CAREERS: A Former CIA Agent Explains How To Advance Your Career Like A Spy

http://www.businessinsider.in/A-Former-CIA-Agent-Explains-How-To-Advance-Your-Career-Like-A-Spy/articleshow/45723965.cms

In order to survive, spies have to be really good at their jobs. 

They have to gain their opponent's trust and respond to a crisis quickly. 

In the book "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer," J.C. Carleson writes about her experience as an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency and the business and career tips she gained during those eight years.

From her experience, we compiled nine career tips that can help any employee reach the top of their professional game - and survive.

Study your industry and look for trends and connections in the field.

"You may diligently read all of the business journals, faithfully study your industry's breaking news, be able to recite from memory your competition's last SEC filing, and still be missing the whole picture."

Basically, you need to gain as much knowledge as possible in your industry and see how everything connects with one another.

Look for trends and try to predict what will happen in the future for your industry. This will help you become an expert in your field.

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Create a "hook" when networking.

"CIA officers spend a great deal of time formulating personalized hooks for their targets. A proper hook contains three elements:

• A reason to meet once.
• A reason to connect.
• A reason to continue to meet.

"A good hook allows a case officer to establish a mutually beneficial relationship quickly - even if this relationship is based on deception."

Similar to a CIA agent, if you want to meet someone in your industry, find a reason for them to want to take the time out to meet you. What can you offer them? Always approach the relationship with what you can do for them before asking for favors.

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer" 

Keep your guard up when other people are being nice to you.

"Your cubicle neighbor may suddenly be chattier than usual because he is competing with you for a promotion."

Carleson says you should never let your guard down and you should always know why someone is being nice to you - even if you are familiar with them.

In fact, "your most talented, hardest-working, most gregarious, best-liked co-workers are your biggest threats. That might sound a bit nasty, but he fact of the matter is, you are constantly being compared to your colleagues when it comes to decisions about promotions, bonuses, or career-enhancing opportunities." 

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Don't share too much information during the job interview. 

"It may seem tempting to share information in order to prove your knowledge during a job interview with a competitor's company, but a reputable company should be more interested in learning about you than your previous employer."

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Know that high achievers are difficult to manage. 

"The highest achiever can also be the most difficult to manage. For better or worse, they have the confidence to stand up to authority, the intelligence to debate, and the bravery to defy - all of which can amount to a serious management challenge."

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Don't force people who work best alone to work in groups.

"...[Don't] force collaboration onto talented individuals who are superstars in their own right but don't necessarily work well with others. Some people thrive on team participation, out-of-specialty rotational assignments, and constant developmental opportunities. Other people do their jobs well and just want to be left alone to do what they were hired for."

Some people might be brilliant at their jobs, but would be "disastrous managers" and "a thoroughly unpleasant team member," and in this case, Carleson says you should keep them if they're brilliant, but promote them "over the course of the years on the basis of his solo work and left alone to achieve his results."

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Analyze your own weaknesses.

"Not even the best actors are infinitely versatile when it comes to playing a role. You can be as observant, responsive, and flexible as humanly possible, but there are always going to be situations in which you are, by nature of your appearance, your personality, or any other immutable characteristic, at a disadvantage."

You need to know how other people perceive you and how you tick them off. Then, you need to narrow down any commonalities to identify your weaknesses. Be aware of them when you're doing business with someone new.

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Know other people's weaknesses. 

You need to know everyone's weaknesses and vulnerabilities if you're doing business with them. You should have a good idea of their background and even their competitor's background.

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

Follow through on both your promises and your threats.

"Whether you have made promises or threats, follow through. You may be back at the negotiating table sooner than you think; a reputation for bluffing will not serve you well."

If you're threatening to leave your employer so that they'll offer you a raise, you need to be prepared to do so if they aren't willing to give you what you want.

Source: "Work Like a Spy: Business Tips from a Former CIA Officer"

This post was originally written by Vivian Giang.

Social Programs That Work

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/01/opinion/social-programs-that-work.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
By RON HASKINS


Sam Island

WASHINGTON — HARDLY anyone knows it, but since its earliest days the Obama administration has been pursuing the most important initiative in the history of federal attempts to use evidence to improve social programs.

