The Life Organizer
Mindful LivingMost organizers or planners give you just enough space to hang yourself in. Between scrawled appointments, doctor visits, meetings and task lists, you can see your very identity shrinking in the margins—along with your sanity. This is not one of those organizers.
Quite the opposite of a day planner, The Life Organizer: A Woman’s Guide to a Mindful Year is about slowing down, taking deep breaths, and concentrating on doing what’s really important by living in the moment.
Louden prepares you for this Zen trip with plenty of background information and tips on creating your own Life Organizer. She teaches you how to do a self-check in to find out what you need to focus on for that day or week, a mood shifter, five steps to use when settling in to do the journaling each week, and quotes and stories throughout the journal.
She also teaches about meeting your “minimum requirements,” a list of daily criteria that need to be met based on what YOU decide. Some people may choose raw foods and yoga; others, sleep and sex. The list can be as long as you need it to be. There are suggestions for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly minimum requirements.
Each week, you’ll have some space to jot down your thoughts and feelings for that day along with five to six soul-searching questions to answer, like “What self-nurturing could I share with someone I love?” Every five weeks, Louden shares a client’s story, often with a very funny or moving poem that she herself created.
Perhaps the most useful tool—to me, at least—are the three “to-do” lists for the week. Instead of one massive neverending list that leeches into your blood and poisons you to death, Louden has you break down all of your tasks into two columns—“Have To” and “Could Do.” This gives you a chance to gain a little perspective about your daily tasks and perhaps create a gradual shift on what is really important.
The third “to-do” list is something that you may have never used—a list of things to “Let Go” of. An amazing concept yet so simple, you may find yourself surprised by what you fill this list with each week—anything from “shame” to “my ripped sweater” to “rocky road.”
You can actually use the one in the book, but its space is limited and she, along with many other Life Organizer users (including yours truly), opts to use a journal in order to have more space to write and answer the weekly questions.
Louden’s book is the tool that actually helped me keep a journal for a full year without stopping for a day—quite an accomplishment for a very sporadic-up-to-then journal keeper. Looking back over the year using the book, I can say that I’ve changed many areas of my life for the better—and am using it for another round this year.
