From the Desk of Janet Barclay

Wow, I can’t believe we’ve reached the end of summer. Yes, I know summer doesn’t officially end until September 21st, but we all know that Labour Day weekend and back-to-school are the true signs that summer is over. Time sure does fly when you’re busy!

Speaking of busy, I’d like to take some time out to talk about someone who is one of the busiest people I know! Wendy Hollick is a dear friend as well as one of my clients, and I’ve also had the opportunity to work with her on various organizing projects and seminars. Wendy operates two businesses, NEAT SPACES Professional Organizing Service and It’s a Girl Thing Spa Birthday Parties, as well as managing a family of five, so she’s very qualified to be helping others to manage their family schedules and homes!

Wendy has been nominated for the SavvyMom Mompreneur of the Year Award, and I’d love to see her win it! You can learn more about Wendy and show your support by voting for her.

Happy Long Weekend!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may remember reading about the problems I was having with my Article Dashboard site. It has taken a while, but with the help of my assistant, Sylvie, I’m happy to announce that OrganizedArticles.com has now been converted to a blog. It will be easy for me to maintain and easier for you to find the information you’re looking for, because it’s no longer restricted to one category per article. Although you can no longer submit your articles online, I am still very happy to receive them by email, and will post any that meet the submission guidelines. In fact, the majority of articles on OrganizedArticles.com were written by other people, including well-known authors such as Barbara Hemphill, Donald Wetmore, and Maria Gracia.

I do make a practice of posting one of my own original articles each month, and subscribers to my ezine, The Organized Assistant Resource, have the benefit of reading those articles before they are published online. This month’s issue will be sent out on Wednesday, August 29th, so if you’re not yet a subscriber, this is an ideal time to sign up on my website.

Since OrganizedArticles.com is now my primary blog related to organizing, I’m moving other organizing blogs from my blogroll here to the new site. I will of course still be posting organizing tips here, along with other business tips and insights.

Spell checkers can be wonderful things, when they are used properly, but overreliance on them can create a whole new set of problems! The following are all real examples of the misuse of spell checkers that I have run across.

Pay attention to what the spell checker is recommending.

When I was working for the Provincial government, I discovered that a co-worker had created a form letter with "Hamilton, Entire" in the return address, because the spell checker didn’t recognize "Ontario" and suggested "Entire" as an alternative. I don’t know how many copies of that letter went out.

Don’t trust the spell checker to catch all your mistakes.

Just because the word you’ve typed was found in the dictionary doesn’t mean you’ve typed the correct word. I can’t even guess how many resumes I’ve seen where the job applicant is looking for work or has experience as a "manger" or in "costumer service."

Be careful when using the "add to dictionary" function.

If you accidentally add a word that is spelled incorrectly, it will never again be caught by the spell checker. If you’re anything like me, you’re apt to make the same typing mistakes over and over, so this can be a real problem, and to fix it, you’ll need to figure out how to edit your user dictionary.

I was recently working in Office 2007 when I noticed that the spell checker did not catch one of my mistakes. There was no way that what I’d typed was a dictionary word, so I was really puzzled why this had happened. Then a couple of days ago I got an interesting message on my screen from Microsoft - in order to improve their product they wanted my permission to add words I’d added to my dictionary to their master dictionary. It gave me the option of seeing what those words were, and I declined, because I could see that some of them were simply sentence fragments I’d chosen to ignore (as opposed to adding to the dictionary) which would be of no value to anyone. But this made me think that perhaps the uncaught error was the result of some other user saying, yes sure, take my words, when they had actually added spelling mistakes to the dictionary.

It just goes to show that a spell checker is dangerous in the wrong hands!

Bottom line - it never hurts to get someone else to take a look at your work, especially in the case of important documents. Even good spellers and proficient keyboarders make mistakes, and it’s often difficult to spot your own errors, because your mind already knows what it should say, so that’s what it sees. 

One of my friends subscribes to "Today’s Gift," a daily email from the Hazelden Foundation, which she occasionally forwards to me. She sent me one earlier this week that had a valuable time management tip which I’m going to share with you today.

Recovery works best for me when I’m open to what comes along each day. I used to set rigid schedules for myself, write long lists of things to do, and proceed through the day wearing the blinders of my preconceived scenario. Binges were my way of rebelling against my own rigidity and also a protest against whatever upset my carefully made plans.

We miss a lot when we try to impose our own structure on the events of the day. Perhaps we do it out of anxiety, and perhaps we do it to feel we’re in control, but it doesn’t work.

However hard we try to ignore or prevent the unexpected, the unexpected occurs. One of the things recovery teaches us is that we can trust ourselves and our Higher Power to deal with whatever comes along. Using our inner resources, we are free to respond spontaneously to the real life situations that we encounter.

Today, I will be open to the unexpected. Who knows? It might be fun!

(from the book "Inner Harvest" by Elisabeth L. - bolding added by me)

This advice was written for individuals recovering from eating disorders, but I think most of us can benefit from it. How often have you missed out on a fun activity, or even a work opportunity, because you already had decided what you were going to do during that time frame?

There are clear benefits to having a plan and a schedule, but it’s important that you let it guide your day, not dictate it, and that you are careful not to plan every minute of the day. You need to keep some time open to allow for interruptions, tasks that take longer than expected, possible technical problems, and other circumstances outside your control - not to mention breaks, as well as time to prepare for and get to meetings and outside appointments.

Is there room in your day for the unexpected?

I have always seen libraries as the epitome of organization, with books neatly shelved according the elaborate Dewey Decimal System (or the system I encountered in university, which I now know is the Libary of Congress system). I was therefore amazed to read that a new library in Gilbert, Arizona, is using neither of these systems, but is instead displaying books by topic, as is done in bookstores. Although I’m all for structure and tradition (I am an ISTJ, after all), I see this as a positive change.

For one thing, it will save time on the part of library patrons, who will no longer have to look up a title in the library catalogue to obtain the Dewey decimal code before searching for the book. It will also save time on the part of library staff, as shelving the books will not need to be as precise. And of course I always in favour of implementing changes that will save time!

Response to this decision has been mixed, as seen in the comments posted on an article posted at LibraryJournal.com, Behind the Maricopa County Library District’s Dewey-less Plan. It appears that some people feel that libraries are "selling out" when they implement this type of change, and that as public institutions, their role is to enlighten the public. However, it is clear to me that as more and more information is disseminated in electronic format, the role of the library is changing, and whatever they need to do to stay current and continue to meet the needs of the public (who are funding them through their tax dollars, after all) just makes sense.