Despite decades of efforts and trillions of dollars in spending, rigorous evaluations typically find that around 75 percent of programs or practices that are intended to help people do better at school or at work have little or no effect. Studies of the early childhood education program Head Start and the substance-abuse prevention program D.A.R.E. show that even when there are benefits, they are often modest and not enduring.

As a policy analyst who helped House Republicans design the 1996 welfare overhaul and who later advised President George W. Bush on social policy, I am committed to the principle that the government should fund only social welfare programs that work. That’s why it’s imperative that the new Congress reject efforts by some Republicans to cut the Obama administration’s evidence-based programs. Especially in a time of austerity, policy makers must know which programs work, and which don’t.

A growing body of evidence shows that a few model social programs — home visits to vulnerable families, K-12 education, pregnancy prevention, community college and employment training — produce solid impacts that can last for many years. Here are some examples.

At 24 mostly rural locations in Florida, Wyman’s Teen Outreach Programworks with 6,000 ninth graders a year to promote healthy behaviors, life skills and a sense of purpose. Evaluations of the program, which is based on a nine-month curriculum, show that it helped reduce teen pregnancies and lowered the risk of school suspension and dropout.

At 160 elementary schools in low-income communities in California, Colorado, Maryland, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Washington and the District of Columbia, a program called Reading Partners pairs volunteer tutors with children for twice-weekly 45-minute sessions. An evaluation of the program in 19 schools across three states by the research firm M.D.R.C. found substantial improvements in reading skills.

In Lancaster County, Pa., the Nurse-Family Partnership serves 175 low-income, first-time moms. Nurses start visiting the mothers before birth and continue, with diminishing frequency, until the child is 2. The nurses are trained to form a close relationship with the mother and advise her on prenatal health and child-rearing issues — including smoking and drinking during pregnancy and planning future pregnancies — and on life skills. Typically, 20 to 30 visits are involved. Three randomized controlled trials have shown that the program has major impacts that last at least until the child is 15. The mothers who participated were less likely to abuse or neglect their kids, and more likely to be working, and their kids were more likely to be healthy and ready for school.

Success for All, a comprehensive schoolwide reform program, primarily for high-poverty elementary schools, emphasizes early detection and prevention of reading problems before they become serious. Students of various ages who read at the same performance level are grouped together and receive daily, 90-minute reading classes, as well as one-on-one tutoring and cooperative learning activities. We know it works because a study that randomly assigned 41 schools across 11 states to an experimental or control group found improved reading skills, including comprehension, in students in the experimental group. Most of the students were black or Hispanic, and from low-income families. Success for All was awarded $50 million to more than double its network of schools over five years, to train teachers and to improve effectiveness in new sites.

Expansion of these programs has been possible because the Obama administration, building on work by the Bush administration, has insisted that money for evidence-based initiatives go primarily to programs with rigorous evidence of success, as measured by scientifically designed evaluation. (Continuing evaluation is necessary because programs that work in one location can fail when implemented by new organizations in different locations.) Since 2010, these principles have been the basis for competitive grants to more than 1,400 programs across the country.

Over time, an evidence-based approach should be a prerequisite for any program to get federal dollars. Shamefully, this has not been the case. When John M. Bridgeland led Mr. Bush’s Domestic Policy Council, he was amazed to find 339 federal programs for disadvantaged youth, administered by 12 departments and agencies, at a cost of $224 billion. Very few had been evaluated to determine whether they made a difference.

The evidence-based movement separates the wheat from the chaff. If this movement spreads to more federal programs, especially the big education, employment and health programs supported by formula-based grants, we can expect consternation and flailing as many program operators discover that their programs are part of the chaff.

This is why rigorous evaluation is often unpopular, for politicians in both parties. Historically, Democrats have been criticized for throwing money at intractable problems, while Republicans have been depicted as heartlessly assuming that social spending never works. The truth is, of course, more complex. Since Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, disjointed, inefficient, poorly implemented social programs have been created and funded without vigorous assessment. Years of failure have taught us that humans are difficult to change.

The Obama evidence-based initiative has charted a new path that could reduce poverty and increase economic opportunity for the disadvantaged. Rather than cut these programs, Congress should extend funding so that successful programs can expand to new sites while programs that are not working are improved or abandoned. Social policy is too important to be left to guesswork.

