Hi There! Today I’m going to talk to you about a way I’ve discovered to make organizing fun, and it involves a person I admire very much— Gretchen Rubin. She is the bestselling author of many books, most notably ‘The Happiness Project’ and ‘Outer Order Inner Calm.’ I’ve been following her blog and reading her books for years! Lately I love her more than usual because I’m participating in what she calls the ‘30 day Outer Order Inner Calm SMS Challenge,’ and it is SO much fun!! Here’s what it involves:
Every day, at 9 am on the dot, I get an audio message via text from Gretchen with an organizing task I need to do. The task is NOT hard— and it is usually pretty quick to tackle. When I’m done I text her back a code word and then she congratulates me with a cute meme, like animated gold stars, high fives. or applause. I’m on day 16 of the challenge, and I can’t WAIT for her 9 am texts each day!
Here’s a task example from the challenge: “Day 11: Your challenge today is to tackle one shelf or drawer to organize. Seems small but progress is progress! Reply SHELF when you’re done.” She accompanies the text with an audio clip of her saying something motivational about the task.
I always think of myself as pretty organized, but these tasks have shown me I have WORK to do! So let me share what I did in response to the Day 11 text: here’s the before of my drawer, which is in my kitchen:
Ugh! How could I have LIVED with this for so long? It’s like I became blind to the mess. So here’s the after:
Isn’t that SUCH an improvement? To get it looking like this I pulled everything out of the drawer onto the center island:
I threw away a bunch of stuff, sorted the remainder into categories and then put it all back in the drawer. It was so easy to do I decided to tackle a second drawer:
When I was done organizing these drawers I texted back the code word SHELF, and Gretchen responded with a ‘Great Job!’ and an ‘Office’ high-five meme:
Isn’t that original and fun? I feel like I’m on ‘Mission Impossible’ with the audio texts and code words, except that my mission is NOT impossible— in fact it is VERY possible!! And I promise your phone won’t self-destruct . . . well at least mine hasn’t yet!! Anyway, it holds me accountable, it’s not hard to do, and after 30 days I will have completed 30 organizing tasks!! It’s SO motivating. And the results give me momentum to tackle other areas of the kitchen too, which I will share in a future post.
There is a small fee, $14.95, to participate in Gretchen’s OOIC (Outer Order Inner Calm) 30 day SMS challenge— but it’s SO worth it. (I don’t get a commission for recommending, I just want to share because it’s fun and motivating). If you’re interested, click HERE.
I hope you enjoyed this blogpost. If you did, please subscribe to my blog. I PROMISE not to spam you, EVER.
Next week I’m not going to be posting because our family is taking a vacation to Newport Beach. Whoohoo!! So I’ll see you in two weeks. Enjoy the cooler weather!!
xoxo
Cheri