I was doing well with the Wii Fit, exercising for at least 30 minutes a day six days a week. Then I got a little bored with it and purchased EA Sports Active to mix things up a little. That workout makes me sweat and I don’t like to sweat. And I dislike the music. My enthusiasm for both Wii Fit and EA Sports Active started to wane a bit by the end of summer. Then I started travelling and I completely lost the routine of daily exercise.

Once I returned from my trip to LA in early October, I was determined to get back into the groove of regular exercise. But I got busy with clients and I found it harder to getting around to doing it (or even remembering to do it).

Then the good folks at Nintendo did me a big favor. They put out Wii Fit Plus. It’s just like Wii Fit, but there’s more to it. The day I heard about it, I ordered it from Amazon. It cost me less than $20.

Glory be, it’s just what I needed. Now, Wii Fit is fun again. There are new exercises and games for me to try. I have new challenges. And, even better, I can now have the software put together workouts for me, based on the kind of results I want. Before, I would just select the exercises on my own. And, to be honest, I’d often take the path of least resistance, rather than doing the exercises I knew I didn’t enjoy. Having the software choose for me makes a huge difference.

If you have Wii Fit and have grown bored of it, I encourage you to give Wii Fit Plus a try. It’s motivated me to get back into the routine of daily exercise. It’s so new and shiny, I’m even looking forward to it every day!

Once you start leaving stuff out, other stuff naturally joins it. Clutter attracts clutter. It’s amazing.

I’ve recognized that my driving force is ease. I want things to be easy. I like to glide through my life with ease. But when I don’t put stuff away for a few days, I start tripping over the stuff. Literally and figuratively.

This weekend I was going to create some ease by putting stuff away. But I didn’t make that a priority, so I’m tripping again. And I have a busy week with clients and meetings, plus my husband is out of town. For some people, husbands being out of town makes things easier. But when my husband’s gone, I really miss him. He works from home and is a constant presence. And he does things like cook and help feed and walk the dogs.

So it’s not an easy week.

I do love it when things get like this, because it puts me squarely in the shoes of my clients. Here I am facing a busy week, with no large chunks of time available. How am I supposed to clean up? I preach to my clients all the time that you don’t need to wait for a large chunk of time to start creating order. You can do it one small pocket of time after another.

So the challenge I’m giving myself this week is to create ease in my life by creating order a little at a time. I’m going to grab those 15- and 30-minute pockets as they become available. And I’ll put stuff away and weed stuff out and make life easier.

I’d take a picture of my office and post it here, but two things stop me:

1. Embarrassment
2. My camera is upstairs and I’m downstairs and I want to get this posted.

But trust me, my office doesn’t look like the office of someone who craves ease and order.

At the end of the week, I hope to be able to blog that I’m back on easy street again!

It’s an interesting exercise in writing, of course. While I do write regularly, I don’t usually write fiction (I did write a novel in a month back in 2004), so this is completely outside of my normal experience in writing. What I’m loving is that I’m not planning this book at all. I sit down to write and see what happens. I don’t know how good the final product will be. And the best part is that I don’t really care.

Mostly this is an interesting experience in discipline and striving to reach a goal. I’m doing this just for the challenge of doing it. I’ve made a public commitment to write 50,000 words of fiction in the month of November and, barring catastrophe, I will meet that commitment.

I’m working on the novel first thing in the morning, even on the days I have client appointments. That means I have to get up a little earlier than usual. And it means I can’t do much else in the morning before an appointment. But I have done it each and every day starting November 1. As of this morning, I’ve written 11,877 words. To write 50,000 words in 30 days, I need to write 1667 words daily. I try to write more each day and, in fact, I’m 1875 words ahead of that pace. So if need be, I can take a day off. But I’d rather finish early.

