If your life was like mine in September, it was busy and perhaps a bit frantic.  Unfortunately, the bad news is that life for the next few months is only likely to get busier and busier as we head into the holiday season.

A quick list of things to do includes:

1)      If you celebrate Halloween, decide on/order/make costumes and purchase treats.  Pencil in all the fall festival/Halloween-themed events on your calendar.  Perhaps you may want to make a Halloween tulle wreath like I showed last year.  (My task for today is to hang mine from last year on my door.)

2)      Get informed about the candidates standing for election in your city/county/state and make plans to vote on November 8.  Vote411.org is a great website for this information.

3)      Start thinking about your Thanksgiving dinner generally and/or travel plans.

4)      Start thinking about your Christmas or other holiday activities and/or travel plans.  The folks at organizing blog 100 Days to Christmas remind us that there are 81 days and counting.

5)      Plan for end-of-the-year business activities.

That’s a pretty big list to add on to all the everyday life things going on at the moment!  Take heart that even professional organizing coaches are getting a bit overwhelmed.  Stever Robbins, the Get-it-Done Guy, posted a question on his blog: How do you deal with fundamental overload?, confessing that he too is a bit overscheduled at the moment.

So what can you do to feel a bit saner?

Schedule Time for Relaxation and Rejuvenation. Kacy Paide of The Inspired Office suggested in her weekly newsletter that it is time to mark out time on your calendar for the important things so they don’t get lost in the holiday  rush.  In her case, Kacy was penciling in yoga classes.

Appreciate Yourself. Don’t beat yourself up for what you are not getting done. Recognize what you are achieving and give yourself credit.

Keep up your organizing efforts. Even if you only have 5 minutes here and there, keep up your organizing work.  You may feel frustrated that you are not able to finish anything but know that every 5 minutes of progress you make is reducing your stress and moving your goals forward.

This month at Ruly, we are going to focus on clothing and closets.  Yes, we have done this before, but this time we will come back to revisit some new aspects of this topic.

In the Washington area, we tend to have schizophrenic changes of seasons.  The transition from summer to fall is always hard to judge…one day it’s hot and the next it’s rainy and freezing.  Sometimes it is warm all way into November!  This makes the closet organizing tough.  You can’t pack up all those summer clothes and you still need the winter clothes available.  If you have space, you can keep all of your clothes out and just move from one side of the closet to the other.  If you don’t have space, you have to do the best you can shuttling between closet and storage boxes.

The organizing this month will stay fairly simple to keep stress levels low.  We are going to focus on how you can streamline your closet to the essentials of good fashion.  Of course, you are going to have to take all of my advice with a grain of salt and adapt it to your own tastes, body type, profession, climate and budget.  I look forward to learning from you what you consider to be the basics.

Check back tomorrow for our first installment of Ruly fashion essentials!