Tax Time Tip

Many people have just received their W-2s during this last week of January. To make things easier when you fill out your tax forms, start a special file or folder for all tax related paperwork and statements that you are getting in the mail now.

Having a distinct location for these tax-related papers will make them easier to find and access between now and April 15th. If you have an accountant or tax preparer that assists you with your taxes, you may want to schedule an appointment now, so that you have more choice and control over the date or time of the meeting. As tax day nears, it may be hard to get an appointment that will work with your schedule.

Think Twice about Online Statements

Just a quick tip today. If you need to have printed copies of bank or credit card statements, or utility bills, it may actually be quicker to just continue receiving them in paper format rather than signing up to receive them electronically.

From a time standpoint, when you get the statement in the mail, you have what you need. If you get the info via e-mail, you may not be near a printer at that moment, and will have to remind yourself to be sure to print out a copy.

This can actually be more environmentally friendly, as the mailed statement is typically on smaller paper than the standard 8 1/2 by 11 printer paper and the mailed copies are generally two-sided, which not all printers can automatically do.

Of course, if you don't need to retain a printed record of a bill or statement, the electronic method is still your best bet!

Save Time by Optimizing Storage

In order to save time, it is typically a good idea to stock up on frequently used household items. Laundry detergent, dish soap, paper towels, bath tissue, shampoo, and toothpaste are some examples of things that people often need to have on hand, yet frequently run out of. Making sure to purchase a 30, 60, 90, or 120 day supply of these items can you time by cutting down last-minute trips to the store. As well, buying these items in larger quantities can usually save you some money.

A word of caution here - you don't want to buy more of these products than you will use in a reasonable amount of time, let's say a couple of months. If you overbuy, the items are just going to take up valuable cupboard space that could best be utilized for another purpose.

Likewise, if your storage space is limited, you will need to make choices about how best to use the space. A small bathroom cupboard could hold three months supply of bath tissue, but then you'd have no room for all of your other bathroom essentials. In this case, stocking up with several months' supplies may actually be causing clutter and storage issues.

A professional organizer can work with you to maximize your existing storage space and develop systems to manage household inventory levels of the items you want and need to have on hand.

An Easier Way to Use Debit Gift Cards

Over the past two holiday seasons, I had received a few Visa gift cards. This initially seemed like a wonderful gift, and much better than a particular store gift card in that I could use it anywhere. However, I realized that these credit card debit style gift cards are a bit tricky to use.

For most standard gift cards, you would go to the store, shop, then when they ring you up, you would give the cashier your gift card. If the total due was less than the card balance, so be it. If the amount due was more than the card balance, the card balance would be deducted, then the remainder of the purchase could be paid for with cash, check, debit card, or credit card.

With the Visa debit cards, they work the same way only if the purchase price is less than or equal to the card balance. If the balance is lower than the purchase price, the card will decline. That means you have to figure out beforehand that you have, for example, $36.71 left on your card, and the purchase is $45.29, so you could tell the cashier that you need to first write a check or give cash for whatever that difference is; if you can figure it out, and if the cashier can even put a partial portion on some other method of payment.

To avoid these issues when I received another Visa debit card, I used it to purchase a gift card at the grocery store where I usually shop. This made it alot easier to spend the money and not be left with an odd balance that was hard to use up. You could also split the amount on the original debit gift card, let's say it was $50, and get a $20 grocery card and a $30 Target card. You can decide what works best for you. In any event, this method with save you time and frustration and will also keep you from wasting the remaining balance on the credit card style gift card.

Organized for Dinnertime

For busy two-income couples and families, getting dinner on the table every night can be a real challenge. A little organization and planning can go a long way in making mealtimes easier on everyone.

This is something I have practical, personal experience with. My husband and I often have unpredictable schedules and erratic commute times. I would arrive home, cook a nice meal, and then he might get stuck having to grab a bite at the office. It was frustrating to spend time cooking to wind up having the food go to waste.

I got sick of throwing uneaten food away, try as we might to make meals out of leftovers. We then went to the opposite extreme, where I did not want to even do much grocery shopping, in order to avoid the waste. Of course, when we arrived home from work hungry and tired, the cupboard was bare and we had to go out to grab a bite to eat.

