In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Shira Gill, an organizing expert and author of the brand new book LifeStyled (she is also the author of Minimalista, and writes frequently on minimalism and home organization). She talks about how to start a big organizing project, how to figure out how much stuff you need, and how to get a family on board (it might help to take the log out of your own eye first, metaphorically speaking — and she also advocates letting people have their own rules for their own spaces).

Please give the episode a listen! As always, we welcome ratings and reviews. And please consider joining our Best of Both Worlds Patreon community. We’ll be gathering on December 19th for our annual goal setting workshop. Membership is $9/month.

In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I share 7 strategies for lightening the “mental load,” defined as the cognitive and emotional effort it takes to manage life. From writing things down to batching, automation, embracing vertical ownership, encouraging kid independence, and spending out, we’ve got lots of ideas. And of course our favorite: care less. It’s not always possible, but when it is, it can definitely help!

In the Q&A we address a listener question about the best jobs that are high paying and also flexible. It’s not a question with a straightforward answer. Lots of jobs can be made more flexible once you’ve built up seniority and experience. Even “flexible” jobs usually aren’t 100 percent flexible once time has been spoken for. But we give some ideas for thinking through this question.

Please give the episode a listen, and as always we welcome ratings and reviews. Our Patreon community will be meeting next Tuesday (Nov 26th) to discuss all things holidays, so if you’re interested in that Zoom discussion, you can join us here. Membership is $9/month.

However, sometimes there are things that need to be looked at and dealt with eventually, but don’t need to be done right that minute. We’re talking filling in the Google form a coach sent out, or checking a new school calendar of events that’s been sent from the HSA, or buying pretzels for upcoming half days at the elementary school, or filling out a survey for a work project, or signing a form or…Many things.

I tend to let these pile up and then deal with them every few days during a batch processing time. Friday is a good time for this. I sometimes do a mid-week email triage as well.

On Friday the 4th, however, the kids were out of school and while I was working that day, it was a short day. So it didn’t happen. Then last week I was in Portland and I wasn’t really building in email processing time so even more stuff piled up. I got home late Friday afternoon and immediately went into picking up kids various places.

On Saturday my husband took the older four kids white water rafting (!) and we had a sitter for a while for the 4-year-old, so I seized the opportunity to sit down and deal with the mess of the previous two weeks. Since I track my time, I also know how long this took me: 2.5 hours to get to current.

Now, I don’t know if that’s entirely fair as a count as I spent a reasonable chunk of time on an advertiser survey that was pretty thorough. But I guess every week brings *something* that has to be filled out. So maybe it is an accurate reading of the stuff from the last two weeks.

Two and a half hours seems like a long time but I also imagine that if I’d dealt with all those things in the moment, they would have taken a lot longer than 2.5 hours because I’d be going in and out of things. So I think batching is the way to go, even if it’s not necessarily the most fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Do you batch process email and the tasks that land in your inbox?

Speaking of batching…we are failing on this on the grocery front. There is a rather nice grocery store (McCaffrey’s, for any grocery store experts…) that is approximately a 4 minute drive from the house. This opened a year ago and as a result we don’t wind up thinking too much about what we need because it’s so easy just to stop by. But the net result is that my husband went to a different grocery store (Wegman’s) Friday night (after seeing Beetlejuice with our daughter) and bought some stuff, and then I went on Saturday to the local one to get some more groceries for the week…and then I realized we didn’t have stuff for hamburgers on Sunday night (a frequent choice) so I went back Sunday afternoon…and then got home and realized we didn’t have hot dogs (which we *always* have since we buy from Costco usually…but I guess some kid developed a real hankering for them?). Our nanny will likely get hot dogs and some other things today but she is more rationally making a list from looking at the pantry…

In other news: It’s definitely looking like fall around here! If you’re looking for a fall read, the first half of my novel, The Cortlandt Boys, takes place in a cozy small town in the Poconos during autumn. This remains my favorite thing I’ve ever written. Please give it a read! Or if you’d like a little time management in your fiction, Juliet’s School of Possibilities takes place in October in a place much like Cape May, NJ. You can learn more about this fable here.