These are the things that I’ve identified that are making it work for me:

• I have a set time of day when I do the work. I think I’d find it difficult to squeeze out time to write fiction in the midst of a work day.
• There’s a clear measure of success…I will succeed if I’ve written 50,000 words by November 30.
• It won’t last forever. No matter what, this particular challenge is over on November 30.
• There’s no pressure to be perfect. This is all about putting words on paper (actually, in a computer file). No editing allowed. I’m free to write a really lousy book.
• I’m doing it every day. By month’s end, it will feel automatic. It’s already starting to feel like a routine.
• I have measurable progress. All I do is watch that word count rise (my friend and writing buddy Shannon Wilkinson created a really cool spreadsheet where we can keep great stats for both of us.)
• I have accountability. I email Shannon every morning when I have written my words. She responds with an encouraging email. I do the same for her every day. And I’m tweeting each day after I meet my word quota.
• I’ve made a public commitment. It would be way easier to back out on this if I hadn’t told everyone I’m doing it.

If you have a big job you’d like to accomplish in a short period of time, perhaps the lessons I’ve learned with writing a novel in a month could help. Here’s how you can use them:

• Set a defined goal
• Set a deadline
• Know how much you need to do each day to meet that deadline
• Set a time of day to do the work
• Track your progress
• Don’t try to be perfect
• Have a friend (or professional) provide accountability and encouragement
• Tell people about it

These strategies would work well for tackling a big decluttering/organizing project in a month’s time. (Or, alternatively, to creating a new habit to maintain order.) If you think you could use a little extra help and support, Declutter Happy Hour, the 28-day e-course Shannon and I created, could provide just the framework to help you apply the above lessons and keep you on track for a month.

Writing a novel in a month is a fun goal. Ultimately, the end product won’t probably enhance my life after the month. (Though, who knows…maybe I have the beginnings of a best seller here!) But if you declutter your home (or part of your home) in a month, that could have lasting benefits. And if you start now, it will be done before the holidays!

As the president of the St. Louis chapter of NAPO, I am so proud that two of our members, Aby Garvey and Denslow Brown are nominated for an award this year. Aby’s blog, Creative Organizing is nominated in the Best Blog category. And Denslow, a veteran organizer and originator of the Coach Approach for Organizers (a program I’ve taken), is nominated in the category Best Organizer as Coach or Mentor. I’m proud to count both of these extremely talented women among my friends.

Here’s the cool thing: Now that the nominations are in, you can vote. There are 17 categories the public may vote in (plus two for NAPO-LA members only). Simply go to NAPO LA’s website and click on the words “Cast Your Votes Through December 15.” You’ll be asked to register (don’t worry, you won’t be spammed) and then you’ll be able to vote. You can also see a list of finalists before registering to vote, if you’d like. There are lots of deserving people nominated, so if you’re at all into organizing I promise you’ll see familiar names.

Congratulations Denslow and Aby! You’ve made NAPO St. Louis proud.

I’ve tried, with some success, selling books on Craigslist. I’ve avoided selling them on Ebay or half.com because I didn’t want to have to ship individual books.

Enter Powell’s Books and their Sell Us Your Books program. They make it very easy. You enter in the ISBN numbers of the books you’re interested in selling. They tell you, on the spot, whether they’re interested in the books and, if they are, how much they’ll pay you for them. You accept or decline their offer with a click. If you accept, you decide whether you’d like the money in store credit or via PayPal. (You get a higher price if you opt for store credit.)

After you login or register, you print out a personalized, postage-paid shipping label and ship them the box of books. Once they inspect the books and make sure they meet their quality standards (which they spell out well on their website), they email you that they’re applying the credit (or sending the money via PayPal).

This morning, I found “sell books” on an early page in my Autofocus notebook and so I went to Powell’s website and entered some ISBNs. I sold eight books (out of the 20 or so ISBNs I entered) for $33 in store credit. (I choose store credit so I can buy knitting books, which are among the few categories of books I purchase, rather than borrow from the library.)

I’ve already shipped the box. Easy peasy. And now there’s a little more room on my bookshelf!