Shlucha Can Organize Your Life

By COLlive reporter

Reviewing what Rivka Caroline does, can tire even the motivated and energetic folks among us.

She’s the Program Director of Chabad of Key Biscayne, Florida, run by her husband, Rabbi Yoel Caroline, organizing holiday activities and adult education classes.

Then, there’s the lectures she gives to individuals, small businesses, teams within corporations around the country and at Jewish centers – the latest was this past week at Chabad of Scottsdale in Arizona.

That’s in addition to her social media activity which includes close to 111,597 followers on Twitter that await her insights and tips. She also has fans on Facebook and Pinterest.

Caroline is also the founder and moderator of an Internet support group for fellow Chabad Shluchos called “Shluchos Working Smarter.” It has 400 women in various leadership roles who receive and share advice and encouragement.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and is currently completing her master’s in psychology in 2013. Oh, and she’s a mother of 7 children.

So how does she “do it all” and remain sane?

Well, she is the first to state that she does not do it all. In her newly published 200 page book, Caroline argues that a human cannot get it all done alone – and there’s no point even to try.

“Frazzled to Focused – The Ultimate Guide for Moms Who Want to Reclaim Their Time, Their Sanity and Their Lives” teaches how to leverage time to work effectively and find time for the things that count.

“By the time I had a few kids KA”H and was working with the Chabad House, I felt that I was always ‘busy’ but getting less and less effective,” she tells COLlive.com.

“I realized I had the choice of basically losing my sanity or learning the tricks to time management. So I became a voracious reader of all things time management and began to apply some of the suggested techniques.”

What she learned, was to stop trying to do it all, to delegate, to create systems and to stop being so ‘busy’ and start being more ‘effective’.

“I still am disorganized by nature,” she admits, “but having so much to do has forced me to learn how to navigate it all while retaining my sanity. Better time management=more sanity.”

And thus, the “So Be Organized” community was created. The new book, published by River Grove Books and available on paperback and in a Kindle edition, is its road map to survival.

“This is the book I wished I had read 20 years ago,” Caroline shares. “It was written with the overwhelmed mom in mind but I’m hearing that dads are reading it too, which is awesome as one of my goals is also to help people have less anxiety at home and increase in sholom bayis.”

Here are some tips from the “productivity guru”:

1. Manage those interruptions.
2. The morning starts the night before.
3. Later=never.
4. Write down the key 10 items you want to get done tomorrow.
5. Don’t confuse efficient with effective.
6. It’s all about retrieval: if you can’t find it, you don’t own it.
7. Don’t put it down—put it away.

Perhaps the best indication that Caroline practices what she preaches is that the new book was co-authored by Amy Sweeting, a freelance editor and ghost writer based in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Sweeting, whose child went to Caroline’s Hebrew Schoo in Key Biscayne, says that after 15 years of resisting her husband’s suggestion to plan out the family’s meals for the week, she finally gave it a try at Caroline’s prodding.

She was amazed at how it has made evenings so much more relaxed.

Intrigued? Here is a 30 page free excerpt. “From Frazzled to Focused” is sold on Amazon.com and is sold at Hamafitz Judaica & Gifts in Crown Heights. Learn more about Rivka Caroline at SoBeOrganized.com