What we finally came up with was a rough listing of meals that we rotate during the week based on our schedules. One night we might have a big chef salad, another night is a grocery store rotisserie chicken picked up on the way home from work. For nights where our schedule may be unpredictable, we might have frozen meals like Lean Cuisines on hand to have with a small salad. Soup and sandwiches is another time-saving option. We typically also work in a trip to a nearby, inexpensive local restaurant or two.

This makes it a great deal easier to grocery shop, but still gives some measure of flexibility as there is no set-in-stone, specific menu. As well, it helps with grocery budgeting as well as controlling dining out expenses, since we generally know beforehand both where and what we will be eating. This mealtime organizing tip should save you both money and time.

An Interesting Question....

The other day, I was at a professional women's networking meeting. Someone asked me what I do and I told them I was a professional organizer. They then asked me if I worked with "stuff" or with time management. My response was that I do both. After the conversation was over, though, I started thinking more about her question. It sort of seemed odd to me that someone would think that "stuff" and "time" were two distinct things.

Sure, there can be neat, organized people who may not manage their time very well. They run late, over-schedule themselves, and the like. When I go into a home or office and see clutter and piles of paper, or "stuff", I immediately start thinking of questions to ask them about how they spend their time.

The rationale here is that most clutter results from delayed decision-making. What should I do with this thing? Should I keep it? If so, where? A file cabinet? A drawer? In the house? Which room? When we don't have an immediate answer, the item sits there. And sits there.

Many attempts at organizing fail due to simply trying to temporarily clear out the stuff and the clutter, but not digging deeper and finding out where the time management system has failed to provide the bandwidth to deal with all these papers and items on an ongoing basis so that it becomes a routine part of our lives.

Quickly Revisit the Organizing Resolution

You resolved that 2008 was going to be the year you finally got organized. January is almost over and you have not done much of anything to get started with this goal. You are feeling like a failure, and that it is too late to even bother trying at this point.

Well, actually, it is not too late. Yesterday's commitment to start getting organized tomorrow is here today! I have mentioned in several posts that it can really be quite overwhelming to try to tackle months or years or decades of accumulated clutter. I also advised that it is best to break large projects down into smaller more manageable tasks.

Another great thing to get yourself back on track and committed to your goal is to do a "quick-fix", which is just a very speedy mini-task related to you organizing and de-cluttering goals. A great example would be to grab the pencil cup on your desk and test the two dozen pens in there and dispose of the ones that no longer write. Take out ONE file folder from a file cabinet and weed out any outdated, unwanted items.

These very quick mini-tasks may not seem like much, but you will be surprised how doing just one small thing like this may motivate you to move forward and do the rest of the file cabinet. If your resolution has stalled, this can be a great way to kick-start your organizing projects.

Make Office Recycling Easy

Our best intentions to recycle can go awry if we don't have a plan in place. In home offices, where space is often an issue, people typically may have one trash can. However, since the office is where a great deal of paper is processed, it makes sense to have a "trash station".

As most of the trash in the office is paper, a good sized trash can for paper to be recycled should be central to this system. In addition, if personal or financial documents need to be disposed of, a shredder should be added to the area. If you are shredding a large amount of paperwork, or shredding even small amounts fairly frequently, it may be best to have the shredder on its own trash bin.

It is also important to have a small container or bin for any items that might not be candidates for recycling, in order to have a place to dispose of them without having to mix them in with the papers and/or to leave them strewn about your workspace.

When trash day comes, it will be easy to gather up the recycling materials. You will have the satisfaction of knowing you are doing your part to help the environment and keeping your own space neat and tidy as well. Setting up a trash station is quick, inexpensive, and a great way to quickly make a difference in your home or office.

Collector's Clutter

Collections can quickly overrun a space, giving it a cluttered appearance. Collectors who may consider contacting a professional organizer are often worried that the organizer will want them to get rid of their collectibles. In actualality, the organizer can work with the collector to determine how to best store and display a collection in order to highlight it as part of a room's decor.