Ron Haskins is co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution and co-author of “Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy.”

It's Official: Micromanaging Kills Productivity

http://www.inc.com/jill-krasny/what-really-makes-employees-work-harder.html?cid=sf01002&utm_content=buffer05e0c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

New research suggests the more you try to dictate how and when employees work, the less they will accomplish.

By Jill Krasny



IMAGE: Complot/Shutterstock

Ever wonder what really makes employees work harder?

Let's start with what doesn't. 

Contrary to the instinct of micromanagers everywhere, watching over your employees' shoulders and dictating where and when they should work is perhaps the worst tactic for productivity. 

New research from University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel finds highly educated employees work more when given autonomy over their schedules. In fact, they'll often work to the point of exhaustion. 

Michel saw this herself, when she began her career at Goldman Sachs years ago. There, the average investment banker burned out after nine years and typically quit by age 35. To understand this, Michel spent 12 years studying young executives at two large investment banks.

When employees were pressured to work more, they were less inspired, she found. But when allowed to set their own pace, taking fewer vacations and working on weekends, they could accept it because it was their choice, Michel explained in the summer issue of The Sociological Quarterly, where her study was published. 

Of course, employee-dictated schedules aren't without their flaws. Michel noted many autonomous bankers worked excessively hard, suffering "debilitating physical and psychological breakdowns" as well as back pain, insomnia, addictions, and eating disorders. Others often sacrificed personal needs at the expense of a healthy work-life balance. So while the work schedules were on their own terms, their judgment, creativity, and ethical sensitivity suffered, making life miserable for those around them. 

What's your take on how much autonomy employees should have regarding their schedules?

Here’s the Schedule Very Successful People Follow Every Day

http://time.com/2946226/heres-the-schedule-very-successful-people-follow-every-day/
Eric Barker

All too often, productivity tips are a dime a dozen. Some even conflict with each other. What we need is a system.

What’s key is feeling in control and making sure your energy levels are matched to the importance of the task at hand.What schedule do the pros use? What system does science say allows us to be most productive?

Let’s assemble the expert ideas and research we’ve covered into a more cohesive schedule you can apply to your day.

How do you do that? You may want to get your calendar out. We’ve got some changes to make.

1) The Morning Ritual

Laura Vanderkam studied the schedules of high-achievers. What did she find? They rise early. Almost all have a morning ritual.

You need to wake up before the insanity starts. Before demands are made on you. Before your goals for the day have competition.

If you want to achieve work-life balance you need to determine what is important and focus on that. (And research shows goals make you happier.)

Having concrete goals was correlated with huge increases in confidence and feelings of control.

Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

People who construct their goals in concrete terms are 50 percent more likely to feel confident they will attain their goals and 32 percent more likely to feel in control of their lives. – Howatt 1999

As I’ve discussed before, the second part of your morning ritual is about mood. That feeling of control is what produces grit and makes people persist.

Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

Research comparing students of similar ability finds that the distinguishing feature between those who maintain a strong work ethic in their studies and those who give up is a sense of control. Those who express a sense of control receive scores that are a full letter grade higher than those who do not. – Mendoza 1999

(For more on morning rituals, click here.)

You’ve got your goal and you’re in control. Cool. But what about when you get to work? I recommend you find somewhere to hide. Here’s why…

2) Important Work First Thing — With No Distractions

Many people arrive at the office and immediately get busy with email and meetings, leaving real work for later in the day… Rookie error.

Research shows that 2.5 to 4 hours after waking is when your brain is sharpest. You want to waste that on a conference call or a staff meeting?

Studies show that alertness and memory, the ability to think clearly and to learn, can vary by between 15 and 30 percent over the course of a day. Most of us are sharpest some two and a half to four hours after waking.

When I interviewed willpower expert Roy Baumeister, what did he have to say?

Early morning is also when you’re most disciplined:

The longer people have been awake, the more self-control problems happen. Most things go bad in the evening.

Diets are broken at the evening snack, not at breakfast or in the middle of the morning. Impulsive crimes are mostly committed after midnight.

But does this really work? In studies of geniuses, most did their best work early in the day.

“But why did you say I need to hide somewhere?”

