Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Peter Walsh - Meeting an organising legend!


I was honored to be invited to a breakfast yesterday hosted by Dymo and Corporate Express, for National Organising Week. The guest speaker was Oprah's Organising Guru - Peter Walsh.

I'd like to share some quotes from Peter which I thought were absolute gems!

1) The biggest friend of clutter is the term 'later'.
2) If you start something, finish it.

He spoke a lot about 'finishing the cycle', meaning whatever the task is, do it to completion. If you're doing the dishes, wash them, dry them and put them away. When you get home and change out of your work/day clothes, put them in the hamper. It seems like a simple concept, but how many of you take your clothes off and leave them on the floor saying to yourself 'I'll put that away in a minute'. If you just finish the cycle you can move on to the next thing and you're not surrounding yourself with clutter.
Peter also spoke about not multi-tasking which follows on from what I just wrote about. The ideal is to focus on the task at hand and finish it. If you're trying to do several things at once, they usually don't get done as well and you're extremely stressed out.

Another great piece of advice is that the best time to organise your day is the 10 minutes before bed the night before. Write your to-do list for the following day just before bed. This will help you priorotise better and also sleep better.