Uncomplicated Living with Andrea Hayft

            Our program on March 3^rd was a presentation by Andrea Hayft who has a business called “Uncomplicated Living”. Her expertise is in the area of helping clients remove the paper and material clutter from their lives.

She started her talk by providing two statistics: 54% of those surveyed indicated that they were overwhelmed by clutter in their lives, and each of us averages 55 minutes a day looking for things we have lost or misplaced.

            Her guidelines to calming the chaos in your life are three. First, use a calendar. List future appointments and future plans on the calendar so you don’t miss anything, but also use the calendar to set deadlines for your cleanup activities (I’ll clean out the front hall closet by a certain date). Once you’ve written the commitment down, it becomes easier to accomplish. Second, have a specific place for everything (car keys always left on kitchen counter for example) and always put items in their place. And third, use routines to your advantage. An example she used was handling the daily mail; have a specific place to put it, sort it once to remove items that are of no interest, and handle all the rest so that no item is handled three or four times.

            Most useful item to help de-clutter: a timer. Schedule yourself to do a task for a specific period of time, and enforce the timing by using a timer.

            To contact her, www.uncomplicatedliving.com.