You always ask me what my favorite organizing products are:  Which bins, containers, gadgets and tools I love the most to help you tame the chaos in your home, office and life.  To fill this need, I'm collaborating with an exciting new website called OpenSky- a shopping site that spreads the word about great products recommended by the experts! Each week I’ll hand-pick one special favorite that I know everyone will love and send you an email with info on the product-- including the inside scoop on why I love it (and how to use it!).  As a bonus, OpenSky and I will get it for you at the ultimate VIP price, up to 50% off!   Each discount will be available for a special limited time offer that you can only get if you follow me on OpenSky.  Signing up is totally FREE!

Struggles between parents and children about getting organized are common, but altogether unnecessary.   Use the following strategies to avoid battles, while helping your child become an organizing whiz:

Have you ever felt stuck?  Like there’s something more, but you don’t know what it is? You might feel tongue-tied, indecisive and paralyzed. When something stops working, we are pulled in two different directions: one is to hold onto and fix the broken and familiar, the other is to make a fresh start.

We’ve all been there one time or another.

Often this feeling of paralysis is spurred by a natural life transition (like graduation, marriage, a new baby or a new job), an unanticipated change (the sudden loss of a loved one, a divorce, a job loss or move), or simply an inner drive for self-fulfillment and a need to shake things up.

Does your organized home office look more like a corporate cubicle than an energizing environment where you track your household information?  It is easy for an organized space to feel sterile when it isn’t created around your vibrant personality.  When you get organized from the inside out, your space should be a reflection of who you are and a catalyst for your creativity. 

Most people regard piles of paper, an overstuffed closet and boxes in the attic as nothing more than your regular old run-of-the-mill junk. If these items inhabit your space, it’s merely more evidence that you are indeed a packrat – a hopeless, helpless collector of stuff. But if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a clutter crusade, you know how hurtful (and intimidating) it can feel when people pressure you to trash it all.   

The holidays are coming, and you dream of filling your home with the aroma of baking cookies, simmering wassail and roasted goose. But 30 frustrating minutes of clattering pots later, with no sign of the roasting pan or cooling racks in sight, you’re already reaching for the catering menus. 

Stop! Before you throw in the dish towel, seize this holiday opportunity to create an efficient kitchen that encourages cooking and makes clean-up a piece of cake. Invest a mere 6-8 hours organizing now, and you’ll reap the benefits all year long. 

It takes different people different amounts of time to do the identical task.

Once you know you how long it takes you to do something, you may decide it’s a better use of the world’s resources to have someone else do a certain task. A “do-it-all-yourself” mentality can be a big time trap.

Good time managers calculate how long things take and build the time they need into their schedules. This is not a mysterious talent that some people are born with and you lack. It’s a simple skill anyone can learn.

Good time managers make a conscious decision to figure out how long a task will take. They simply ask themselves that question. This is a big missing link for the rest of us who say, “Okay, I’m going to do these twelve things tomorrow,” without ever pausing to consider how long each task will take.

It’s November. And along with cold weather and shopping trips, this is the month when all the parties begin. When time is tight and you have guests coming for a party you don’t want to exhaust or stress yourself by trying to make your house perfect.  But you do want your home to be welcoming, and to feel confident having people over. The best way to achieve that is to focus on spot organizing key areas of your home which your guests are most likely to see—each area should take no more than 30-60 minutes to get in shape.

Nothing piles up faster than the paper in our lives, nor is anything more satisfying to clean out. Make it easier on yourself by following a few simply rules to do a quick-sort and weed. Purging Paper: Speed up the process by getting a shredder and follow these simple rules.

With the school year starting, you want your child to be successful from the beginning and your child’s bedroom is the best place to start. Create a space for everything in the room (e.g. a spot for reading, homework, creative arts, dressing/clothes, etc) and make sure that the space is defined and easy to identify. It’s important to remember that you are helping your child, follow his or her lead and what makes sense to them.

Struggles between parents and children about getting organized are common, but altogether unnecessary.

Between homework, after-school activities, friends, family, cleaning, errands and a zillion other events competing for your time, yours and your child’s life can be shockingly full of activity. It’s not easy fitting it all in, but you’d be surprised how much you can get done when you learn to organize your time.

Bill paying is not for the faint hearted -- who wants to part with their money? Sometimes it's dread--do I have enough in the bank? Complicating matters, bills have a highly erratic personality, arriving at various times throughout the month, offering staggered due dates and a myriad of payment options. 

Regardless of income, honest folk have been known to come home to no lights, or destroy their credit because they can’t keep track of dates and account balances. Try explaining that to the cable company! 

Swashbuckle the onslaught with a simple, reliable system that minimizes the torture and maximizes your confidence in the information you are working from....

There is nothing more frustrating or disheartening about organizing than investing hours and hours of effort but seeing absolutely no improvement in your space. This kind of discouraging experience is really the result of poor organizing techniques, which are easily fixable. To see visible, dramatic results each time you work, avoid common mistakes such as “Zigzag Organizing.”

No matter where I go in the world, or who I’m working with, everyone feels overwhelmed:  we live in a too much to do, not enough time, blackberry saddled, can’t turn off, can’t quite squeeze it all in world.  That applies equally to the philanthropist in New York trying to change the world, to the Midwest professor balancing work and kids, to the author (Fannie Flagg) preparing for a move, to the entrepreneur in Stockholm trying to take control over her business.

This week on CBS Sunday Morning, I had the privilege of working alongside organizer Fern Silvernagle to help contributor Nancy Giles, have an “aha moment” in taming the chaos in her house.  As she confronted the mountains of clutter that had overtaken her hallway closet, she observed that “organizing is a process…it’s a lot like therapy.”  It was fun to work with Fern, a protégé of my inside out method, who believes in helping people find their own motivation for clearing out the chaos.

I’ve always been viewed as more of a clutter whisperer, than a clutter buster.  I don’t advocate the “tough love” approaches  that make for entertaining TV—or that people hear from genuinely well meaning friends, family, and even from inside their own heads: “Don’t think, don’t hesitate, get rid of that junk!  Come on….it’s time to move on! What good is that stuff doing you?!  Throw it all away!”   ........

Several years ago Life Magazine conducted the Great American Weekend Study, and discovered that 47% of the people surveyed wait until Thursday night or later to plan their weekends.  I don’t even need to tell you what happens when we wait too long to plan---the weekend slips through our fingers and before we know it’s Sunday night, and we didn’t do anything fun or refreshing....