Organize Your Totally Out of Control Time (Time Management)

Did you know there is a difference between planning to do something and scheduling it? Most people use their calendars for major appointments, but rarely schedule everyday tasks and the items on their To Do list. Some are even unsure about the best type of calendar for their lifestyle. The foundation of getting organized and staying organized is Time Management. It takes time to organize office space to be more productive at work, a master closet to make it easier to get started in the morning, or a garage to make room for a car or extra storage.

The goal is to schedule the time to organize spaces and organize spaces to save time. Attendees will be excited to learn practical ways to get Totally Out of Control Time… organized.

Love an Organized Life (Residential/Office Organizing)

What is clutter costing you? Organizing and de-cluttering your home, life, and workplace creates space and time for what’s important. If your attendees or employees are overwhelmed by piles, stacks, and stuff, you will want to book this presentation. So much time is wasted looking for misplaced things and money is spent on buying items that are located later out of their usual place. Professional Organizer Lorraine Brock with Get Organized! will share her favorite products, hand selected for staying organized and maximizing space, plus systems for keeping cluttered lives under control.

Learning to be better organized will save time and money, create a healthy home for families and happier and more productive employees at work.

Messy Desk, Missing Papers, and Totally Too Many Piles (Paper Management)

Piles, stacks, and stuff on a desk or kitchen counter is a constant struggle for some people. They always seem to be looking for a specific piece of paper or an important receipt in a huge pile of paper clutter. The average American spends about 55 minutes a day, roughly 12 weeks a year, looking for things they know they own but cannot find. That translates to lost time and money wasted. The solution? A new system to handle current papers, file archives, and store important tax material.

Professional Organizer Lorraine Brock with Get Organized! will share real solutions and concepts for better management of out of control paper clutter. She also offers information on appropriate time to keep certain papers, going paperless, and a better system for organizing miscellaneous notes and documents.

Depending on the target audience and time allotted, Lorraine can share systems for organizing and storing kid’s papers including artwork, keepsakes, and everyday school papers.

Take Control of Your Inbox

Is your inbox always full of unread emails or ones that require action or fill you with dread to open? Do you miss important messages or forget to go back and address emails that require a response? This topic explores options for basic email folder structure, categories to make retrieval more efficient, and a decision-making model to help you know what to do with each email.

Organizing Kids

Believe it or not, there is a time when kids can learn to pick up after themselves. If they do not learn early, the results will be difficult on the family. Imagine an older child that suffers from chronic disorganization and is always losing papers. Maybe a parent who has to put a warning sign on their child’s door saying, “Disaster Area”. Did you know that a child can be neat but not organized? Neat people tend to put things in stacks or hide clutter in closets or drawers so that the room is eye pleasing, but it is not organized. Teaching children to "Get Organized!" is a quality that will serve them well now, prepare them for the corporate world, and teach them skills to use as future husbands and wives.

Some of the topics Lorraine discusses concerning organizing kids are:

• Toy storage
• Chores (age appropriate)
• Laundry organization (how to do laundry, not just wear it)
• School papers
• Allowance systems
• Lunches
• and much more…

Organizing Teens

The skill of organizing is not something you’re born with, but a learned skill. In many families, organization is not discussed in the home, and there are few, if any, high school courses on being organized. As parents, we are often more focused on getting our children to the next event, rather than teaching them how to get to school on time. Faster than we might imagine, high school aged children will be applying for colleges, scholarships, and jobs, and competing with their fellow classmates and others around the world for key employment positions.

Individuals with poor organizational skills more often than not miss out on opportunities to excel, potential jobs, and even college scholarships. They miss deadlines and appointments and fail to follow through to get the results they want now, and ultimately, in their desired careers. Many times a teenager’s self-esteem suffers, often tagged with laziness or procrastination from family members and friends, leading to further lack of motivation. Even quality of life at home can suffer from the pressure from family to perform.

Let's say they do end up with a job out of high school or, even better, a job and admittance to college. The lack of organizational skills could cause poor job performance, lost promotions, and the inability to hold a job long-term. In this program, Lorraine Brock shows students the difference between planning and scheduling and how to use their time wisely. They will learn organizing processes and strategies used to gain control over cluttered rooms, studies, jobs, and life.

Areas covered:

• Time management
• Organizing your personal space (in most cases a bedroom)
• Organizing tools to maximize your small spaces
• Organizing school binders
• Realistic expectations when organizing

Parenting Teens and Tweens

Parenting choices are a lot like coming upon a large pothole in the road. You can choose to go straight through it and possibly blowout a tire or mess up your car’s alignment, or you can slow down and make some adjustments to get back on track with fewer consequences. This same analogy applies to raising tweens/teens as well. When children are young, parents are the main drivers, making all of the decisions about direction and speed. As they become tweens and then teens, the relationship thrives when kids can sometimes help with the steering.

Consider that:

• Roads are rarely straight or smooth
• There are often onramps and exits that force us to make choices about our direction
• If we are running low on gas, we have to get off the road and refill our tank
• Detours are sometimes long, annoying, and take us to places we didn’t plan to go

Maybe your family is running on all cylinders, focused ahead, and confident in your direction, or maybe you are running on empty and frantically seeking the nearest gas station. Either way, you can be equipped with practical parenting tools when you hit the next pothole during the frustrating and turbulent times raising tweens and teens.

