 Welcome to 2026! Have you made your resolutions for a new you this year? Will you be hitting the gym every day? Creating a whole new spending plan? Completely organizing your entire house? You’re totally on top of everything, right? Maybe not so much. Honestly, once I clean up from the holidays and start getting back to the reality of a normal schedule, January is nearly half over! It’s natural to want to set some intentions for improvement when the calendar rolls around to a new year. What’s unrealistic is thinking that you’ll accomplish them in the first month. This year, to take on your organizing projects, make January your month to come up with a plan. TAKE TIME TO REGROUP Put away the holiday decorations, giving yourself permission to get rid of any you aren’t crazy about anymore. Put away any new gifts you received and—yes!—return, exchange, or even donate any you don’t like or won’t use. MAKE A LIST Now you can start to assess what you have. Walk through your home and make a list of spaces you’d like to organize. Take photos of your space. Photos give you distance so you can see your home with new eyes. You’ll be amazed at what you see in the pictures that your eyes just gloss over in real life! MAP OUT YOUR PLAN Once you have a list of spaces you want to organize, map out how you’ll tackle these projects. Some questions I ask my clients when we start a project are:
Most organizing projects are not urgent, so make peace with the idea that you don’t have to get organized all in one month. See what your schedule looks like, figure out how to divide the work into little chunks, then make incremental progress over the next few months. Make your plan concrete by actually scheduling the projects.. Whether you decide to organize one space per week, month, or quarter, put them on your calendar or your digital To Do list. Be sure to schedule reminders to ping you when it’s time to get to work. At the end of the year, take some “after” photos and compare them to the ones you took at the beginning of the year. Progress, not perfection, is the goal. Share your photos on my social media pages and we’ll celebrate your accomplishments together!  BONUS TIP
There's another question I pose to every new organizing client, and it's a bit of a trick question because I already know the answer. “Does your space have too much stuff or is it just that things are not properly organized?” 99% of the time, the answer is “both.” A big part of being organized is being able to pare down the excess so you have less to manage. Make it fun to let go of things with my FREE printable Pare Down 100 Things page!
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 There’s something magical about vacation mode—that blissful escape from the usual rush. Whether it’s a sun-soaked summer break or a breezy long-weekend retreat, taking time away lets you hit pause, breathe deeper, and take life at a slower pace than your everyday life allows.
However, when vacation mode ends, we all have a hard time jumping back into the swing of the daily routine. When the vacation ends, do you have a hard time jumping back into the swing of the daily routine? Is your home still disorganized with stuff you brought home from your trip and haven’t put away? Is the family having trouble getting out the door in time? You’re not alone! Let’s rebuild the rhythm of your day — one simple habit at a time — to bring calm and simplicity to your everyday life.  Life is busy and maintaining an organized space can feel like an uphill battle. Whether due to a lack of time, a significant life change, or simply an overwhelming accumulation of clutter, it’s easy to feel like you just don’t know where to start. You don’t have to muscle through it on your own. Bringing in a Certified Professional Organizer® can save your sanity and be a game-changer.
Here’s when you need to call in the experts. Chaos & Clutter What’s bugging you? Is it your jumbled kitchen drawers, overstuffed closets and bureaus, messy entryway, chaotic playroom, or piled-up home office?  I once read a book about a man whose wife divorced him because he was a total slob. He wanted to clean up his act, but he wasn’t going to spend longer than absolutely necessary on any chore. So he timed himself doing various household tasks to find the most efficient method.
