Excerpt from Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It means mastering strategies to speed up and simplify the organizing process, so you are sure to reach the finish line, not quit halfway there.

And it means organizing before buying any fancy new Storage units or snazzy containers, so that your purchases will have meaning and be a perfect match for your particular needs.

Organizing from the inside out feels counterintuitive. It's not natural to stop and reflect when disorganization is at its peak. The impulse is to just dive in and attack. But if you invest a little time doing some thinking and analysis first, you will be able to zero in on just the right solution for you.

I once had a client named Carol. At first glance, she was an amazingly accomplished woman. She headed a high-profile arts organization and managed a staff of seven. She'd circulate at cocktail parties attended by important donors and celebrities, winning over one after another with perfect poise and confidence. She was dynamic, charming, and articulate. In the spotlight, she was brilliant, but behind the scenes her professional life was out of control.

Buried under an avalanche of letters, faxes, and e-mail from all those she had charmed, Carol was surrounded by a mountain of unanswered correspondence. With her very hectic and public schedule, she rarely made time to go through the mail, and often it went unopened for months. Grants were lost and opportunities to work with important artists went to other institutions.

Carol tried endless solutions to get and keep herself on track. All of them seemed quite logical: having her secretary open all the mail for her and type a summary sheet of the day's correspondence; sorting the mail into folders marked Extremely Urgent, Very Important, Important--Can Wait, and Less Important--FYI; holding calls for a half hour every morning to go through the mail. Unfortunately, none of these "solutions" worked because the problem was being approached from the outside in.

When Carol called me, I began by talking to her about how she felt about her mail, and why she thought she wasn't taking care of it the way she should. I mentioned that she seemed to be at her best face-to-face. She agreed, telling me that she thrived on human interaction, ideas, and problem solving. She found dealing with written communication painfully boring and isolating. Carol clearly needed a new system for dealing with correspondence--one that appealed to her personality, style, and need for human contact.

I began by encouraging Carol to make a mental shift: to begin viewing those mountains of letters, faxes, and e-mail messages not as paper but as real people who had come into her office with problems they needed her to solve.

I then suggested that she change the name of the time she spent dealing with correspondence from "the mail hour" to "the decision hour." This simple name change had an immediate impact on her because it sparked her love of ideas and action.

Finally, to counteract her feeling of isolation, I suggested her secretary stay with her as she worked through the day's correspondence. Carol could dictate replies, bounce ideas off her secretary, and have the kind of give-and-take that made her excited to be working.

Carol's relationship to correspondence changed completely. What had been a chore became energizing and gratifying, all because she had become organized from the inside out.



EASY AS 1-2-3

Organizing from the inside out is a method that accommodates your personality, needs, situation, and goals rather than forces you to change. By following these three straightforward but very important steps you will be able to meet any of life's organizing challenges and achieve lasting success:

Analyze: Step back to take stock of your current situation by defining where you are, where you are going, what's holding you back, and why it's important to get there.