In today’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Amanda Jefferson of Indigo Organizing shares her expert tips on digital decluttering. Learn how to stay on top of things while making your digital spaces feel more serene.

In the Q&A we tackle a question from a listener on helping kids with learning disabilities — what resources and approaches are helpful for navigating those challenges?

Please give the episode a listen! Over at our Patreon community page we’re also discussing naps (our own, not our kids’) and staying connected if you’re a full time WFH employee. Please come join us!

However, I felt like my eldest’s room wasn’t necessarily living up to its potential. It has lots of light. We bought furniture for it from the previous owners, and bought an additional book case and desk, but things weren’t terribly well-organized. Or, they were, but it was hard to maintain them that way. My son is busy and he’s also grown a lot in the past few years, which means he’s grown out of a lot of clothes — sometimes clothes I swear I’d just bought a few months before. It’s hard to stay current on that, plus old school notebooks/notepaper, etc.

He’s been away for the last three weeks at camp, so with his permission, our house manager and I have been busy upgrading the space. (I don’t have permission for pictures yet — hopefully later! But this is why this isn’t a design blog haha).

First order of business: clearing out the too-small clothes. The good news is that because he is at camp, we’re pretty sure he took his favorite things with him. So a lot of the other things could be dispatched to some giant Rubbermaid-type containers, ready for the 14-year-old to “shop” if he desires. (He is also gone, so we’ll have to wait on that.) Trash was removed, books put on the shelf, etc.

We purchased a rug, so that is now grounding the space around his bed. Also on the decor front: framing posters! Several years ago, right before we moved into the house, he received a number of movie posters as a Christmas present. We were going to frame these and put them up and then just…didn’t. But that finally happened and they are being delivered today, so that is going to make the space look a lot more coherent.

We also got some new lamps, which give the bedroom a much more homey glow. Clear off some horizontal surfaces and the place looks a lot better. I’m looking forward to the big reveal when he comes home (though given that he’s getting home after midnight maybe it will be more of a wake up in the morning reveal).

Of course, I’m also realizing we should have done this a lot earlier. He’s likely going away to college in approximately 13 months. But I assume he’ll come home for vacations and long weekends so it will be good to have a more attractive space to welcome him home.

However, this weekend, the amount of mess in the house had reached what I consider a maddening point (if anyone has seen my desk that is saying something!) There were also a large number of things in my brain that, while I am not thrilled that I am the one remembering them, were things that needed to be remembered. My husband had plenty of logistical things he was in charge of as well, such as booking a trip for him and some of the older kids to a family memorial service in a few weeks, signing a kid up for tennis, various complications with bids on chimney work, etc.

I realized that if I didn’t make a list to get these things out of my head — did I wash the pool towels? The kids’ sheets? Did I order lunches? Did the piano and alto sax get practiced? And by the way, the kids need to sweep up the paper bits the dog chewed up and get their clothes put away and… — I would be thinking of stuff that needed to be done all day, in addition to the normal Sunday logistics (does the 6-year-old have his soccer cleats? A water bottle? Is he wearing sunscreen?)

So I made a Sunday checklist. I listed the things that needed to happen with check boxes next to them and the person responsible. My husband took the 6-year-old to rock climbing (during which he dealt with chimney matters…good times), and during this time my older kids and I traded off caring for the toddler and working through the list.

I think it worked pretty well. The house is cleaner. The upstairs hallway is no longer covered with a ridiculous amount of kid flotsam. We got clarity on some future scheduling — knowing that people are not doing something is important too. People practiced their instruments. Thank you notes got written (not addressed yet, but baby steps…) By batching all this, we were still able to do some fun activities, like spending a long time in the pool when a family friend came over mid-day.

In general, I’d like the kids to shoulder more of the task load around here. The big ones are definitely old enough. They can take on some of the housework and weekend baby-help that I’m not sure needs to be outsourced anymore with so many capable people in the house. In KJ Dell’Antonia’s book, How to be a Happier Parent, she mentions that many people get upset because they want their kids to do chores without being asked. That might be the gold standard, but if you don’t get so hung up on that desire, you can wind up with the chores done. Which has some real upsides too! So I may start making a Sunday list more often.

