Accelerated aging of organic materials which results in believable predictions is a topic of interest to many engineers. O-rings are an example; love them, hate them, or like most people, consider them an afterthought -until the 25 cent part brings down your million dollar system. Organic materials are ubiquitous, and serve many functions. Over the past several years, we have derived improved approaches for predicting sealing force loss of o-rings (the degradation parameter of fundamental interest) based on developing compression stress-relaxation (CSR) methods. For certain materials we have shown that the predicted results for the sealing force decay are qualitatively consistent with the more easily measured compression set measurements taken on field-aged o-rings, leading to the development of a surveillance approach. This talk will use o-rings (and other organic materials) as examples to discuss the challenges and thought processes that are involved in organic material accelerated aging studies. It will also touch on why we do what we do, and on some of the common mistakes made.