Tips & Tools — organization

As promised, this is a continuation of our latest Ask Paloma post where we talked to Mimi about what to do when you have too many to-do lists. We left off with the promise of going deeper on catch locations.  What are catch locations? Most people store important information (including email addresses, meeting information, appointments, ideas, lists, etc) in places like apps on their phone, notebooks, calendar apps, Gmail, sticky notes, planners, and even napkins. Each of these are catch locations because it's where key info is "caught".  Why does thinking about catch locations matter?Because a major source of stress can come from having too many of them...

If you're like most of us, there's an object in your life that you repeatedly lose: Keys, phone, your favorite pen, sunglasses and other important items can be frustrating to track down.  The key (no pun intended) is to create "environmental cues". THE PSYCHOLOGY: There's two important things about the brain we can leverage here: It feels rewarded by visually-pleasing things,  and it looks to its environment for cues about what to do next.  So, beautiful "cues" (a hook, a little box) increase the likelihood that your brain will want to put things in a consistent place, making those things always easy...