What happens when you get hundreds of Professional Organizers in a Conference together?
Well, first…
- You know everything will run on time
- You know everyone can and will take care of their own stuff
- You know everyone can find whatever they need in seconds
SO, that was the kind of weekend I had last month!
I was with “my people” and it was a blast. I came back with a renewed sense of joy for helping clients to become better organized. I haven’t stopped doing that since 1982 (yes, that’s 33 years of being a Professional Organizer). While much hasn’t changed in the years since I originally attended this conference when it began nearly 30 years ago, there were some cool new things to hear about.
Basically; folks are still struggling with having too much stuff, too little time, and being overwhelmed with regard to finding a way to get their lives in balance. Time and the use of it hasn’t changed that much – as I have noticed in my work as well, but some things have changed, and for the better!
Here are some things that have changed…but not in a good way…
- We now have more distractions and need coping methods to be able to get work done.
- Where we once had mountains of paper, now we have thousands of emails. In addition to the mountains of paper!
- Where we once put the onus of compulsive buying on women, it is now a shared problem between the genders. Men just do most of their buying online.
- Even with the advent of technology, millions of people still struggle with chaos and too much stuff burdening their lives daily.
Some good things that have come our way…
- We now have access to more information than we can possibly read, see, or hear in the course of our lifetime (if we even had that desire) so there is no excuse to not knowing where to find the answer to a problem.
- We can manage our time and calendars on the same device that houses our contacts, makes our calls, and provides our entertainment – and it can back up to a place we can retrieve lost information from.
- We can reach people and their products or services worldwide within the blink of an eye.
As a Productivity Coach, who also happens to be a Professional Organizer, it has been awesome watching the changes over the decades. However, human existence still comes down to two things: Happiness and Feeling Productive. In that order.
Are you spending your time doing things that make you happy or make you miserable? Are you struggling with the burden of so much stuff that you spend the majority of your waking hours sifting through it, tripping over it, and wondering how to even begin to get rid of it? Are you doing activities that make you feel productive and a contributing member of this world.
If there was one resounding message I took away from this conference, it is that there are thousands of people out there, like myself, who are able and willing to help those who are stuck. Finding someone to make another’s life better is a gift and those of us who do this with our time, do it because we are called to it, because we know how to make those problems go away, and love what we do. We don’t know any other way to be!
So, let me ask you…when will you be ready to make that change and start living a more organized and peaceful existence? Think it’s out of your reach? Think again. It’s one phone call.
Make the call. Decide to live a better life.
Exactly what have you been waiting for? Because like I’ve noticed, and shared, not much has changed in the past three decades…it’s unlikely it will in the next one either.