How do you tackle kid responsibilities?

Photo: Growing in the new yard! I took the 9-year-old and toddler over there for a short walk after dinner on Sunday. This is part of my desire to log 1000 steps after dinner, as I suggested in a recent Before Breakfast episode.

Here are the strategies I found helpful, that maybe other people will too.

Stay organized by making gift lists. And start early! If you have a bullet journal or planner this can be a collection, started whenever you want (like…January?). I have been keeping track of what is ordered or needs to be ordered, and what arrived. As an extension of this, I have been opening boxes immediately because we still have everyday household items arriving from Amazon and it’s frustrating to realize that the supplies for a kid’s school project are now at the bottom of the gift closet. Speaking of which…

Pick a gift closet (or room). We store all presents in a closet in the guest room, with children forbidden to enter. We kind of ran out of space, though, so there’s also a pile in the bedroom with a giant blanket over it. It works. This is also where we keep wrapping paper, scissors, and tape, and where the bulk of the wrapping has happened.

Have the kids buy for each other. We had never done this before but finally decided to do so — and I am a big fan! We managed to pull this off with two Target trips and a little supplemental online shopping. We gave the kids a budget and then had them think through what their siblings would want. The upside is that there will be more stuff under the tree that I didn’t come up with. Another upside: the kids all learned how difficult it can be to make wrapped presents look nice, and I got a few bonus points for past present aesthetics. Another item in the category of “things mom did that we didn’t think about”…that is now thought about.

Get help with the wrapping. G (nanny) and I took a morning and did the bulk of it. It went much quicker this way!

Give each category of gift its own wrapping paper. Each child has their own paper — courtesy Costco’s double-sided big rolls — which allows me to see if the piles are relatively equal. This is no longer a perfect solution (big kid gifts tend to be small and expensive; little kid gifts are big and cheap!) but helps make sure things don’t get too out of whack. I also wrapped the presents for my extended family in a different color wrapping paper, so these can be found for that party, and the adult presents for Christmas morning will be in their own color wrapping paper too.

Re-use gift tags. We bought two giant boxes of gift tags from Costco a few years ago, and have been re-using them ever since. Someone just collects them on Christmas morning and stuffs them right back in the box!

Gift buying responsibilities can be split in different ways. I took the lead on Christmas, assigning my husband certain gifts that I was going to have trouble figuring out (all electronics seem the same to me, so he needs to sort out what’s the “right” thing to get). But my husband takes the lead on our kids’ birthdays, and is fully responsible for buying all presents for these celebrations. It comes out fairly evenly over time. (We are each responsible for our own extended families.)

Have a go-to gift. For the past few years I’ve gotten the adults in my extended family something similar within a theme, purchased from the same retailer. Nice slippers, blankets, Christmas tree ornaments, scarves, etc. might all be options that work for most people.

What strategies do you have for gift buying and wrapping?

Of course, that knowledge doesn’t mitigate the fact that I really hate doing this. So every year, I face a dilemma. Do I log my receipts diligently as I go? Or stick them all in a pile, and then log them all at once?

I used to think that the former option was the more virtuous one. Do a bit at a time and the task never gets overwhelming. That sounds like something Benjamin Franklin would say. But then in 2009, I decided not to bother. The receipts piled up and I had to log them all at once.

But you know what? It wasn’t that bad. It took me 5 hours (I’d check receipts against my work calendar and credit card statements to confirm what any ones I’d forgotten were for). There were hundreds of receipts, which means that if I’d logged each one individually, even if it only took 2 minutes each time to open that computer program and then file the receipt, it would have taken me more than 5 hours over the course of the year to keep on top of them. And I’m guessing it might have taken more than 2 minutes. Once we use the mental energy to start a task, it’s hard to get back into the flow of work (even checking your email often involves a 20-25 minute break from the flow of your main project).

The downside is that I may have missed receipts, so that would have cost me money. The question is how many receipts I missed, and the dollar amount I thus owe in additional taxes, and the amount of time I save by not logging frequently. I’m not entirely sure how this calculation would turn out, but in general, batching tasks is more efficient. You focus on one thing, get it done, and move on.

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