Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Know Thyself
“I know myself and that is all” I don’t know who said it, but it used to hang above my mother’s desk, and it has always stuck in my head.
Self-knowledge is a beautiful thing, and self-acceptance is even lovelier. When I look back on my twenties I see that I was in a period of self-discovery, or even self-creation, especially in terms of fashion. Purchasing different clothes was a tangible way of experimenting with different personas: the uber-efficient temp and the artsy-actress. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve settled into myself; I tend to buy fewer clothes and wear them more. I’ve stopped buying clothes in the attempt to “create” a new person. As Popeye said, “I yam what I yam.”
This doesn’t only apply to clothes. When I am helping people organize I always ask them questions that reveal their level of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. It takes self-knowledge to know whether or not you are going to finish that afghan that has been sitting at the bottom of your closet for a year, and it takes self-acceptance to say, “No, I’m not, and that is okay.” It is also important to know whether you can really throw something out before you buy a replacement. If you aren’t going to be able to pitch the old item, then don’t purchase a new one. These are questions that only you know the answer to, but the trick is to ask yourself the question, and be honest when you answer.
So often the purchases we make are about who we want to be– runners, knitters, chefs– rather than who we are. I suggest that before you purchase anything, block out the time in which you are going to run or knit or cook and then buy the equipment.
Though I want a pasta maker and a slow cooker, I have committed myself to cooking imaginatively with the cookware I do have (which my husband would tell you is plenty). My time is limited and so is my money, so before I bring anything else into my home, I want to be certain that I am fully utilizing everything I own. And who do I think I’m kidding? If I am really honest, it is going to be years before I get a chance to make pasta.
And that’s okay.
Excel
Once upon a time I was completely resistant to learning Excel. Then the RSVP’s started flowing in for my wedding: one person could make the rehearsal, but not the wedding, another could do the wedding but not the rehearsal and so forth. So, much to the amusement of the boss who had been urging me to learn Excel, I sat down, figured it out, and created a spreadsheet. Not long after that, I created a pretty complicated (for me) financial spreadsheet for my father with the help of Excel for Dummies. In the years since, I have found numerous uses for this basic computer program both for my clients and myself.
As I have mentioned before, I use Excel as an adding machine when I add up my receipts at tax time. It is nice to have a hard copy, which you can’t get from a calculator, and the computer is neater than an adding machine because you can label your columns rather than hoping you remember to scrawl something on a strip of paper.
I also use an Excel spreadsheet for my Holiday Gift list. I have a column for ideas, another for actual purchases and another for amounts spent. The recipients are listed on the left. I also save the previous year’s data up, so that I can remember what I bought and what I spent. Since I’ve started doing this I have been much better at sticking to my holiday budget.
For a client, I recently created two spreadsheets: one to track subscriptions and one to track charitable contributions. Using these, she can track when a subscription began, the duration of her subscription, for and what she paid, and she can do the same for the charitable contributions. This is a good example of how to keep information in one place, so that you can find it when you need it (like when that notice arrives from Martha Stewart: Living and you could swear you just renewed) without having to dig through old check registers.
So, I no longer resist Excel, I embrace it, and perhaps it can be of use to you in the coming year too!
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