Because distractions make you stupid. These days it’s hard to do much real work at work.

Jason Fried explains the modern workplace is an endless stream of interruptions. (Short on time? Watch the first 5 minutes):

Can’t do the work of your choice when the day starts? Get in early or work from home before you head into the office.

(For more on using your peak hours right, click here.)

So you’re making progress on the thing that matters. But you can’t sprint for miles. What do you do when your brain gets tired?

3) Regroup When You Slow Down

Afternoon brain fog. We’ve all felt it. Why does this happen? Working too hard? Food coma? Often it’s just our natural circadian rhythm:

First, take a break. Get a snack or a power nap if you can.

What you need next is a mini-version of your morning ritual. Review your goals and the progress you’ve made this morning.

Harvard research shows nothing is more motivating than progress. Appreciating how far they’ve come is what very persistent people do.

Via The 100 Simple Secrets of Successful People:

Comparing people who tend to give up easily with people who tend to carry on, even through difficult challenges, researchers find that persistent people spend twice as much time thinking, not about what has to be done, but about what they have already accomplished, the fact that the task is doable, and that they are capable of it. – Sparrow 1998

(For more on fighting procrastination, click here.)

You got a break, reviewed your goals and achievements, and now you’re ready to work again. What do you focus on now?

4) Meetings, Calls and People Stuff In The Afternoon

When energy is high, that’s when you want to focus on creative, challenging work. When energy is low, do busy work.

Scott Adams, creator of “Dilbert“, makes comics in the morning. By the afternoon, his brain is fuzzy and he shifts his objectives.

Via How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:

One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task… At 6:00 A.M. I’m a creator, and by 2:00 P.M. I’m a copier… It’s the perfect match of my energy level with a mindless task.

And research shows the afternoon really is the best time for meetings —specifically, 3PM.

Need to power through some busy work but you can’t muster the willpower? This is when distraction can benefit you.

When tasks are dull and you’re feeling distractable, friends can make you more productive — even if they’re not helping.

Via Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are:

Just having friends nearby can push you toward productivity. “There’s a concept in ADHD treatment called the ‘body double,’ ” says David Nowell, Ph.D., a clinical neuropsychologist from Worcester, Massachusetts. “Distractable people get more done when there is someone else there, even if he isn’t coaching or assisting them.” If you’re facing a task that is dull or difficult, such as cleaning out your closets or pulling together your receipts for tax time, get a friend to be your body double.

(For more on how to work smarter, not harder, click here.)

So the work day is over. Is that it? Nope. There’s an optimal way to handle your schedule after the sun goes down too.

5) A Relaxing Evening

Though successful people do work long hours, the greats almost all take the evening off to recharge.

Before dinner, Tim Ferriss recommends writing down your big goal for tomorrow. This will get your mind off work and allow you to relax.

What does research say can help you chill out? Hint: don’t trust your instincts.

The things we frequently choose to reduce stress are often the least effective.

What does work? Seeing friends and active hobbies. What doesn’t? More passive activities like TV, video games and eating.

Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)

Past that, get to bed. Studies of world class performersshow they have boundless energy, so get those zzz’s to be one of them.

No, you can’t cheat yourself on sleep and not see negative effects.

What does brain research tell us about cutting corners at bedtime? You’re basically making yourself stupid:

The bottom line is that sleep loss means mind loss. Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability, general math knowledge.

(For how to make your weekends awesome, click here.)

So how do we bring this all together to be more successful?

Sum Up

Here’s what a successful schedule looks like:

1. Your Morning Ritual
2. Important Work First Thing — With No Distractions
3. Regroup When You Slow Down
4. Meetings, Calls And Little Things In The Afternoon
5. A Relaxing Evening

Sadly, we can’t all dictate our own schedule. That’s why there are no specific times listed above.

But we can all opt to do some things before or after others. Stop focusing on just getting lots of random things done to pretend you’re making progress.

All moments in your day are not equal, and all tasks are not of equal importance.

Knowing the best time to get the right things done is key.

What will this schedule do for you? Well, when the day ends you’restill going to find that you didn’t get everything done.

But that won’t bother you much because you did the things that mattered, and did them well.

