Thank you for joining me for another twelve months of Extra Organised. The blog has grown in content and readership during 2012 and I’m happy to say I’ve mostly been able to keep up with my posting schedule. It makes it easier that I love to write about organising! It’s also proved to be excellent writing practice, particularly in helping me to write regularly.
I write both to share ideas with you and to research them myself. I don’t want you to think I’m perfectly organised because I’m not :) Even though I'm passionate about organising and spend regular time on it, I struggle with the pressures of life just as much as we all do. Actually, I think that's where targeted organising can help us the most.
I chose the name for the blog not because I’m more organised than anyone else, but because after years of researching and applying ideas, I’ve figured out that to be really organised we need a different approach—one that is pared right back and highly focused on meeting our current needs and interests, rather than the ones we had in the past or the ones we fantasise about.
By closely examining what I do and how much time it takes, I’ve learned intimately that there really is only time for the important stuff, which can be so easily crowded out by many other things—this is clutter and it’s not only physical. It can take the form of stuff we don’t use or like, unhelpful thinking, striving for others’ expectations over our own, having unrealistic expectations, bad habits or addictions, not figuring out what we are passionate about, or simply saying yes to too much.
Organising well ironically sometimes flies in the face of traditional organising ideas, and brings in aspects of minimalism, mindfulness, and simple living. That’s why I find it such an exciting area to research, test, and write about. It's a worthwhile activity to figure out our values and passions and slowly bring our lives into alignment with them, while letting go of the rest. It’s a deeply personal journey and one that we’ll never get to the end of on this earth, but it's a worthwhile one.
To each of you and your families, I pray you have a peaceful Christmas and New Year.
In case you missed it, in October I released the free download An Extra Organised Year which summarised the first twelve months of the blog as an actionable weekly guide.
Take care, and I look forward to sharing Extra Organised ideas with you again in 2013.
