Peace of Mind Organizing

Storing cards to send later

4 June 2012

If you’re like me and like to pick up greeting cards when they’re on sale or when you find one you really like (or, if you like to reuse cards like I do), sometimes storing them can get tricky.

I’m usually looking for a card in a hurry, like when I’m heading out the door to meet a friend and realize her birthday is coming up. Some years back, I started storing my cards by category using a desktop file box. Now it’s really easy to find what I want in a hurry. I’ve suggested this to several clients, who found it to be an easy-to-maintain system as well.

That's our tile porch roof in the background.

Here’s what you do:

• Take a container, either a shallow desktop file box like mine or a plastic (or even cardboard) shoe box. Or use any container that fits cards well.

• Sort your cards into whatever categories work for you.

• Create labels, either using a label maker, printing Avery address labels (which is what I did), or hand writing a label right on the file tab.

• Cut manila file folders so they’re about the width of a card, using the section of the folder surrounding the 1/3-cut tab. Cut the folder at the bottom as well, so that your file folder divider is just a single thickness.

• Simply rest the cards upright in the file box, using the modified file folders as dividers to separate the categories.

The great thing about this is that the cards become very easy to flip through. At one point in my life, a couple of decades ago, I tried using an accordion file. But that took many more steps to access. This has been terrific. Happy card giving!

App of the week: Milebug

1 June 2012

I blogged about the mileage-tracking app Milebug last year, after I realized how much time it was saving me on my taxes. Back then, I was using it on my iPod Touch.

Now, I have my beloved iPhone. And since I’ve decided to do an App of the Week post every Friday, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about it again.

Milebug makes it very easy for me to track my mileage. As a business owner who travels to client sites, I’m eligible to deduct my mileage—to the tune of 55 cents a mile; definitely worth the effort. Milebug makes the process easy: as I pull out of the garage, I pull my iPhone out of my purse and touch the Milebug icon. I simply record my destination and purpose (I can do that with one touch for my most frequent trip, pictured at right, from to a client’s home for the purpose of a client appointment). I also record the odometer reading. On a typical day, I might have an open trip—yesterday’s client visit, for example. When that happens, I record the closing mileage, which automatically becomes the beginning mileage if I add a new trip. Easy peasy.

Before Milebug, I did this with a pen in a little notebook I kept in my car visor. That was almost as easy. But Milebug has a distinct advantage: I just email a spreadsheet of the trips to myself. It even calculates the mileage deduction, since it knows the federal rates (and as long as I keep it updated, it knows if the federal mileage rate changes mid-year). Back when I did this by hand, I would spend a very tedious hour, sometimes longer, calculating the mileage.

Some entrepreneurs I know use Google Maps to calculate their mileage after the fact. Talk about tedious. Milebug is infinitely more convenient, if you ask me.

It all boils down to creating the habit of entering the mileage, something that’s now almost automatic for me after doing it for so long. If you can find something you always do in your car that you can anchor it to (for me, it’s waiting for the garage door to go down; for you it might be fastening your seatbelt or putting on your sunglasses), it makes it an easy habit to form.

I love my iPhone 4S so much I’m rarely without it. (I actually sleep with it under my pillow.) That makes it the perfect place to record my mileage. And Milebug makes that easy.

Travel jewelry case giveaway winner!

31 May 2012

Thank you to everyone who entered to win the Travel Jewelry Case from Clos-Ette Too. To select the winner from among the entries, I entered the names in a spreadsheet, assigned a number to each and used the Random Number Generator to come up with the number that corresponds to the winning entry.

The winner is Deborah Underwood, who lives in San Francisco, and, like me, grew up in Walla Walla, Washington. (Deborah is a really talented and successful children’s author…you should check out her website.) I’m very excited for her to receive the travel jewelry case. I hope she likes hers as much as I like mine!

I’ll be doing more giveaways throughout the year, so if you entered and didn’t win, please keep an eye out for the next one!

Find your family members on the 1940 U.S. Census

30 May 2012

A census of the United States population has been conducted every year since 1790. The census results are full of great information, both on the population in general (as analyzed by demographers at the U.S. Census Bureau) and on individual residents (once results are released).

For family history researchers, the census can provide clues about one’s family history. Depending on the year (the census’ questions are revised each time), you can learn where ancestors lived, their occupations, educational status, job status, who lived with them…all sorts of great stuff.

Due to privacy concerns, individual census results are not released to the public for 72 years after the census is conducted. The release of new census results is always a cause for much excitement among those who are into genealogy. On April 2, 2012, the 1940 census results were released.

You don’t have to be a family history researcher to get a thrill from finding your parents’ or grandparents’ handwritten names and other information on the census. You can access the census results free of charge. A great starting point is the 1940 census page of the U.S. Archives website.

Eventually, the census will be indexed (as previous censuses are). Then, all you will have to do to find an individual is plug in the name and search. Now, though, you have to know the enumeration district in order to pinpoint the correct page on the census.
It’s easy to find the enumeration district if you know the address where your people lived.

In my case, my 79-year old mother remembered her childhood address. So at the Archives.gov website, I entered the state (Washington), county (Spokane), city (Spokane), street (31st). That narrowed it down to three sets of documents (over 35 pages each) to look through. Since I had her exact address, I entered it into Google Maps and was able to see that a nearby cross street is Division. When I entered the cross street, it narrowed it down to just one set of census pages. I had to look through about 24 pages of the 38-page set, but then I found it.

