Peace of Mind Organizing

Portable power station

14 October 2013

I don’t usually have too tough a time with my iPhone 4S running out of juice. I charge it nightly when I sleep and the charge typically lasts the day.

But when I’m using my phone as a WiFi Hot Spot or for some other battery-draining purpose, sometimes I run into trouble. And I’m not always in the car or at home when my phone comes dangerously close to turning itself off.

I was delighted, therefore, to see this myCharge Trek 2000 portable power station? at Office Max for just $10. It’s doesn’t work for phones newer than the 4S, which is why I suspect it’s so heavily discounted. (The regular price is $60.)

This little device is easily stowed in my purse. I charge it with its USB cord and when I need to charge my phone, it turns into a little docking station. I keep it in my purse (I charge it after I’ve used it) and I no longer have to worry about carrying a charger or being near an electrical outlet.

When I traveled last month, it was particularly handy, since outlets were few and far between at my departing airport.

If you have an iPhone 4S or earlier, you may want to check it out!

The joy of a clean computer destop

11 October 2013

Last July, I cleared off my very cluttered computer desktop. As I wrote then, it took only 50 minutes and I did it while flying on an airplane.

It’s been three months, and I just have to share how wonderful it’s been to have a clear desktop! It’s not that I look at my computer’s desktop much—I’m one of these people with multiple computer programs open all the time.

But what’s handy is that the desktop is now a place I can park things temporarily, like photographs I want to upload to one of my blogs. Anything I save there hangs out at the right margin of my screen. When I need to select a file in a Finder window, I click on Desktop and there are just a few there, typically.

I had no idea this would be such a time saver. And it’s so easy to maintain. When I notice files there, I just move them to the appropriate folder or to the trash. It’s really become a very useful temporary holding place for me.

And it makes me feel good when my computer boots up!

Here’s how my desktop looks today. (It’s an image that came with the computer, one of a few that rotate through.)

Accessorizing my new car

10 October 2013

I bought a 2008 Honda CR-V about a month ago. It replaces an older Honda Civic. I realized I need more room to carry around the supplies I use on my team jobs. (Incidentally, I bought it on Craiglist, and it was an excellent experience.)

I love my new car—it’s a top-of-the-line EX-L so it has a posh feel about it. I’m most excited about the heated seats. I immediately started thinking about how I would organize it (I’m still tweaking that), which took me to Pinterest, of course.

I started a car-organizing Pinterest board and then suppressed my impulse to head straight out and buy organizing solutions. I realized I really needed to give it some time to figure out what my organizational challenges are with regard to my car before buying anything.

But there was one thing I knew I needed: A wastebasket. (The passenger front seat filled that role all too often in the Civic.) And I had the perfect solution right inside my house. Here it is, in the car:

It’s a felted basket I knitted a bazillion years ago. I knit it for the fun of it, without a real need for the finished object. My cat, Joe, liked sleeping on it, so it was usually squashed and covered in cat hair.

Now it has a place of honor in my car, between the center console in the dash. It fits the space perfectly and even blends in color-wise. Its wide-open top makes it easy for me to toss in a protein-bar wrapper when necessary and also makes it easy for me to see when it needs to be emptied.

I have to say: this makes me happy. Eventually, I’ll be purchasing some supplies for organizing the cargo area of my little SUV. And when I do I’ll post about it here.

There's no such thing as a free book

7 October 2013

I make no secret of the fact that I love my Kindle Paperwhite. It makes books so portable that I’m reading more than ever. I love my cover too—I have the persimmon-colored cover pictured below.

One of the things that made me hesitate to buy a Kindle was that I was afraid I’d spend a lot of money on books. Since I was a heavy user of our library system, I was not accustomed to paying for fiction.

Turns out I needn’t have worried. Some Kindle books are available via my library’s system—and I don’t have to leave the house to check them out. But thanks to Bookbub, I’m downloading free books practically daily. And there’s the rub.

Bookbub (which I enthused about in a blog post last summer) sends me an email every day with a selection of free and discounted Kindle books available that day in the genres I selected. I limit myself to the free ones. And there’s usually at least one each day that appeals to me.

So what’s the problem? I have so many books on my Kindle I can’t separate the wheat from the chaff. When I finish the library book I’m reading now, how will I know which one to select?

I tried creating a spreadsheet that ranked the books I had so I could simply start reading the next one on the list. But it’s not realistic to keep that up on a daily basis, especially since I can’t rank books against one another if I can’t tell from the title what a book is about.

I’m pretty sure that if a client were having this problem (be it with electronic books or paper books or other items) and asked me for advice, I’d tell her to stop buying books. I’d talk with her about how there’s a cost to acquiring and keeping even free things.

Perhaps that’s what I need to do. Stop downloading free books. I’m sure there will be free books available after I’ve read the approximately 100 books on my Kindle that I haven’t yet read. At some point, I could revisit my spreadsheet and keep using it until I’ve read all the books I want.

The overabundance of books on my Kindle was starting to stress me out a little. Now that I’ve resolved to stop downloading new books until I’ve read the majority of books on the device, I can breathe easier.

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best

4 October 2013

I had one of those “Why didn’t I think of that before?” strokes of brilliance that illustrates how sometimes we overlook the most simple solutions.

