Pam Young - Get Your Act Together: A 7-Day Get-Organized Program for the Overworked, Overbooked, and Overwhelmed

What Is a Person Like You Doing in a Mess Like This?

The SLOB Sisters

Why Youll Never Meet a Disorganized Amish

Its in the Cards!

Pigtales

One Mans Junk Is Another Mans Junk Too!

Gone With the Wind

The Inside Story

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

Less Than Friendly Persuasion

Infractions the Name of the Game

Keeping Up with the Joneses

The 50/50 Family

A Mothers Day That Really Was

A Critical Message

W e want to thank the two men in our lives, Danny and Terry, but there arent words meaningful enough (not even in the synonym finder) to express the depth of our gratitude.

We want to give special thanks to each of our children: Michael, Peggy, Joanna, Chris, Jeff, and Allyson, for being guinea pigs for all of our bright ideas.

At the risk of sounding like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, we must thank our parents for raising us to believe that success comes from having a positive attitude even in negative circumstances. Growing up, we were allowed to be discouraged, depressed, angry, or in a bad mood, but Mom was always there with a timer and we had ten minutes to get through it and get on with life. The timer has come in handy during the evolvement of our new system.

Special thanks to John Boswell for his friendship over the last fifteen years. It is a privilege to be part of his flock of authors. His enthusiasm, wonderful sense of humor, and his kindness to strangers has always been an attraction to us.

Our wonderful friend, Kac Young, deserves special thanks for her daily, long-distance hotline of quality feedback. She has been a great cheerleader for this book, but, just as valuable, she has had the courage to tell us when something didnt work. We have always respected her professional advice, but her personal friendship is priceless.

Thanks go to Sydney Craft Rozen, for once again saving us from literary embarrassment. To have Sydney help us over the last fifteen years has been a real blessing. Her unique ability to edit a manuscript, without changing the voice of the author, is rare and truly appreciated.

Nancy Peske, our editor at HarperCollins, deserves special acknowledgment. She can giggle and edit brilliantly at the same time. It was great working with her.

W e know what kind of a mess you are in right now. We could tell you, in detail, what your kitchen, living room, closets, cupboards, drawers, car, purse, refrigerator, and even your bedroom look like. No, were not psychic, and no, we havent been sneaking around your house, peeking in your windows at night. We know because we used to be in the same messy dilemma. We escaped and have helped thousands of other people get free from the vicious grip of disorganization. We can help you do it, too.

You know you are overworked, overbooked, and overwhelmed, but did you know that maybe one of the main reasons you got that way is because you were born that way? We believe that if you have struggled to be organized but still lead a messy and disorganized life, you can blame it on heredity. Its our guess that your mess is genetic, and if were right about that, we can tell a lot more about you.

Instead of reading this book, youre probably supposed to be doing something else. Maybe youre in a bookstore at the mall when you should be picking up vacuum cleaner bags at Sears. Or maybe youre propped up on your bed reading and you should be starting dinner. One woman in a small midwestern town wrote and said that she accidentally ran into one of our books. She had locked herself out of her house in bare feet and no coat. It was the dead of winter and her first thought was the warm library that was just a block from her home. Once inside, she called her husband to bring her a key and made a decision to get organized. The librarian, able to size up the reader, led the trembling, shoeless woman to our book.

We bet youve tried to get organized in the past. In fact, youve probably gone off on organizational binges with great energy and enthusiasm, only to end up with one more discarded clutterbuster to add to your stash of gadgets and papers. We suspect that you have a lot of organizational tools around the house: filing cabinets, shoe trees, stacking bins, pen caddies, and mail organizers. But instead of satisfying your organizational needs, these tools just loom like lighthouses in a sea of clutter and chaos, beaming rays of accusation that you didnt follow through.

Maybe you also have a diary, photo albums, weekly planners, and calendars that are blank or only partially filled out. Perhaps you bought a rowing machine, stationary bicycle, NordicTrack, Thigh Master, or Gut Buster, but youre not rowing, biking, tracking, squeezing, or busting. In fact, your exercise has probably been limited to hauling all that equipment from the attic to the driveway for a garage sale every couple of years.

Speaking of exercise, do you belong to a health club that you dont go to? Speaking of health, did you invest in the Richard Simmons Deal-a-Meal cards, but the last time you dealt them, you left them in your bathrobe and they went through the wash? Is your Meet You at the Top motivational tape at the bottom of the bill basket? Did you buy Pull Your Own Strings but still find yourself at the end of your rope?

Have you ever been a victim of PREMATURE EVALUATION? Any time youve tried to get organized but had to look for a pen, unload a chair, and clear a spot on the kitchen table for a piece of scratch paper, youve jumped the organizational gun. In the end, you have suffered the letdown and disappointment of premature evaluation. Embarrassed at ending up in more of a mess than you had when you started, youre left with battered self-esteem and public failure (usually logged by family and friends.)

The reason we know so much about you is that we are deficiency experts. We really do think that being disorganized is genetic. As you will read in Chapter 2, we inherited our messy genes from our dad. For more than fifteen years, we have made it our mission to help people who were born with the congenital tendency to be locked out, left behind, and overdrawn.

We think people who are prompt and efficient are born that way, too. Theyre those few naturally organized people who have it together. They have five- and ten-year plans; they floss, make lists, and actually do the stuff on the lists. They dont run anywhere, look for anything, arrive late, or forget birthdays. They have low cholesterol, IRAs, cash in their wallets, milk in the refrigerator, and high-fiber cereal in the cupboardand they were all born on their due dates! Theyre people like Ordell Daily, our make-believe Goddess of Order, who has a standing hair appointment on Saturday, sleeps on her face Saturday night, and comes to church Sunday morning, resprayed with Follicle Freeze and looking brittle yet lifelike.

Ordell Daily was an organized soul .

No one could match her skill .

The crack of dawn was her rising time ,

Her day was a routine drill .

Showered and dressed in less than ten ,

Breakfast in just under three .

Dishes cleared, the dusting done ,