I discovered that my mother’s uncle was living with them in 1940, which I hadn’t realized, and that he worked as a mechanic for the city. I was reminded that my grandfather was a retail merchant who owned his own business. I learned that my mother’s brother (at least according to this census, but censuses can be wrong) was born in Georgia. I’d never, not once, heard of our family having any associations with Georgia (my mother was born in Missouri), so I’m going to have to ask my mother about this.

I had a similar experience finding my 81-year-old father on the 1940 census. He was born in 1930, but after the enumeration date, so it was the first time I’d seen his name on the census.

I love family history research, so perhaps I’m biased, but I think this is very exciting. I encourage you to take a few minutes and explore your own family in 1940. It’s free and, I think, really fun!

In praise of downtime

29 May 2012

For the first time in quite some time, I actually had a three-day weekend. The curse of being self-employed tends to be a certain lack of downtime. When a three-day weekend rolls around, I usually see clients (because they’re available) or at the very least work at my desk at least one day of the weekend.

But this weekend, I decided to take the whole weekend off. It was tremendous. I enjoyed three long chats with girlfriends. I helped another friend organize his office. (I know that might not sound like downtime, but it was really fun.) I went to a barbecue and a farmer’s market. Yesterday, my husband and I went out to lunch.

But mostly I sat and knit and watched TV I love. (I downloaded Season Five of Mad Men and also watched back episodes of The Glee Project, which is a perfect marriage of Glee and American Idol…bliss for me.) I learned a new knitting technique, which is really exciting. I just reveled in doing very, very little.

The result? I woke up this morning ready and raring to go. I quickly caught up on email, focused on my task list, started thinking about goals. Now I’m blogging.

If I had worked this weekend, I doubt I would have been nearly as enthusiastic about getting to work today.

Sometimes you have to let your battery drain before recharging it. And that’s what I did this weekend. I literally didn’t step foot into my office. I highly recommend it.

App of the week: SleepCycle

25 May 2012

When I was at the NAPO conference in March, one of the keynote speakers, Joanne Lichten, Ph.D., RD, aka Dr. Jo®, recommended an app called SleepCycle. She was talking about the importance of good sleeping habits for good health and self care. I had my iPhone with me, so I downloaded it on the spot, during the talk. (The app costs 99 cents.)

SleepCycle acts as a nifty alarm clock, as well as a monitor of your sleep patterns. It uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movements while you sleep. You place your iPhone, with the SleepCycle app running, next to your pillow.

There is usually less physical movement during deep sleep. If your alarm clock goes off while you’re in deep sleep, you wake up feeling groggy. When you use SleepCycle as your alarm clock, it starts sensing movement a half hour before the time the alarm is set to go off. If you move during that window (indicating you’re not in deep sleep), the gentle alarm goes off. That way you wake up before you fall back into deep sleep. The result? You wake up refreshed, rather than groggy.

I’ve been using it more than a month and so far I love this as an alarm clock. The tone I selected is sort of new-age music and it comes on very softly. I simply pick up the phone to put it on snooze. It goes off again in a few minutes—the amount time between snoozes decreases as you get closer to your target wake-up time.

My sleep graph last night

The other fun part of SleepCycle is that gives you a graph of your sleep cycle throughout the night. It’s fascinating. I fear, though, that for those of us who don’t sleep alone it’s inaccurate. My husband is a bit of a toss-and-turner and I suspect the accelerometer is picking up his movement as well. I hope that my sleep last night was better than the graph at right indicates!

SleepCycle also shows you the time you went to bed and got up, and how long you slept. And it tells you how many hours a night you average. I average 7 hours 31 minutes over 39 nights. That makes me happy!

I love using SleepCycle as an alarm clock. It’s made getting up easier and it’s such a gentle way to awaken. (Side benefit: It doesn’t wake up my husband, who usually gets up after me.)

One downside is that the phone needs to be plugged in while it’s working. Not a problem for me…I would need to be plugging it in at night anyway. The other downside is that calls or texts could come in and wake me up, but I just put it on airplane mode.

Intrigued? Click here to download SleepCycle for 99 cents. I’m glad I did!

The blogging continues

24 May 2012

Today marks 30 days since I took on a 30-day blogging challenge with my friend and collaborator, Shannon Wilkinson. When she was in St. Louis to hold an in-person habits and routines workshop with me, we got to talking about blogging.

I’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping up with my blogging, but my three-day-a-week blogging habit had devolved into a two-day-a-week habit. Shannon mentioned that she’d like to blog more—she knew it would be beneficial for her busines—but found it challenging to get into a good blogging routine.

I asked whether it would help if we each committed to daily blogging (five days a week). And we decided to go for it.

I knew from experience that blogging that frequently might actually be easier than blogging less frequently. And I was right. In fact, I was right about all five potential benefits to regular blogging that I outlined in my post announcing the challenge.

You know what’s great? I met my commitment. But there are so many benefits to this daily routine that I’m going to commit to sticking with it for at least another two weeks. (And perhaps beyond.)

Shannon has done an equally committed job of blogging regularly. She had a set back at the very beginning when her site was hacked (!) but thanks to the power of the commitment, she started in on the five-day-a-week blogging as soon as her site was available again. If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to check out her blog and see some of the great things she’s been writing about.

I love the power of public commitment. And I’m really enjoying all this blogging. Thank you so much for reading!