Organize Anything

My friend called me three weeks after her mother's funeral and said: I don't know what to do with her shoes.

The shoes. Oh, her mum loved those shoes. They were there, that pair of worn house slippers sitting exactly where her mother had left them, beside the bed, angled slightly outward. She couldn't move them. Couldn't throw them away. Couldn't explain, even to herself, why a pair of slippers had become the place where all her grief had chosen to live.

I didn't have an answer for her. I just stayed on the phone. But I thought about that call for a long time afterward. I also thought about Joan Didion's story. About how grief is never really about what it appears to be about.

About how we spend our whole lives living alongside people, eating with them, arguing with them, taking them for granted in the specific comfortable way you only take for granted the people you cannot imagine losing, and then one day they are gone and we are left standing in their rooms, holding their ordinary things, ambushed by the sudden, unbearable weight of the unremarkable.

Plum Johnson's They Left Us Everything is the book I wish I could have handed her that Tuesday.

1. Every object you touch is a conversation with someone who can no longer speak:
Plum opens drawers and finds love letters from before her parents married; tender, nothing like the brittle distance she witnessed growing up. She finds photographs that quietly contradict the family story. Receipts that open small windows onto secrets. Her father's tools arranged with the quiet obsession of a man who needed one thing in his life to be perfectly ordered. Her mother's aprons, worn thin at the front, stiff at the ties.

Each object carries its history in its fibre, and none of them can explain themselves anymore. You realise, reading, that this isn't decluttering. It's excavation. She is digging through the sediment of two lives trying to find the truth of them, knowing the whole time that whatever she finds, she cannot ask anyone to confirm it.

2. Keeping everything isn't the same as honouring them
Plum finds dozens of her mother's aprons. Keeps one. Donates the rest. Feels like a terrible daughter for keeping only one, then feels like a terrible daughter for donating any. This is the mathematics nobody teaches you about grief: everything you keep becomes a weight you carry forward. Everything you release feels like a small act of abandonment.

There is no arrangement of keeping and releasing that doesn't cost something. Her mother wore those aprons like proof, proof she was doing it right, being what she was supposed to be. And now the proof is in garbage bags in the driveway and Plum is the one who put it there.

3. What you owe the dead versus what you owe yourself.
Do you preserve everything because throwing it away feels disrespectful? Turn their house into a museum? Or do you recognise that you cannot live your own life while curating theirs? Johnson keeps her mother's wedding ring, her father's tools, the dining room table where decades of meals and arguments happened.

My friend eventually moved the slippers. She told me weeks later, like she was confessing something. She didn't throw them away. She put them in a bag with a few other small things, a scarf, a handwritten recipe, a photograph, and kept them.

She didn't do that to hold onto her mother. She understood her mother was gone. But to hold onto the version of herself that had existed in her mother's presence. The daughter. The child. The person who had someone to call when things got hard.

That is what this book is really about. Not the house or the objects or even the mother, remarkable as she was. It is about the moment you realize that the person who remembered you longest is gone, and you are now the keeper of your own story. Fully, finally, irrevocably responsible for what it means.

Plum Johnson spent months in her mother's house, sorting through the evidence of a life, trying to understand a woman she had spent decades living beside without fully seeing. What she found, beneath the furniture and the letters and the arguments and the silence, was not emptiness.

It was everything.
It always was. We just needed them to leave before we could see it.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/4aFDuGL

We live in an increasingly casual world, but are still expected to understand formal situations - which can be really stressful. Weddings are more than just a celebration, they're a perfect place to brush up on your soft etiquette skills!

Read this week's issue of the Organize Anything Newsletter to pick up some great tips for both your next wedding, and your next formal etiquette scenario.

https://loom.ly/WkFRj5k

Wedding Etiquette Is No Longer Just About Weddings Why one of the last formal social experiences many people attend still reveals powerful lessons about confidence, communication, and human connection. Wedding season is here.

Our Organize Anything mascot Winnie has been working on her LinkedIn. I hope she's not job hunting.

Today is World Organizing Day, and it’s a reminder that organizing is about far more than tidy spaces.

It’s about reducing stress, improving focus, and creating systems that support real life.

It’s about helping people function better at home, at work, and in their relationships.

After nearly 25 years working in productivity, chronic disorganization, executive functioning, and organizing, one thing has become very clear to me:

Organized does not mean perfect.

It means creating environments, routines, and systems that allow people to live and work with more ease, clarity, confidence, and intention.

Whether you’re organizing a kitchen, a calendar, a business workflow, digital files, or even your own thinking, small changes made consistently can create enormous impact over time.

I’m proud to be part of a profession that helps people save time, reduce overwhelm, improve productivity, and often feel a little more hopeful in the process.

Professional Organizers in Canada
Institute for Challenging Disorganization
National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals APDO Association of Professional Declutterers & Organisers

Today is World Organizing Day, and it’s a reminder that organizing is about so much more than tidy spaces.

It’s about reducing stress.
Improving focus.
Creating systems that support real life.
Helping people function better at home, at work, and in their relationships.

After almost 25 years working in productivity, chronic disorganization, executive functioning, and organizing, one thing has become very clear:
organized doesn’t mean perfect.

It means creating environments, routines, and systems that help people live with more ease, clarity, confidence, and intention.