Many times, a collector will have their collections scattered all over a room or throughout the entire home. By grouping collectibles in one location within a room, it really places emphasis on the collection whille at the same time reducing the visual clutter around the room.

For very large collections, it is sometimes best to have a central grouping of the very best pieces which can then be supplemented with a few additional pieces from the remaining collection. Any additional pieces can be rotated in and out of the display as needed or on a seasonal basis, and safely stored away in an accesbile location.

Getting organized is not about getting rid of the things you cherish. Instead, organizing your space can allow you to focus on the antiques, collectibles, and items you enjoy the most!

Fail to be Perfectly Organized

Setting up and maintaining a workable filing system can often be a hard project to jump into. The longer we wait to get started, the more the paper piles up, until we are faced with a mountain of clutter. We want to get organized and to be able to find that important document at a moment's notice, but we get stuck.

One of the biggest problems we often create for ourselves, often without even being aware of it, is that we want to be "perfectly" organized. For example, we might have a bill from the doctor's office and we can't decide if it should be filed as a medical document or as a financial document. We don't want to put the paper in the wrong place, so we put it nowhere.

This can be very self-defeating, but can be easily remedied. We need to remember that filing systems we create are used as a guideline to help us organize. Therefore, there is no perfect or correct categories, just the categories that work best for you at this point in your life.

If you can't decide which category to put a piece of paper in, just make a temporary decision - put it in one of the categories that makes sense, and remind yourself that you can change it later if need be. It is still better to have a medical bill in EITHER your medical or financial file than in a big unsorted pile where it will be nearly impossible to find it.

Shred It for Safety

In January, many people begin to organize and sort through the previous year's paperwork. Depending on your personal and business accounting needs, you may be getting ready to dispose of financial statements or other business documentation from several years back. This is a good habit to get into, as it frees up space and keeps your home or office from becoming overrun with paper.

However, it is important to dispose of this paperwork safely. While a trash can is a great everyday organizing tool; for sensitive financial information, a shredder is really your best bet. There are shredders available to handle anything from small to large volumes of document shredding.

With identity theft on the rise, taking precautions with your personal information is really a must nowadays. While taking the time to shred your documents may take a bit longer than simply tossing them in the trash, it is definitely time well spent.

I mentioned in previous posts that I have personally been attempting to greatly reduce the amount of paper in my life for both environmental and space-saving reasons. Even with these efforts, I was able to fill a majority of a huge lawn and garden refuse bag with shredded paper. A standard household can likely fill about two such bags.

Happy Shredding!

Getting There with Baby Steps

It can be quite overwhelming to begin on your resolution to get organized. It seems as if everywhere you turn, clutter abounds! Piles of paperwork, crammed closets, packed cabinets, and overflowing drawers lurk all over the house. When looking at the "big picture", organizing can indeed seem difficult.

To overcome this, it is really best to take baby steps by breaking down the project of "getting organized" into smaller tasks. Rather than thinking about the whole house, select one room to work on. Continue to drill down to smaller areas - instead of the bedroom, think about the closet and the dresser. Perhaps you could start just by organizing your sock drawer, pairing up the socks, discarding socks with no mates or those with holes or stains.

By creating manageable tasks for yourself, you set yourself up for a win-win situation. You are moving along with your goal of getting organized, and you are also getting a feeling of accomplishment with each small area you tackle. This, in turn, should serve to keep you motivated to continue.

Organizing often entails sorting through many years, or even decades, of accumulated belongings and clutter. It is not realistic to think you can totally revamp an entire house in just a few hours. It is very comparable to losing weight - you can't expect to lose 30 pounds all at once; rather, you have to keep at it and you will see the pounds go down gradually each week. Taking small steps towards your goal will eventually have the payoff you are looking for.

Coupon Clutter

I am a big fan of coupons. I get the Sunday paper each week and spend time clipping coupons. On an average weekly trip to the grocery store, I can easily save $5, if not more, by using coupons. That quickly adds up to over a $250 savings per year.