(If you want a nice PDF of this schedule, join my weekly updatehere. I’ll be sending one out with next week’s update.)

Join 45K+ readers. Get a free weekly update via email here.

This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

LEADERSHIP BEST ADVICE: Peter Thiel's very negative - and very useful - advice for entrepreneurs

http://fortune.com/2014/11/12/peter-thiel-advice-entrepreneurs/?utm_content=buffer2dc05&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

by  

Brett Arends

Peter ThielPhotograph by David Paul Morris—Bloomberg via Getty Images

So you’re a young dot-com wannabe launching your own venture. Here’s what the successful entrepreneur and investor has to say.

Maybe you can tell something about the Zeitgeist of the business world by looking at what business people are reading at airports. In the white-collar recession angst of the early 1990s, for example, they were desperately flipping through the cost-cutting manifesto Reengineering The Corporation. During the China panic a decade ago, it was Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. When the financial crisis exploded in 2008, and blew their neat little spreadsheets to smithereens, they turned to Nassim Taleb’sThe Black Swan, about the power of the unpredictable, to find out why.

Today, the Nasdaq is surging, young companies such as Facebook and Twitter and Uber and AirBnB are turning established industries upside down, and a new generation of dot-com wannabes are dreaming of starting their own revolution. So Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Peter Thiel has probably picked the perfect moment to publish Zero To One: Notes On Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Thiel has a remarkable track record. He co-launched PayPal and sold it to eBay for billions. Then, as a venture capitalist, he was among the early backers of Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Yelp. It says something about Thiel’s clout that the marketing materials for the book have come with gushing reviews from Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Nassim Taleb, and even GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Okay, so you’re a young dot-com wannabe in San Francisco—or New York, or London, or Taipei—thinking of jumping on the bandwagon and launching your own venture. Your company will be the next Uber or Square or so on. What advice does Thiel have for you?

Lots. Some of it is buried, or revealed in passing. And upon looking back through Zero To One I realized most of the really interesting advice is negative. Don’t.

So… don’t try to “disrupt” an existing industry: instead, try to fill a need that nobody else knows exists. Don’t get overwhelmed by uncertainty. Don’t diversify. Don’t hire consultants.

Don’t have part-time employees (“Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.”) Don’t pay your CEO too much and don’t pay staff lots of cash instead of stock.

Don’t have a board of more than three to five people. Don’t offer incremental advances. Don’t bother launching a new technology unless it is “an order of magnitude” or “10X” better than what exists today.

Don’t play little ball—swing for home runs. Don’t listen to the mainstream. Don’t be afraid of the unknown. Don’t try to be a big fish in a big pond before you’ve been a big fish in a small pond. Don’t start a company with people you don’t really like. Don’t neglect sales and marketing.

And, my favorite bit of advice: Do not, under any circumstances, create a complex or confused organization. “The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal,” Thiel writes, “was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.”

This, of course, is applicable to people in any organization or business whatsoever, in the old economy as well as the new. I am constantly astonished at how many big companies are so badly organized and how few follow sensible management techniques. Maybe if more established companies adopted a little more of the thinking of successful startups, there would be fewer successful startups.

8 SECRETS OF PERSONAL ORGANIZERS

http://www.elledecor.com/home-remodeling/what-the-pros-know/personal-organizing-secrets-womans-day

Learn from the pros; their ingenious ideas for ditching clutter will save you time, money, and stress.

BY BRYNN MANNINO

There's no right way to organize your home. Whatever strategy you choose just has to work with your lifestyle, habits and tastes. But there are a few tried-and-true strategies that can enhance the effectiveness of any system. From being aware of clutter hot spots to identifying red flags that your organizing method isn't working, we learned some smart approaches to getting organized from the pros so you can save the time, money and stress that come with living in a den of disorder.

1. Make it easier to put things away than to take them out. 
"It always surprises me how difficult people make organizing for themselves," says Kate Brown, certified professional organizer and owner of Impact Organizing LLC. Her suggestion: "Make everything a one-handed operation."

For example, don't hide your laundry basket in the back of the closet. Instead, use an open bin that you can throw your clothes into from across the room. "And avoid lids at almost all costs," she urges. Using open containers for things you use often like toiletries and cooking supplies makes it easier to put them away. This advice even applies to garbage cans. Brown recommends investing in one with a lever you can step on to pop the lid open. "The fewer steps, the better the organizing system," she says. 

