The Seduction of Little Stuff

Have you ever been fully committed to completing a particular organizing project but after a significant investment of time found that you had made little progress? It’s quite possible that you were led astray by the seduction of little stuff.  

Feng Shui teaches that everything has an energy. The energy of little things like pens, buttons, jewelry, scraps of paper, business cards, coins, trinkets and tiny toys and toy parts can be particularly distracting, especially when those things are out of place. It’s as though each item is talking to you, demanding your attention. Put a number of small items together and you have a conversation, or at the very least an annoying type of static. It can seem as though they are all screaming at you from all over the space you are attempting to organize. 

 

The temptation is to shut those conversations up by putting all those things away, one by one. As you might imagine, putting small things away produces very little visual progress for the time and energy invested. You’ll work your butt off and have little to show for your efforts. Silencing the little stuff is a good idea, but not by dealing with each and every item at the front end of a project. 

 

The best way to handle little things is to clump them together in a basket, box, or bag and earmark it as something to address at the end of the project. By pulling noisy little things together you quiet their energy and can focus on making real progress with larger things that will produce significant results. You have to be able to see and feel the effects of progress being made to keep yourself motivated to keep going in a process that can be overwhelming in its complexity and tiring to the mind and body.Beware of the pull of little stuff! Don’t let it seduce you and sabotage your organizing efforts!

 

Feng Shui Organizing with Debbie Bowie

Discover the profound impact that environment has on performance! Debbie Bowie, Certified Professional Organizer®, professional speaker, feng shui practitioner, and author of Rock Scissors Paper: Understanding How Environment Affects Your Performance on a Daily Basis, shows you how you can empower yourself and get the life you really want by changing the spaces in which you live and work. Her column is devoted to helping you learn how to better manage your time, tasks, thinking and stuff to have the life of your dreams!

Debbie Bowie is the owner of the Rock Scissors Paper Institute, formerly Simply Organized, a company she formed in 1998 whose mission is to help people clear a path to getting more of what they really want from life. Debbie believes the condition of our living and work environments has a direct impact on what is happening in our lives.

Debbie has spoken for audiences from ages 11 to 80 about topics as diverse as art, addiction, substance abuse prevention, organizing and feng shui. Besides her B.A. in Art History from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, an M.A. in Art History from the University of Utah, and an M.S. in Rehabilitation Counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University, she has had training in Pyramid School Feng Shui, Black Hat Sect Feng Shui, and is a graduate of the Western School of Feng Shui™. In 2007, Debbie was one of an inaugural group of professional organizers to receive the designation of Certified Professional Organizer®.

Let Debbie's guidance in Feng Shui Organizing help you increase your performance and your enjoyment of life!