Our first full week this December takes us smack into the middle of the Christmas rush, with everything Christmassy going about: Christmas shopping, Christmas decorating, Christmas caroling, Christmas booking, Christmas cooking, Christmas eating… and the list goes on.

And amidst it all, we may already be losing our minds or our heads (hopefully not literally!) and our environment would show it. For some, they’ve already mastered managing to keep themselves above it all, but others may not be so lucky. After all, in anything in life, not everyone is always on the same page, and each individual is on a different stage in anything and everything. That’s how it is, that’s what our Life Kits are made of, and that’s what shapes our purposes.

So, yes, it is inevitable that the time leading up to Christmas may be a messy one for some of us, thereby leading to more stress. Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid all of it in the first place? After all, prevention is always better than the cure.

As such, we are launching this week a short series of posts all about organizing and keeping tidy – and this doesn’t just apply to physical clutter from shopping. Your life itself may need tidying – I know mine does! – and philosophies behind home organizing would be apt for life organizing as well. We’ll discuss organizing across that broad spectrum, and apply it to our purposeful living framework as well.

Organizing is a favorite practice of mine. I am absolutely hopeless as a worker with no form of organization or structure, as I am always distracted by the need to organize – a distraction that really exists, says Marie Kondo (pronounced “ma-ri-eh”), the Japanese professional organizer behind the revolutionary KonMari method of tidying. And I want to see things in order, regardless of how much things I have (which I am not as excellent in as organizing).

And, in fact, research shows that an organized space boosts productivity – and part of it is rooted in common sense. If you don’t know where something is, you use up valuable time looking for it in the first place.

So stay tuned for more posts today and throughout the next few days on organizing!