With dishes, he assumed it was better to let them pile up in the sink and soak, then wash the whole load at once. To his surprise, rinsing and putting them into the dishwasher right after eating was much quicker. If you’re familiar with productivity expert David Allen’s 2-Minute Rule, this won’t surprise you. The 2-Minute Rule states that if you can do something in two minutes or less, do it now instead of putting it off for later. It’s more efficient to get little tasks out of your way than it is to let them build up into mountains of work. My client Meredith* knows this first hand. We had cleared, sorted, and organized several rooms in her home, but Meredith struggled to keep it up. The mail piled up in front of the door, dishes overflowed the sink, and hills of laundry littered the bedroom floor. While we cleared the backlog, I had Meredith time herself doing routine tasks so she’d have a realistic sense of how long things take. Meredith found that she liked the challenge of timing herself and how it turned chores into games. If it took her 18 minutes to fold laundry one time, she’d try to beat the clock and do it in 17 minutes the next time. Now she knows that putting off chores only makes them grow, so she’s more motivated to get them out of the way. Here are some tasks that you can start timing yourself doing chores. Work a few of them into your daily and weekly routines and you’ll find it’s easier to maintain your home and you’ll be less stressed  “How long will it take for me to get organized?” As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I get this question a lot.
Remember, your home didn’t get disorganized in one day, and it’s not going to get fixed in one day! How long your organizing project will take depends on 4 factors. 1. HOW QUICKLY DO YOU MAKE DECISIONS? If you need to reminisce and tell the story of each item before deciding whether or not to keep it or where to put it, the organizing process is going to go pretty slowly. If, on the other hand, you set some pre-decision guidelines, your project will pick up speed.  ✔️ Backpack ✔️ Notebooks ✔️ #2 pencils If you're just checking off the school supply list, you're missing the most important back-to-school prep that you can do for your student. I interviewed expert Student Coach Leslie Josel of Order Out of Chaos who says the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do to get ready for school is to help your student learn the organizational skill of Time Management. Students need to SEE their time so they can manage their time. If you struggle with time management and distractibility, you'll find lots of ideas in our discussion that will help you get a handle on your time. Watch the video for all the great tips and information. Send your students back to school with the supplies they really need! Use my affiliate link, https://bit.ly/KateOrderOOChaos, to access all of the great FREE resources and products (20% off through 9/30 with code PLANNER20) at Order Out of Chaos. While you're there, be sure to sign up for Leslie's free Back-to-School Webinar on August 22. If you can't watch it live, register and get the recording to watch later that week.   Did you know that 80-95% of college students procrastinate? Maybe you’re rolling your eyes and saying, “Duh, who doesn’t know that college students procrastinate?” And maybe you were one of those students.
But when you’re trapped in a procrastination cycle, it can feel as if everyone around you has it all together and you’re the only one who has, once again, gotten yourself into trouble with the doom of an approaching deadline. In her new book, How to Do It Now Because It's Not Going Away: An Expert Guide to Getting Stuff Done, Leslie Josel tackles the sticky problem of procrastination.  Paperwork, filing, taxes -- there must be some people who enjoy dealing with these, right? I’m not one of them and I suspect you aren’t either. Unfortunately, with tax day coming up next month, piles of paper are a reality for many of us.
What are the top causes of this paper pileup?
What are the solutions to these problems?
 At the beginning of every year, there are a lot of ideas rattling around in my head of new things I'd like to do and others I’d like to refresh or revise. The problem is that it can be hard to change habits and make a fresh start, right?
I don’t want to end up next December wondering where my time went and what happened to all those things I’d hoped to get done. So, I came up with a new event to help me achieve some goals.  If you’ve ever had the chance to attend a professional conference, you know what a rewarding and renewing experience it can be to learn new things and network with people in your profession from all around the world.
At this year’s conference of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals, I met organizers from as far away as China and Australia! In addition to being a geographically diverse group, the organizing professionals I met are varied in the types of organizing they do and the ways they run their businesses. Some organizers have lots of employees while others are solo-entrepreneurs. Specialities include home organizing, business organizing, photo organizing, digital organizing, time management, and more. Now that Kate Bosch Professional Organizing is in its fourth year in business, I decided to focus on conference sessions that would enable me to run my business smoothly while it grows so I can maintain the level of excellence that my clients expect. The connecting theme of these conference sessions was “process.” The emphasis was on defining and refining your processes so that what you do becomes more automated and things don’t fall through the cracks. |
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