As a professional organizer, the top two questions I get asked are:

“How do I decide what I can get rid of?”

“How do I know I won’t need that item in the future?”

The secret will be revealed in this article: knowing where to get started, what to get rid of, and what to keep.

What to Get Rid Of: If it’s not meaningful or useful, get rid of it. How will you know you won’t need it in the future? You don’t! You only know that you don’t need it right now. Here is what you must believe: you will be able to get that item again just as you were able to get it in the first place. You have to trust the market place. It is as ready as you are to swap things. If you find that you do need it in the future, you will be able to simply find a substitute on Craigslist, eBay, or another of the online free markets in the US.

Let’s say you have an unused bookcase that you decide to sell on Craigslist for $40 and that a year later you find that you really need a bookcase. You should be able to find one within a week or so. In most cases, you will find one that meets your needs better than the previous one. Also, you’ve had the bonus of having $40 in your pocket over the past year.

What to Keep: Meaningful or useful items should be kept. If you are someone who loves memorabilia and cannot let it go, try this easy three-step process.

1. Pull out the top 10 items that mean the most to you and that you truly value.

2. Honor your memories by beautifully displaying them. Frame a special t-shirt, hang it on the wall, or create a shadow box of special jewelry, news clippings, and other small items.

3. For each member of your family, get a single large bin or box (less than 15 gallon). Have each person pick out favorite items to fill the bin. Donate or sell the remaining items.

Where to Get Started: Prioritize all the areas you want organized and make a list. Begin with the area you use most often. In one area:

Start clearing out stuff that is obviously garbage or recycling. You will get distracted, but focus on garbage and recycling; don’t touch anything else. Here’s a focusing tip: put on your favorite song and have it cleared out before the song ends.

Next, have three large bins set out in the area you are working. Items to donate go in one bin, items to be sold in another bin, and items that belong in a different area go in the last bin. If necessary, more bins can be used. When you are done sorting, the bins should be removed from your working area.

After all items have been sorted you can begin organizing. Organize only the items you are keeping. Re-evaluate the area. What specific purpose should it serve? How can you make the most of the space? Is there a way to use the walls to display items and keep them off the floor? Let the answers to these questions direct the organizational process.

If you get stuck on one of these steps, or if you need help maximizing your space, consider hiring a professional organizer. Check with the National Association of Professional Organizers (napo.net) to find a qualified organizer in your area.
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The premise behind this site is to try to find ways to do things more easily…preferrably by creating systems that allow things to get done more easily and efficiently.

I’m fascinated by the concept of automation! Think of all of the things that we currently automate in our lives…I’ve made a little list of things that I currently have automated just to give you an idea of how transparent automation can be…almost to the point of forgetting that something is even automated!

1. Automatic bill-paying services. All of our bills are automatically paid either directly debited from our checking by the company we are paying or via our bank that pays bills automatically for us. I honestly can’t remember the last time I opened a bill and paid it with a paper check!

2. Netflix: How can I explain how much I LOVE Netflix! My husband and I last went to a video store about two years ago! Our movie queue is about 100 movies long and we keep adding new ones all the time!

3. The washing machine and dryer….so hard to remember that these handy devices have saved us so much time doing laundry compared to the way our grandmothers did laundry!

4. The dishwasher….could not live without it. The five minutes it takes to load and unload is NOTHING compared to the time it takes to hand wash dishes! And I HATE doing dishes!

5. The slow cooker, or Crock-Pot. We received two large ones for our wedding along with a smaller one and two little ones. Admittedly, I haven’t been as good about using them lately but I have some new recipes I plan to try this Winter!

6. Cleaning the floors with my Roomba: What a great invention! If you have a dog (or kids) or just a busy lifestyle I highly recommend getting a Roomba vacuum cleaner. Just press the button and away it goes. Some even have a scheduler that allows you to set the exact time when you want Roomba to go to work! The height of automation!

But the big question is not what you are currently automating in your life, but what do you WISH you could automate? Is it the cleaning tasks you need to do? Bookkeeping and paying bills? Processes in your business?

My personal wish list for the next year is:

1. Automate more of my cleaning in my home. I hate cleaning so if I can find a way for something to get accomplished while I do something else, I’m all for it!

2. Find ways to keep track of information, appointments and other info so that I can be prepared for anything!

3. Automate more tasks in my business. I really need to find ways to get more things accomplished in less time…preferrably by having three or four tasks all hummin’ along at once.

4. Create “systems” for doing things…..much like a flow chart that takes tasks one step at a time and that can be repeated over and over again. This is probably one of my biggest priorities as I try to get more of my personal and business life organized. I tend to do something one way one time, then forget how I did it, only to re-invent the wheel again later. It’s a waste of time and energy, so creating systems and maybe even a manual for what I do frequently should be my top task.

What do you wish you could automate in your life? Do you wish you had more control over your finances or your tasks at home? Do you find that at work you are always struggling to find a predictable way to repeat a task that you do frequently? Do you lose control of paper and other items? Are you buried under a to-do list that never seems to be finished?

