Organization and Time Management

            Start now to streamline your life and accomplish more with the help of these current publications.

            Clearing Clutter: Physical, Mental, and Spiritual is written by Alexandra Chauran, a professional psychic intuitive who has been interviewed on National Public Radio. Her focus is not only on clearing physical clutter but on mental and spiritual clutter; she uses feng shui interior decorating, meditation exercises, and psychic guidance to accomplish this.

            The Smart Guide to Winning Back Your Time is written by Jeffrey P. Davidson, an authority on time management and work-life balance issues. Here he presents tips and techniques for better managing and restructuring daily life’s activities to gain back control of free time and time spent with loved ones.

            Driven to Distraction at Work: How to Focus and Be More Productive is written by Edward M. Hallowell, an authority on attention deficit disorder. He pinpoints why we often lose our focus at work, explaining the underlying psychological and emotional dynamics behind each example, and advises on how to train our attention.

            L’Art de la Simplicite = How to Live More with Less is written by Dominique Loreau, a French essayist who has written other books on living the simple life. She provides a step-by-step guide to decluttering one’s home, mind, and body, offering such suggestions as removing unwanted possessions, spending money on experiences, and rejecting negative relationships.

            Decluttering Your Home: Tips, Techniques & Trade Secrets is written by Geralin Thomas, an instructor to professional organizers who also appeared on the Arts & Entertainment network show Hoarders for six seasons. Get started on decluttering using her tips, techniques, and trade secrets.

            Mess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean up His House and His Act is written by Barry Yourgrau, also the author of the memoir Wearing Dad’s Head. He embarks on this project after his girlfriend issues an ultimatum. The book draws on his experiences as both a hoarder and an investigator to profile subjects ranging from professional decluttering services and anti-hoarding therapy to the medical causes of hoarding and the psychological ramifications of clutter on relationships.  

New Year's Resolutions for Time and Stress Management

            It’s the end of January, but it’s not too late to get to some of those New Year’s resolutions. Here are some books to help.

            The Weekend Makeover: Get a Brand New Life by Monday Morning, written by Jill Martin and Dana Ravich, who are also the coauthors of the New York Times bestseller I Have Nothing to Wear. In this book, women are advised on how to make, execute and apply 48-hour plans to improve their diets, workouts, beauty techniques, vacation goals, closet and clutter cleanups, and more.  
           
            Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier is written by Ari Meisel, an efficiency consultant. His guide includes ways to organizing your work and personal lives so that you can: write up lower-level tasks in an instruction book and delegate to others; use apps and computer tools to optimize workflow; create an “external brain” in the Cloud for storing projects; rely on a digitized trail not a paper one; and improve your fitness, sleep and nutrition levels to enhance your performance.
           
          10 Steps to Mastering Stress: a Lifestyle Approach, is written by David Barlow, Ronald Rapee, and Sarah Perini; all who are psychology professionals with more than twenty years of experience working with stressed and anxious individuals. Mindfulness-based stress reduction strategies are illustrated with detailed case studies from these professionals’ notebooks; useful for the general reader.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

            More than a book of “how-to” be more organized in everyday life or at work, this is a guide to coping with today’s onslaught of information based on the latest research in neuroscience. It is written by Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of cognitive psychology at McGill University and the author of two New York Times bestsellers: This is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs.

            Although humans have more neural capacity than the apes and other animals, we still are shortchanged, even with the development of writing as a successor to memory alone. Levitin demonstrates ways to organize our homes, our social worlds, and our time, relying on man-made aids such as note-taking, filing systems and computers as a supplement to memory. He instructs the reader on how to construct a fourfold table to help organize information and calculate the odds when dealing with life-changing decisions. He advises how to structure the business world with clearly defined roles for workers and planning for failure. He recommends that our children be educated in the ways of information literacy and creative thinking using approximation as a tool, and encouraged to be more understanding of others and of other points of view.

            Over ninety pages of endnotes provide a path to Levitin’s research and for further reading.

           

Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time

  Brigid Schulte, a journalist for the Washington Post and a wife and mother, has undertaken a comprehensive investigation of modern-day life and its dearth of leisure time. Primarily focusing on working parents, especially mothers, Schulte relies on a large quantity of studies and interviews with sociologists, neuroscientists and working parents to interpret how American society has arrived at this non-stop way of life. She also compares our work, nurturance and play habits with those from other cultures so that we can observe some of their more sensible ways to manage time.

  Schulte offers advice on how spouses can equally share responsibility for children and home through paid maternal and paternal child care leave, staggered work schedules, working from home, and more.

  Schulte finds that the American “ideal worker” myth and multitasking as a life ideal is keeping us from reaching our true potential. Only with meaningful “play” experiences can we expand our creative potential and make life worth living.