Find your starting place, follow a few directions, and you and your teen will have a greater chance of reaching your destination successfully. During this presentation, Lorraine Brock shares with other parents her experience and wisdom about raising her three sons, two of whom are still at home. This topic can be geared towards a Christian audience if desired.

Kitchen “Tidbites”

Kitchen “Tidbites” is designed to give you helpful ideas on how to have your family reconnect around the dinner table and to keep this area of your home organized. In times past, family meals were the reward of a hard day’s work and a time to come together to eat, laugh, and work out life’s issues. This is even more important with today’s chaotic lifestyles. In fact, many of life's problems can still be solved around the kitchen table. In order to do this, we must first bring families back to the dinner table.

The Food Marketing Institute states that only 40% of American families eat meals together; of those families, they do so no more than two or three times a week! Attendees of Kitchen “Tidbites” will also learn about meal planning, organization in the kitchen, and shortcuts to save time and money each day.

Senior Downsizing

There are several reasons why seniors downsize. Most seniors want to move to a smaller home or apartment because they feel that their current home is too big. However, some sell their house to move to a retirement community or other senior care facility. No matter the reason, getting organized during this phase of life is incredibility important.

Seniors and their families are often emotionally attached to heirlooms, photos and personal belongings and have difficulty letting go of them. Once the sorting and purging is complete, the next challenge is to organize everything to fit in a much smaller place. At this point, space planning and organizing to maximize space becomes very important.

In this talk, Lorraine Brock, Professional Organizer, Family Coach, and Speaker, addresses the following areas:

• Sorting, purging, and packing
• Passing down keepsakes
• Organizing photos
• Disposal, selling, or recycling of unwanted/unneeded items. What are the options and pros and cons of each option?
• Paper clutter (to keep or not to keep)
• Having adult children and other family members involved in senior downsizing

Organizing Your New Home

Ready to get your cluttered home or areas in your home organized? Home organization is a topic that always creates high interest and draws large audiences. When setting New Year’s resolutions, getting organized is in the top 10 and is often a repeated goal throughout the year. Many visuals are shown during this presentation to explain the best solutions for organizing areas in the home.

Attendees will be motivated to tackle closets, kitchens, pantries, garages, and more with practical, functional, and sensible ideas for keeping the home organized.

Get Out the Door and in the Car, Organized

Is getting out the door in the mornings driving you crazy? Do you keep forgetting to grab the return you wanted to make on the way home, or the gift you wanted to give someone at the office? Maybe you are a mom who forgets to give their child morning medication and has to drive back home to get forgotten items. To top it off, once things get into the car, they seem to take root in the trunk or fall between or behind seats. Clutter in the home or from a hectic lifestyle can spill over into the car, where is starts to have a negative impact on quality of life for individuals and the family.

Professional Organizer Lorraine Brock with Get Organized!, speaks about taking the organization in the home and creating a smooth transition to the car. Americans spend large amounts of time in their vehicles, so why not keep them organized? According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the average American driver logs 13,476 miles each year. That's more than four times the distance from New York City to Los Angeles, California. – cars.lovetoknow.com. Lorraine will be sharing tips, tricks, and totally awesome products that will help keep clutter at bay in the home away from home.

Organized for Christmas

Christmas has become so commercialized, and as we become so involved in trying to make it perfect for everyone around us, we miss the real reason for the season. As a Professional Organizer and Family Coach, Lorraine Brock shows audiences how to plan, prepare, and execute a holiday season that leaves plenty of room for spiritual fulfillment and family time.

Lorraine will talk about family traditions, shortcuts for baking, and kids earning extra money for gift giving to family and friends. She will focus on breaking down what has to be accomplished and what is realistic, with the understanding that the earlier you begin, the more you can get done. Attendees will learn how to schedule tasks each week with the goal of finishing long before the actual holiday and having time to enjoy the season.

Additionally, Lorraine will discuss the "Christmas Binder". This is a yearly binder used to keep track of everything from:

• Wrapping
• Shopping
• Gift ideas
• Dinners
• Goodies
• and so much more!

This talk will cover Thanksgiving and New Years as well, with the primary focus on Christmas.

Stressed to … Blessed

Being Prudent in Your Home and Life

Did you know that God places a high value on being prudent? Prudent with our time, money, and the resources that God has given us. Professional Organizer, Family Coach, and Speaker Lorraine Brock shares Biblical and practical truths about how to be prudent, as defined “wise or judicious in practical affairs”, in the home and life. This topic shows us how to de-clutter our lives both physically and mentally so that we focus on becoming more prudent with the “stuff” that is really important. This type of event has proven time and time again to be a subject that draws a large crowd. It is different, it is real, it is practical, and almost everyone is interested in how to get better organized.

Mompreneur

Is your group looking for the perfect motivational speaker for your next event or conference? Lorraine Brock, Professional Organizer, Family Coach, and Speaker, shares with audiences the story of her life as mom turned entrepreneur. She explains why she started Get Organized!, how she grew her company, and where she is going. With no formal higher education or schooled business skills, how did this stay-at-home mom of 15 years start and grow her own business?

You will hear Lorraine’s creative ideas on how she did everything from marketing to her business policies without abandoning her love of being a wife and mom. “Everyone has a skill and a passion, so find out what yours is because when that skill and passion line up together, it can be a money-maker. Making a profit in business is what keeps you in business doing what you love.” Lorraine’s skill as a mom organizing and managing her home for 15+ years launched her business, Get Organized!. “If I can do it, anyone can”.