I had white towels in my bathroom, including the hand towels. I use mineral makeup, which I love, but I do hate the powdery mess it makes. After applying makeup, I would wash my hands and dry them on the towel. Perhaps because I’m always in a hurry, sometimes makeup residue would remain on my hands and get transferred to the hand towel.

I put up with this for literally years, lamenting the demise of the towels. (Even bleach didn’t seem to help.)

Then I redid my bathroom, which gave me the opportunity to re-think my towels. The new bathroom is beige with white trim, with silver and black accents. That’s when it hit me: I should buy black hand towels! They not only look good, they’re functional. Now if there’s makeup residue on my hands, it doesn’t show on the towels.

What could be more simple? Sometimes the simplest solutions really are the best!

One of the joys of being organized

27 September 2013

I sold my car a couple of weeks ago. It was easy to do—the receptionist at my mechanic shop bought it. Even the paperwork wasn’t too bad, and I’ll tell you why: Because I’m organized.

When it came time to put together the forms, I was able to go to my auto file and see how the paperwork was filled out when I bought the car (I bought it used off Craigslist). And here’s the best part. As I knew it would, the car’s title sat in the file right where it was supposed to be. No searching. No worrying. All I had to do was sign it over.

I’m a proponent of keeping all service records for a car in the event you sell it. It’s a great way to help the buyer realize the car was well maintained. I just keep one file per car (including the title) and hand over the whole thing when I sell the car.

Being able to find important documents when I need them is a huge benefit to being an organized person. If you’re not there yet, trust me, you can be!

Worth repeating: Inbox Zero - how I do it

25 September 2013

I’ll be celebrating three years of routinely clearing out my email inbox come January. I wrote this nuts-and-bolts post about how I do it in January 2012, after I’d been practicing this habit for a year. Now, more than a year and a half later, nothing’s changed. I use the same procedures and I’m still in love with this habit, which make my life unequivocally better.

It’s been over a year since I started my Inbox Zero habit. On January 2, 2011 I cleared out my email inbox. And, for the most part, it’s been empty at the end of each workday since.

In May of last year, I blogged about why I love clearing out my inbox every day. You can read more detail in the post, but the bottom line is that clearing out my email inbox every day is easier than not clearing it out. Each day my inbox has only new messages in it. Nothing lingering. No time bombs. It’s fantastic.

Moreover, having an Inbox Zero habit prompts me to respond to messages that, in the past, I would have let linger in my inbox. It forces me to make decisions today, not tomorrow or next week. That not only enhances my productivity; it frees up my brain!

Today I thought I’d share the nuts and bolts of how I do it, since it seems to be the kind of thing that many consider difficult. In reality, I find it very easy.

Here’s an important note: When I talk about Inbox Zero, I’m not talking about deleting all my emails. I keep thousands of emails. But they’re filed away from my inbox, waiting for me to refer to them. They’re not mixed in with new emails.

I use my MacBook’s Mail program as an email client. All my emails are downloaded to my computer, which is how I like it. I see no reason, though, that these principles wouldn’t apply to cloud-based systems, like gmail.

1. I have many, many email folders. The one I use the most is called *Archive. (More on that below. The * ensures that the *Archive folder is at the top of my list of folders.) I also have folders for various volunteer activities, one called Clients, another for Prospective Clients, and folders for each email list I’m on.
2. I use rules to divert listserv emails to designated folders, so they never hit my inbox. Google groups, yahoo groups, any other group emails automatically go into their respective folders and I read them at my leisure. Same goes for messages from Twitter telling me I have new followers.
3. For those emails that do land in my inbox, I read and respond as necessary. Ideally, I respond immediately and then move that message out of my inbox. If the incoming message doesn’t apply to a volunteer activity or isn’t from a client or prospective client, I move it into the *Archive folder. If I don’t need to keep it, I delete it. If it doesn’t require a response, but I want to keep it, I just file it.
4. By far, most of my emails end up in the *Archive folder. Thanks to the robust search capabilities of my Mac, I can always find an old message; I don’t have to be more detailed in the filing.
5. If a message requires action after the response, I flag it, add it to my task list, then file it. In Mail, when I click on the word Flagged in the sidebar, all flagged messages are displayed. No need to move it into an action folder (which I always found scary to look in) and then refile it when the action is done.
6. At the end of each day, I go through any emails left in my inbox, respond as necessary, file and delete. It’s that simple.

The number of emails that land in my inbox each day isn’t huge—usually less than 100—and this system works very well for me. It’s very easy to maintain. I typically take a break on the weekends, which means that I have a backlog to deal with Monday morning. (That’s not ideal, but the break feels important.) During the week, I strive for—and unless I’m traveling, almost always achieve—inbox zero.

I have an iPad and I read my email on my iPad (using the Mail app) when I’m out in the world. I automatically blind copy myself on outgoing messages on my iPad, so those messages end up in my inbox on my computer. I just file them along with the rest, thus maintaining a correspondence record in my Mail program. But I don’t worry about Inbox Zero on my iPad. I left the device delete all messages at certain thresholds.

I have a secret weapon in my email success: an accountability buddy. At the end of every weekday my friend and colleague Aby Garvey and I send one another an email about the status of our inboxes. It’s highly motivating and, in the beginning, also helped me remember to clear out my inbox.

Inbox Zero may or may not be attractive for you. It’s certainly been helpful for me and if you’re tempted, I hope you find this post helpful!