Whether you’re organizing a kitchen, a calendar, a business workflow, digital files, or your own thoughts, small changes can create enormous impact over time.

Proud to be part of a profession that helps people save time, reduce overwhelm, improve productivity, and often feel a little more hopeful in the process.

Here’s a great video celebrating the profession and the impact organizing can have on everyday life.

Watch the video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLToqciA-eE

Professional Organizers in Canada
Institute for Challenging Disorganization
National Association of Productivity and Organizing APDO Association of Professional Declutterers & Organisers

World Organizing Day 2026 - IFPOA Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYbBg0hPONC/?igsh=YzBtb252ZjY1eDRm

introducing: good will hunting (2026 remake) starring an ADHD woman, one vintage denim jacket, and absolute clarity of vision ♥️

I think one of the loneliest things about aging is how invisible people slowly become while they are still alive.

The world celebrates beginnings. Youth. Newness. But old age is often spoken about in lowered voices, as though growing older is something slightly embarrassing, a quiet decline best hidden from view.

And then along comes The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly, written by a woman in her late eighties who looks directly at aging, death, loneliness, clutter, joy, regret, and the strange miracle of still being here… and somehow manages to make the entire thing feel less frightening. Warm.

The year Margareta Magnusson was born, the life expectancy for a Swedish woman was sixty-six. Her mother died at sixty-eight, right on schedule, as though obeying time itself. She wrote this book at eighty-eight years old.

By every statistical prediction, Margareta should already have been gone long before this book. Instead, she survived her own expiration date by decades and wrote a book to help us achieve the same.

1. Aging does not steal your humanity. It reveals it.
One of the most beautiful things about this book is the way Magnusson strips aging of all the unnecessary drama people attach to it. She speaks openly about forgetting things, becoming tired more easily, losing friends, watching her body change. But there is no self-pity in her voice. No desperation to appear younger than she is.

Just honesty. And reading that honesty felt strangely emotional to me because so much of modern life feels built around pretending. Pretending we are fine. Pretending we are not scared. Pretending we are not changing. But old age, at least in Magnusson’s hands, feels like the gradual shedding of performance.

You stop trying to become impressive. You stop shaping yourself into what the world applauds. You finally become yourself without apology. And maybe that is why her words feel so freeing.

2. Curiosity is an act of courage at any age.
What keeps Magnusson vivid on the page is not wisdom exactly — it is appetite. She is still curious. Still delighted. Still willing to be surprised. And she makes the case, gently but firmly, that curiosity is not a young person's luxury. It is a choice. Available at every age, to anyone willing to stop performing certainty long enough to admit they still do not know everything. Which, it turns out, is the beginning of living well.

3. Death is not the opposite of life. Forgetting to live is.
There is a softness beneath this entire book that caught me completely off guard. Magnusson does not deny death. She talks about it openly, almost casually at times. Not because she is unafraid, but because she understands something many younger people do not yet understand:

Death was always part of the agreement. The tragedy is not that life ends. The tragedy is how many people forget to inhabit it while they are here.

And by the end of the book, I found myself looking differently at my own life. The people sitting across from me. The ordinary afternoons I rush through. The small rituals that quietly make up a human life.

Nothing had changed. And yet somehow everything felt more precious.

Magnusson is somewhere between eighty and one hundred years old. She is still painting. She is still, as far as anyone can tell, exuberantly here. That is not an accident. That is a choice she makes every morning.

And this book is her gentle, direct, deeply human invitation to start making it yourself.

If I am lucky enough to grow old, I hope I do it with this much humour, this much grace, and this much love still left in me.

BOOK: https://amzn.to/49DKrrg

Working with others involves coordinating not just your time, but theirs. Do yourself, and others, a favour by front-ending your asks. Read this newsletter to learn more.

https://loom.ly/lK1yV6Q

Front End the Ask Stop Letting Other People Derail Your Timeline We think delays come from doing too much. But often, they come from asking too late.

ADHD ✨TIME ZONES✨ ➡️ how time perception affects our ability to stay organized and accomplish tasks. ⏳ If we can’t get to something immediately, or don’t feel motivated enough by time constraints or penalties, we will push them to the Not Now. ❎ When we don’t assign a specific time to the Not Now, we do ourselves a disservice, because Future Us is still going to have to do the thing, AND it likely feels like it’s too much to accomplish all at once. 🌀Individuals managing chronic disorganization, and especially ADHD, are used to shaming and blaming themselves: when they put things off and it all comes crashing down at once, they usually shrug and think “this is my life”. ✅ Your perception of time doesn’t mean you don’t ALSO deserve a calm and organized life. You didn’t cause this to happen, and you CAN make it work differently. You just need strategies that take the way your brain operates into consideration. 🤔 If you’re looking for more information, strategies for managing your level of organization, or even professional support, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization has over two decades of experience in this field. 💻Check us out online! The best time to start getting informed is in fact, now. #ADHD #timeperception #chronicdisorganization #instituteforchallengingdisorganization #helpfordisorganization

This is a fabulous podcast with IInstitute for Challenging Disorganizationcolleague Alison Lush certified professional organizer.

I asked a professional organizer how to stop the ADHD clutter shame spiral | Sorry, I Missed This If your home has ever felt like it’s working against you, this one’s for you. Certified professional organizer Alison Lush joins the show to unpack the ADHD ...