Do you ever find that your week has a theme?  For me, this week has been “Book & Photo” week. 

I love organizing books.  I just love books in general.  I love being around them.  I love touching them, smelling them, admiring their covers, reading the back page and inside flap, flipping through the pages, reading a passage.  I love listening to books.  I have an Audible subscription, and it’s worth every penny.  I can buy an audio book that I feel is a worthwhile investment and listen to it over and over again.  I have the Libby app on my phone.  I can download audio books from my local library system and listen while I drive, fold laundry, get ready in the morning, cook, or sometimes even just sit and chill.  Luxury! 

I’m currently listening to a book called The Messy Lives of Book People.  I even read books about books!

My book week actually started last week.  I’m a part of the NAPO Authorship and Publishing Special Interest Group, the A&P SIG (can you tell I have a love of words?).  We’re all long-time professional organizers with active businesses, so finding the time to write can be a challenge.  Last Friday, the A&P SIG hosted a Writing Retreat.  The intention was to set aside an extended, fun, somewhat social but very productive day to just write.  Members of the SIG met over Zoom for several hours of writing sprints and schmoozing.  Heaven. 

The result of my being a part of the Writing Retreat?  I published my second min-ebook on Amazon.  This one is about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Chronic Disorganization (CD), my organizing specialty.  The first is Quick Organizing Tips for Seasons and Holidays – not just the ones that happen between October and December.  If you’re interested, you can download them here.

This week, I had the pleasure of working with one of my favorite clients.  She is a woman, about 82, divorced with essentially four adopted daughters (that’s a story for another time).  Let’s call her Faith, since she’s an ordained minister. 

Faith lives in a high-rise apartment building and will likely be downsizing soon from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom apartment.  She won’t be able to accommodate her four or five tall bookcases that are fully stocked with her lifetime of books and music.  We had addressed two of her bookcases in a previous session and donated several bags of books. 

This week, I walked in to find two medium-sized moving boxes full of books she had already culled out, prepared for donation.  Faith wanted to work on a bookcase that was stuck behind another bookcase too heavy for me to move out of the way.  Our short (two-hour) organizing session went like this: me snaking my arm behind the front bookcase to pull out a few books at a time, showing Faith what they were, her deciding on keep vs. donate while balancing her cat on her lap, me piling them to the right or left according to her decision, then returning the “keepers” to a shelf and stuffing the donations into reusable Amazon Prime shopping bags.  There were eight of them in total, plus one containing a few books I agreed to take myself. 

When Faith saw all of the bags piled into a shopping cart the building had let us borrow so I could ferry them down to my car, she apologized profusely.  I was so surprised!  I was absolutely thrilled with our session and explained that such a day was one of my “happy places” – a really smart/fun/interesting client, a loving cat, a ton of books, and a little physical exercise to sort, contain, and donate them.  What’s not to like?!

Epilogue: After the session, I drove the eight bags of donations to Faith’s local library, which had agreed to take them.  It was a complete win-win-win.

If you’ve been following me, you know I’m giving a six-week class called Organizing Your Digital Life 101.  This week’s topic was digital photos.  Who can’t use advice on photo organizing?!  My dear friend and photo guru, Rachel Jenkins, owner of ScrapMyPix in Columbia, MD – soon to rebrand as Photo Archivers – was the guest speaker.  Rachel’s company specializes in curating and preserving collections for individuals, families, museums, schools, and municipalities.

Rachel led attendees through the process of how to gather, cull, and prepare digital photos for archiving.  She taught us about different software for storing digital photos and how to back up the files to protect precious memories. 

The class was recorded.  If you weren’t able to sign up for the full organizing course but would like to receive the recording of this class, send an email to Support@LGOrganized.com with “Copy of Photo Class” in the Subject line, and we’ll make the arrangements.  The fee for the individual class is $25.

The day after Rachel’s guest appearance, I met with the executors of the estate of a client Let’s Get Organized had worked with last year.  Our client had been a nuclear scientist by profession, but he was also an amateur photographer.  He took thousands of photos, in print and slide form, over his 80+ years, which now need to be looked at, culled, organized, digitized, and archived.  What a stroke of luck that Rachel had just given her talk on organizing photos!

The rest of the week progressed in the same vein: every client either had boxes of books to unpack, sort, and shelve, or framed photos and artwork to unwrap, delight over, and hang on the walls to admire and enjoy.

There are some weeks that make a professional organizer sit back, sigh, and say, “I love what I do.”  This was definitely one of them.