This tip is an oldie but a goodie…I’m sure many of you practice some sort of variation of this tip, so I won’t go into great detail. But I’ve devised some simple ways to stay on top of the whole “greeting card madness” that we are all familiar with. How many times have you realized all too late, that you should have mailed a greeting card two days ago for your sister’s birthday that is today? Fear not, I have a few tips to make this process easy and to help you remember those special days.

First of all, you can’t send a card if you don’t have them and who wants to rush out to Walgreen’s at 10pm to buy a forgotten birthday card right? Here are some tips for staying stocked with a selection of cards:

1. Make a list and check it twice. Just like Santa Claus, make a list of your favorite people and when they have important days such as birthdays and anniversaries. A great way to keep this list organized is to use a Google Calendar that will allow you to enter the days in one time and will copy them to each subsequent years’ calendar for you automatically. You can even set up the calendar to send you an email two or three days before the big day to remind you to get that card in the mail!

2. Once you have your core list, factor in the other occasions that might pop up for you during the year. Weddings, new babies, shower cards, get well soon cards, cards for people who have passed away and card for people who need cheering up.

The average woman will attend at least one baby shower, one wedding shower and one wedding a year. You should also factor in at least one of each of the other cards previously mentioned.

3. Think of the kids….buy some generic kiddie cards that are not specific to any particular age for your stash as well. These are the birthdays that always sneak up on me personally.

4. Have a stash of “thank you” cards on hand at all times so you can send out a quick note. While you’re at it, find a nice set of blank cards that can be used for all kinds of purposes in case something pops up and you are short a card.

Ok, that’s great and all, but what if you always forget to buy cards? Here are some tips for how to handle this so that you always have cards on hand:

1. Buy all of your cards in January and stash them away. A good idea for most people, although not that many people can afford to spend $100 or more on greeting cards in one fell swoop. If you can, great…this is perhaps the best way to make sure you get them purchased.

If you can’t afford to buy them all at once, there is an easy way to take the pain out of purchasing so many cards. At the beginning of the month BEFORE you need the cards, buy the cards you need for the next month. So if you need cards in January for a birthday, an anniversary and a wedding, buy them in December before the end of the month. Then, as long as you are ahead, buy a card that you can stash away for another purpose later in the year….like a Valentine card or a baby shower card.

The idea is to stay one month ahead while ALSO stockpiling one extra future card into your stash. As the months go on and you go through the year, you will purchase fewer and fewer cards to get you though the year.

Another twist on this same strategy is to buy the cards you need for that month, but double them. So if Aunt Sally has a birthday in January, buy her the card for this year AND the card for next year and stash it away. By the end of the year, you will have sent all of your cards AND you will have a complete year’s worth of cards ready to go for next year!

When next year rolls around, repeat the process and you will always have an ample supply of cards in your stash.

How to care for a card stash….in other words, how to keep them looking like you just bought them.

The hardest part about stockpiling anything is keeping it looking new until you need to use it. I’m picky about cards and want them to look nice when they are given to someone, so I have a few tips for storing cards that will help them to look newer longer.

First of all, air and moisture are the two most damaging elements that will ruin your cards. The only sure-fire way to make sure they are protected is to keep them in plastic zipper bags. The problem is that once you have a pile of them in the bag, it’s often difficult to see which cards are in the bag and to keep the bag from bending.

Here’s a method for organizing and keeping greeting cards nice:

1. You’ll need several freezer-style zipper bags, a permanent marker and several pieces of thin to medium-weight cardboard (a cereal box or granola bar box cut into rectangles works well for this).

2. Cut the cardboard into rectangles that will fit into the zippered bags. You will need two pieces of cardboard for each bag, and each piece should fit nearly exactly from left to right in the bag. An ideal piece of cardboard would have no writing at all, perhaps from an old shirt box that you received when you received a clothing gift or something.

3. On the outside of each bag, choose your method of labeling. You might want a bag for each month of the year, or a bag for each occasion….just label the bags with the marker so that you know what is inside each one.

4. Place the greeting cards between the two pieces of cardboard in each bag so that the cardboard acts like a support for each bag.

5. Lay the bags flat in a plastic storage container (the kind you put under the bed or on a shelf…not a huge one you would use for clothes or books) and keep it in a convenient place! Voila! You have a perfectly stashed supply of cards!

Some people also like to place a perfume sample from a magazine in the box too to scent the cards lightly and keep them from getting stale smelling. That’s up to you….I’ve actually put an unused dryer sheet in my box of cards and that works well without creating an overpowering scent.

Hopefully these greeting card organization tips will help you get your correspondence under control! Good luck!

Technorati Tags: home organization, organizing, organizer, greeting cards, organize greeting cards, holiday cards

If you are like me, you have a ton of “Favorites” or bookmarks saved in Internet Explorer. I’ve always kept my favorites sorted into folders to make it easier to find them when I need them. It’s a much better strategy than scrolling through 200 or so URLS trying to find the one I need.