Aside from the manufacturer's coupons in the Sunday paper, many department stores have money saving coupons in their weekly circulars. As well, many schools have fundraisers selling local coupon books with savings for local restaurants and stores. Local junk mail often includes ValPak and other regional advertising catalogs that have clip-n-save offers.

It can be easy to collect a large number of coupons. However, it can soon become cumbersome to find a coupon you need if you have to sort through dozens or hundreds of them. You can spend 20 minutes digging into your coupon pile only to find that the offer expired a week ago.

To avoid this, try to be realistic about which coupons you will use. If you use a certain brand of hand lotion and don't typically deviate from that brand, it may not make sense to keep coupons for other brands. As well, if you have three bottles of lotion stored away, enough to last for several months, you may not need to clip the coupon that expires this month.

Coupons can be sorted by expiration date and/or by type (restaurant, pets, food, cleaning, health & beauty). If there are products you buy weekly or monthly, on a regular basis, you may want to keep those coupons filed separately so you can easily find them.

If you really don't want to throw coupons out, give them away to friends and family. If you don't have a baby, your friend may like to have the diaper and baby food coupons. I have even seen people offer themed batches of coupons on sites such as Craig's List or Freecycle.

Coupons can be a great way to save money. Avoiding coupon clutter can also save you time!

Organizing Fact and Fiction

There are many professional organizing rules and methodologies that people read about in books and articles. Often, it can seem that many of these guidelines appear contradictory to one another. For example, a common organizing principle is to store items nearest to where they are used; while another is to store similar items together.

When applying these principles to actual organizing situations, you will want to take several factors into consideration. Among these are the storage capabilities of the different rooms and areas within your home or workspace, as well as frequency of use of items.

While the "like items together" concept may seem to dictate that all household paper goods be stored together, it may not make practical sense. Instead, paper towels may be best kept in the laundry room, napkins in the kitchen, and bath tissue in the bathrooms; this is where these items are used. That being said, if your household goes through a large amount of paper goods, perhaps the kitchen and bathrooms lack the storage capacity to hold a big supply of these items. Therefore, maybe all overflow paper products would be stored in the laundry or utility room if that is where the most space exists.

Another example is kitchen and dining related items. While it may be logical for all dishes to be stored together, it may make more sense to have everyday dishes in the kitchen and the fancy china in the dining room. And holiday dishes might not be stored with other dishes at all; if storage space in the kitchen or dining room is limited during the rest of the year, it may make more sense to think of holiday china as a "holiday" item and store it away with the rest of your holiday decor.

It can indeed be confusing to determine how best to apply tried and true organizing ideas to your own unique storage and space planning challenges. There may be some trial and error involved as you mix and match the best plans for your situation. A professional organizer can aide you in this process; they have worked with a variety of clients and are able to quickly assess problems in order to provide effective resolution through a careful blending of techniques.

The Ongoing Effort to be Paperless

A few years ago, I decided to really make a conscious effort to reduce the amount of paper coming into my home and office and also to reduce the amount of paper I store. Although we rely on computers and email, there is still a huge amount of paper that comes into our lives. That being said, I have found a few things to be helpful in reducing the paper influx.

Receiving bills electronically and paying them electronically has made a big dent in the amount of paper that comes in on a monthly basis. Receiving bank and investment statements in paperless format also helps. Taking steps to have my name removed from junk mail marketing lists, limiting magazine subscriptions to what I will actually read, and reducing our newspaper subscription from daily to just the weekend editions has also cut down on the paper pileup.

In conjunction with trying to reduce the paper I use and receive, I have also really made a commitment to recycling paper when I am through with it. While I had not been so good about recycling cans and bottles, mostly because of problems with insects being attracted to food remnants in my garage recycling bin, I have found it to be quite easy to recycle any and all paper products that have not had contact with food or moisture. I was actually quite surprised to find that even after taking so many steps to reduce the paper I brought into the house, I am filling up a recycling bin just about every other week, and this is not including newspapers.

Overall, I have found it is not really feasible for most people to be paperless, but we can be paper-less!