2. Don't buy storage containers until you’ve purged. 
"When people want to get organized, the first thing they usually do is run out and buy storage supplies," says Julie Isaacs, a professional organizer and founder of Uncluttered Home. "But that's actually backwards." The point, she explains, is to evaluate why you have so much stuff to begin with — not find new ways to house your junk. “You won’t have any idea of what you really need in terms of containers or shelving until you've purged." While deciding what to keep and what to toss, always remember the "80/20 rule." "It's the theory that most of us only use 20 percent of what we have. That’s a good starting point to realizing you are surrounded by a lot of things you probably don't need," Isaacs says. Plus, not only will slimming down your stuff save you money on storage supplies, but it'll save you the headache of going through excess items in an emergency or last-minute situation.

RELATED: 43 Double-Duty Tips for Household Items

3. There are red flags that let you know your system isn't working.
If a room still somehow looks messy after you've cleaned, it's time to improve your organizational system, which, according to Brown, should allow you to tidy up in 15 minutes or less. Once you've pulled out what you don't need — to either throw away or donate — the next step is to group things together based on use or occasion and store them in open, square containers (round ones take up too much space). Now that everything has a place, Brown recommends labeling. "If you don’t like labeling, find some other way to communicate your organizational system to yourself and your family, either by using translucent bins or by simply involving everyone in the purging process so they have a better idea of your goals," she says.  

4. Use containers as visual signals that it’s time to purge. 
Not only do containers keep items grouped and easier to find, but they also make it obvious when you're at capacity. For instance, most organizing experts would recommend keeping a basket or open container for magazines beside the couch. Brown recommends an 11" x 14" container that’s 4" to 6" deep. "When the magazine container is full, you've [got] more reading material than you can handle," she says. A pile of magazines, which has no literal limit, doesn't relay the same message. 

RELATED: 12 Ways to Declutter Your Kitchen

5. Don't treat drawers like catchalls. 
"There isn’t a drawer in your house that should not have container organizers in them," says interior decorator Christopher Lowell, author of Seven Layers of Organization. They can be any material you want — wood, wire mesh or clear plastic — and are available at most home goods stores. "This allows you to separate the drawers into defined areas for specific things verses throwing everything into one big space," says Lowell. For the bedroom, store everyday items — like underwear and socks—in top drawers, workout clothes in the second or third drawers and pants in the bottom drawers. In the bathroom, keep cotton swabs and other daily use items on the counter within arm's reach, and tools you use occasionally under the cabinet. "With the things you only use now and then separated out and away from the things you need every day, those daily essentials will be better organized and easier to get to," Lowell says. 

6. Eliminate clutter hot spots. 
Flat surfaces like your dining room table, entryway table and kitchen counters tend to accumulate piles faster than any other spot in the house, explains Isaacs, who advises clients to make clearing all flat surfaces part of their nightly routine — right along with washing their face and brushing their teeth. But if that doesn't work, her last-ditch trick is to physically block any surface that has become a clutter haven. "For instance, if you put a flower arrangement in the middle of the dining room table and set it with placemats, you're sending the message that the space is no longer a dumping zone," Isaacs says. 

7. Store a discard bag in the closet. 
"I keep a shopping bag with a handle in the front of my closet. Every time I try on a piece of clothing and then take if off again because it's unflattering, doesn't fit, is pulled, stained or out of style, I put it in the bag," Brown says. "If you've taken the piece of clothing off for any reason other than that it's dirty or doesn't match, that means it's not right and will probably never be," she says. When the bag is full, Isaacs explains, donate the clothes or trade them with a friend at a swap party. 

8. The items you use most frequently should be easiest to get to. 
Keep the items you use every day in plain sight — or at least at eye level. "The things you use daily should be the easiest to get to," says Lowell. "While the things you use once in a while should require a step stool." This is where high shelving comes in handy. "Things you use only once a year should require a ladder," he adds. (Think attics or out-of-reach shelving in a garage.) Not only will this storage system make it easier for you to find the things you use often, but the items you don’t use regularly will stay organized until you need them.

This story originally appeared on Womansday.com