You need new practices, not new products
It may come as a surprise that I very rarely purchase new office organizing products for my own home. Considering that half of my dining table is my home office, I don't have any room for stuff, let alone products to wrangle stuff. However, there always was one little "chronic" pile on the side table 3' from the dining table that serves as my de facto desktop. Recently I saw a new desktop sorter at Ikea.com that caught my attention. I sat with the idea for a couple of weeks before I pulled the trigger on the Fagning Magazine File. I'm thrilled with it! The color, the curves, the style, and the functionality add up to something I would have paid many times the price for ($13!). Currently it holds my former pile:
- spiral notebook
- weekly to-do list
- daily to-do list
- notes from a virtual client session that hold some nuggets for a future post
- a magazine with a layout I want to show to my branding person
- blank notecards
Caution: Do NOT buy this unless you need it as badly as I did. Have you already tried 5 different mail sorters? This one probably won't work any better than those. Don't throw another pretty product at a problem that really should be solved with time and discipline.
During a recent virtual organizing session a client who I've been meeting with for a while asked me about her various spiral notebooks. She wanted to know if I'd recommend she try a slightly different style of notebook, hoping "the right notebook" might solve her problem of too many imperfect notebook systems.
My reply: "You need new practices, not new products."
She and I then talked about better practices around taking notes: where the notebooks live, what types of notes should land in a notebook, etc. Sometimes people really do need a new product, as I did. More often than not, a product won't fix your organizing problems - time and focus will.
As this post was coming together in my head, I read this quote in a Vogue article from personal stylist Allison Bornstein: "We don’t need more stuff, we need more ideas.” She used nearly my same words to discourage people from buying more clothes.
Next time you find yourself looking to buy "the right thing," ask yourself if instead you need an idea, a "do not disturb" sign, a day off, a timer, a helping hand, a trash bin, some tough love, a deep purge, a Professional Organizer, a friend to phone, or any other practice that can keep one more product out of your life.
Maybe you need new products, maybe you don't. You probably don't. Is there an organizing product you are tempted to buy but probably don't need? Have you bought multiples of a similar product and they still havn't solved the problem? Please share in the comments!