The January Container Trap

This time of year, all the big discount stores and home improvement stores feature organizing and storage products in their catalogs and circulars. For people who have made a resolution to get more organized this year, these products promise to help them meet these organizing goals. However, the reality is that in most cases, you really need to go through all your belongings first, weeding out things that are no longer useful or meaningful, and then sorting the items that are left.

Once you have sorted out items by type and/or placed them in the areas of your home or office where they will be used and stored, then you can assess what types of storage containers or other organizing products may be useful.

I have gone into so many homes to find the homeowner bewildered as to why they are still living in disarray after spending hundreds of dollars on baskets, bins, containers, and shelving units. Really, it comes down to "putting the cart before the horse", or in this case, putting the plastic tote before the clutter.

A professional organizer can help you to effectively assess your belongings and storage needs. Since most of us want our homes to have decorative appeal, the organizer can assist in selecting proper storage solutions that will prevent your living spaces from looking like storage lockers.

Paper or Plastic?

In this age of heightened environmental awareness, the choices we make daily can have a great impact. Sometimes, it is hard to know the right thing to do. I am in Raleigh, NC, which currently has severe drought conditions. There are water usage restrictions in place. While I normally try to curtail use of paper products in favor of reusable cloth items, I worry if that is the right thing to do at this time. Are paper napkins and paper towels going to the landfill better than running a load of wash for cloth napkins and old rags that are used for cleaning?

Ultimately, I think the answer lies in trying to make more conscious decisions about these issues. If you use paper products, try not to be wasteful or excessive. And organization comes into play here, too. While you may not want to wash tomato sauce stained cloth napkins and cleaning product saturated rags with your nice clothes, you can wash these items with your bed and bath linens rather than as a separate load.

Organizing your life is about streamlining items and activities to make your daily tasks smoother and easier. And while disposable products can make things easier on the surface, you need to balance that ease of use against your feelings and beliefs about how best to conserve resources. It may turn out that the time, gas, and storage space needed for month's supply of convenient, disposable paper towels is actually a greater drain than having a supply of reusable cloth rags.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about which is better - paper or plastic? The answer is neither. The best thing is to use reusable cloth bags for your shopping.

Use It or Lose It

January is a great month to use up things around the house. In the kitchen, try to use up the leftover holiday food before it goes bad. Making creative meals from the leftovers will save you money and free up space in the pantry and fridge. In the bathroom, make January the month to use up all the sample size products you accumulated throughout the previous year. The fancy lotion and perfume you received LAST Christmas and decided to save for "special" occasions? Go ahead and use it now before the scent is lost.

If you come across items you will not use, donate them to a suitable charity. Many food pantries and shelters need non-perishable food items this time of year. Unwanted toiletries are often welcome at retirement homes and women's shelters.

Other unwanted gifts can also be donated. In January, I usually have an annual "regifting" party - I invite my girlfriends over for an afternoon and we wrap up the unwanted gifts and have an exchange drawing. We all typically wind up with a gift we have more use for, rather than letting unwanted items languish as clutter in the back of our closets.

A New Year, A New Focus

My post earlier today was inspired by my initial hopes to give this blog a facelift starting on January 1st. However, the cold and flu season had some other ideas for me. So my new year is starting a few days late, but better late than never.
Having spent the last few months moving towards going paperless in my home and home office, and continuing to be interested in enviromental concerns, I am going to focus on incorporating green prinicples into my life and into my work with my clients. I will be sharing some of the things I have been working on over the past months to that end in hopes that information will be useful to you.

Avoid "Black & White" Thinking

At the beginning of a new year, we typically make resolutions to get more organized, lose weight, etc. But we give up these resolutions early on when we slip up and do something that goes against these lofty goals we have set for ourselves. The main problem here is black and white thinking, which has us approaching our resolutions in an all or nothing manner. If we are dieting, and we eat a cookie, we have failed. If we are trying to get organized, and the closet is a disaster, there is no point in trying. However, if you take a less severe approach to moving towards your goals, you can get there, one step at a time, even if some of the steps may be backwards. Two steps back and three steps forward is still making progress. Remind yourself of your goals and recommit yourself to them and you will see gradual changes.