Well, my dad recently discovered the need for this as well and asked me how to sort his Favorites into folders. For many of you, this is old-news and you already know how to do it, but I know there are plenty of you who waste valuable time every day trudging through an ever-growing Favorites list trying to find, “you know, that one site with the thing written by that chick who wrote that book…” Yeah, I’m so gonna help you out here.

I made my tutorial into a handy-dandy PDF file (with screenshots of the browser with important stuff circled!) so that my dad could print it out and follow along. If you want to grab your copy, just right click and select, “Save target as…” and save it somewhere on your computer where you can find it. It’s a PDF file, so you need the free PDF viewer from Adobe, which most of you already have anyway.

No cost, no email opt-in required….just a handy little guide on how to get your Favorites organized so you can save some time and energy every day…my mission in life you know!

Free Tutorial on How to Organize Your Internet Explorer Favorites (right-click here)

Technorati Tags: Internet explorer, favorites, bookmarks, organizing your bookmarks, how-to, free tutorial, internet explorer hack

In an effort to declutter our home and get ready for a move, I’ve been trying to find places willing to either buy used items or accept them as donations.

One thing that has really accumulated in our home that I have tried desperately to get rid of over the years are old books. We have used textbooks (I recently finished a degree so I have some stray books that were never sold back to the bookstore) and books that I accumulated from a used bookstore and a store that went out of business. I tried Amazon’s service that allows you to sell books to other users, but some of the titles weren’t purchased. When you list a book on Amazon, you name your price and hope someone buys it. No luck.

But I recently discovered a site that will simply name the price they are willing to pay…no messing around! While the amounts for some of these books weren’t extraordinarily high, they were better than nothing and allowed me to get rid of the books easily and get cash via PayPal in days! They even pay the shipping costs!

The site I’m using for my book decluttering project is Cash4Books and it’s super-simple to use! Just flip the book over and type in the ISBN number and the site instantly searches for the title and gives you a quote! You enter all of your ISBN’s in, and the page automatically updates the page with a running total of what they will pay you. It’s a really slick site and accomplishes my goal of decluttering in just minutes rather than storing the books forever hoping to get an extra buck or two later.

You know I like things that solve my problems, help me accomplish my goals and are fast. Cash4Books definitely meets all of my requirements! Goodbye books, hello closet space!

Technorati Tags: used books, sell used books, sell used books online, declutter, organizing, organizing tips

 One of the things that absolutely drives me CRAZY is when I clean out a cupboard or the refrigerator and find that there was something perfectly good that went to waste because it either got pushed back too far to notice or that I used it once and then it expired. How frustrating! Not to mention a waste of money.

The problem is that I often don’t remember when I opened something, which is really the important factor in knowing whether something is still fresh. The other factor is that food manufacturers print their expiration dates in small writing usually on the bottom or the back of an item so you have to hunt for it.

So I’m experimenting with a new method of keeping track of the freshness of items in my fridge and pantry, and I’d like to invite you to test this method along with me and let me know how it works for you.

I’ve created free printable food labels that allow you to slap a sticker on items when you buy them, so that when you use them, you can simply fill out the sticker with the expiration date and opened date. The labels are the size of a standard mailing label (30 to a page) and feature three lines you can fill out: Purchased date, Opened date and Expiration date.

There are lots of ways you can use this strategy for labelling your food items. You can, by default, slap a sticker on every item that enters your kitchen and fill out the expiration date immediately so that it’s always in an easy-to-read and prominent spot or you can simply use a sticker when you open something.

I’m personally going to use them on all items that enter my kitchen. I’ll just have a couple of pages of labels on my fridge with a magnet and peel them off one by one and stick them on as I put groceries away. For perishable items, especially items in my fridge and freezer, I’ll fill out the expiration date right away.

The benefits of using stickers like this:

1. You always have the important freshness information up front on your item. You don’t have to hunt for the expiration date later.

2. The labels are uniform, making your refrigerator more organized. You could even sort items in your fridge by expiration date really easily so that, for example, the top shelf on the right is the stuff expiring sooner so you can be sure to use it up.

3. The labels keep track of more than just the expiration date, but also the “opened date” so you can make sure that the spaghetti sauce you opened five days ago gets used within the 7-day suggested window even if you don’t remember exactly when you opened it or if someone else opened it.

These labels are designed to be used with standard address labels (the kind that are 30 to a page) and measure 1” x 2-5/8”. Don’t worry…when you download the labels you will also receive a “readme” file that lays out all the particulars about which labels are compatible with the download.

All you need to do is load up a few pages of blank labels in your printer, open the Word file, and print! I suggest printing a couple of pages at a time so you always have some labels ready to go.

So if you want to try this experiment with me, right-click here to download the free printable food expiration labels and then select, “Save Target As” and save to a folder or your desktop.

Then, please leave your comments at the bottom of this post so we can compare notes on how well it worked!

Technorati Tags: free printables, printable labels, food expiration, food labels, home organization, organizing tips