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Home Office Organizer Brandie Kajino Shares Some Wisdom on Being Practical About the Junk

First, a confession: I have never had a consistently tidy desk.

There, I’ve said it – and that wasn’t really so bad.

It was so good in those days long ago when I had a secretary who used to organize my desk, my schedule etc. But once I chose the home based business option – and really, I have never looked back – I found I had to take action, on a fairly regular basis, to sort things, toss some and generally re-establish some semblance of order.

As for example yesterday, when I decided I could not work another day with the piles of paper and books that threatened to cascade all over my desk if I made any sudden move. I had a big sorting, throwing-out and filing for an hour or so and was then able to get back to business.

Which kind of works for me. But still, when I meet people who are experts on how to organize your office and probably your life, my first reaction is somewhat of an attack of the guilts.

Take Brandie Kajino, for instance.

Actually, when you meet Brandie you won’t feel bad, because she is such a delightful, happiness-spreading person.

And she is an expert organizer, specializing in helping people sort out their home offices. Actually, she is The Home Office Organizer.

What brought all this on was my reading today a post by Brandie in which she basically admitted she is human and does not have some regime of tidiness which is in practical terms unattainable by some of us less naturally neat mortals.

And if you have ever worried, as I have, that you are not as organized as you should be, you owe it to yourself to read Brandie’s wonderful post, “Organized” is NOT Code For “Perfection”.

Just as a taste:

Being organized doesn’t mean you have to have color-coded cabinets or files, have everything (including the dog) labeled and forgo your work to keep everything spotless. What it DOES mean is some semblance of order that makes sense for you and your life. And that means a daily decision to keep things in working order.

If you want to see whether Brandie might be able to help you, why not take advantage of her no obligation 15 minute consultation?

And no, FTC and whoever else might ask, I don’t get a commission. I just know Brandie knows her stuff (and how to help the rest of us from letting our stuff get in the way of our business).

clay elephant from Kasongan, Indonesia
This clay elephant I bought in the Jogjakarta region in Indonesia many years ago is a symbol for me of how even the poorest of people and communities, lacking many of the comforts enjoyed by people in other communities, can create business and income by focusing on their skills.

It’s my “don’t complain about what you don’t have, work with what you’ve got” story.

The back story, as I was told it by Indonesian friends who took me to the village where the elephant was made, is that the Indonesian Government had sponsored a famous artist, the late Sapto Hudoyo , to help the village use its traditional clay object handicraft skills to create products which would be more commercially viable. As I understood, they made traditional, utilitarian household objects such as bowls and pitchers, many of which I could see baking in the sun when we entered the village.

When I visited it was clearly a very, very poor village, even by developing country standards. And the objects, like my elephant, were very fragile for having been simply sun-baked, unlike the kiln-fired pottery I was used to in Australia. I remember carrying my little elephant, wrapped in multiple layers to protect it from fracturing shock, around Indonesia and then in my carry-on luggage, back to Australia.

This was the simple combination: a specific skillset, clay, sun, their modest homes from which they worked.

They made an industry of it, eventually exporting to the world.

And, like the people of that village, businesses they could develop from their own homes.

Name of the village? It’s times like this I wish I’d kept travel diaries more assiduously, but from some searching today on the web I’m at least 95% sure it was Kasongan.

A tourism site I found via Google included a whole piece on Kasongan which sounded very much like the place I visited (emphases added by me):

Kasongan village is the dwelling place of kundis, which means earthenware jugs and later refers to people who make any earthenware jug-like as kitchen tools and ornaments.

and

At the beginning, these ceramics did not have style at all. The legend of the dead horse, however, inspired the craftsmen to create horse motifs on many products, especially the horses carrying earthenware goods or roof-tiles complete with bamboo basket placed on the horseback, in addition to frog, rooster and elephant motifs.

The entering modern influence and culture from outside through various media and the first introduction of Kasongan to public by Sapto Hudoyo around 1971-1972 with artistic and commercial touch and commercially sold in major scale by Sahid Keramik around 1980s enables tourists to see various ceramic motifs.

From what I’ve read today, the village of Kasongan went from strength to strength, not only selling to people who visited there but shipping quantities of goods internationally and became its regency’s main source of foreign currency. Then the Bali bombings in 2002 affected trade badly and then the village and its business were devastated by the major earthquake in 2006.

An article in the NZ Herald at the time, “Quake survivors forced to start from zero”, painted a grim picture of the devastation caused and the anxiety among the survivors.

But judging by this video (warning: turn the volume down as there is some serious static part way through), apparently taken from a motorbike driving through Kasognan recently, the village and its industry seem to be thriving again. It’s certainly a bigger and more bustling place than I recall from those days long ago when I visited.

I couldn’t see any little clay elephants in the video. I like to think they are still being made.

Because my elephant reminds me of how those very poor people took that one skill they had as a community, making earthenware vessels and then drying them in the sun, getting help from someone more creative to add value to their work and thus created livelihoods for themselves and their families.

I see it as a story to encourage and inspire many of those people around the world who have in recent months been put out of work or had their savings destroyed in the great economic meltdown. I’m sure many of those people, who may understandably be grieving for the loss of their jobs and/or savings, have skills which they can translate into viable businesses.

My hope is that someone who reads this story of the resilient people of Kasongan, who made my little clay elephant and turned their dirt poor village into an exporter to the world, and then picked themselves up after a 6.3 earthquake to do it all again, might be moved to share the story with someone they know who is feeling pessimistic about their economic situation and who might just be inspired by it to re-evaluate their own skills and how those skills could be successfully employed and marketed.

If the story helps just one person get back on their feet and create a successful business I will feel I have done something useful to honour the people of that village.