days to get all of your business receipts and paperwork to your tax accountant before her last and final deadline that she requires for a guarantee that your taxes will be filed on time.   

You walk into your office and utter a sigh of defeat as you glance around at the disorganized piles on your desk and credenza. You don’t even want to look inside the file drawers where you have been haphazardly shoving even more papers and folders in feeble attempts to clear a little space on your desk so that you could work.  

The truth is, you haven’t actually worked in your office for weeks. As a result, you’ve migrated your workspace and the mess that goes with it, to the dining room table.  

Now, faced with the seemingly impossible task of getting all you sh*t together to send to your accountant, you go right to beating yourself up: 

“I am a disorganized...

Negative emotions are a vital part of the human experience. Nobody in the world feels good all the time.

In our culture, we welcome certain negative emotions. Grief is one example of that. For instance, we don't want to feel good and happy immediately after someone we love passes away. We understand that grief is an integral part of the healing process when experiencing that kind of loss, so we willingly embrace bad feelings such as sadness or despair during that period.

However, we don't often welcome other negative emotions that are part of our daily experience. For example, we typically don't like feeling bored, angry, lonely, insecure, disappointed, or envious.

When we feel negative emotions, there are a few different ways that we can respond. But, when we don't deal with them in a healthy, productive way, we find ourselves living with results that cause problems in our lives. Those negative responses would be to resist, react to,...

In my marriage, I am the partner who has always taken care of our family’s finances and budget - paying the bills, balancing the accounts, monitoring spending and saving, etc. It just made sense - I was the one at home, running the household for many months at a time while my husband deployed with the Navy. Even though I wasn’t bringing the money in, I was the one who spent it most of the time.

My efficiency with this particular chore ebbed and flowed over the years. During specific periods, I would be highly organized with balancing the checkbook (you know, back then, when we kept written records of this stuff:). I paid bills on time (even early) and always had an accurate idea of how much money was in our checking and savings accounts. Finances were easy during those times.

But then suddenly, I would find myself in a more stressful stage of life - maybe my husband was deployed, and two of my daughters had gotten the flu. Or perhaps the mini-van needed new...

I’ve mentioned before that changing your thoughts and beliefs around being productive is just as important as setting up systems and schedules to keep the spaces around you and your mind organized. 

Managing your mind is key to achieving any result you wish to create in your life – I promise!   

Fortunately, there’s a super easy exercise that can help you get clarity around why you think and believe what you do.  It’s called a “thought download.”   

To do a thought download, take a sheet of paper and spend the next 5-10 minutes writing down all your thoughts that are at the forefront of your mind.  I like to think of it as a brain dump.  Be sure to get everything out – and don’t edit yourself.  You will be the only person who sees the paper.   

...

In this blog post, I taught you about the difference between thoughts and circumstances.    At the end of the article, I mentioned that this understanding was a powerful step in managing your mind around creating and maintaining an organized life. 

Why is this skill so powerful? 

It’s because when you are able to determine the differences between circumstances and your thoughts, it’s easier to really focus on the thoughts that float through your brain all day long.   

Becoming super aware of your thinking then makes it much easier to understand how it’s not the circumstances in your life that create your problems, but that it’s actually your thoughts about those circumstances that create them. 

Eventually, it becomes apparent that the problems in your life are actually “thought problems.”  You can stop...