Peace of Mind Organizing

Snatching pockets of time

14 March 2011

The past couple of weeks have been very busy for me and I haven’t been home a whole lot. I did take one glorious day off at home day a week ago Saturday, where I caught up on my TV and did some knitting. I did nothing but relax, which I sorely needed.

Because I’ve been away so much helping people create order in their homes, my own home has gone into disarray. In a big way. I have a very high tolerance for mess, but I find myself looking around thinking, “I can’t wait to get some time to get this house in shape.”

I realize that’s my big mistake. I tend to think I need to wait until I have a large chunk of a day available for cleaning before I lift a finger (beyond the basics). But today when I look at my calendar, I see that free day is almost a week away.

The truth is that I don’t need a large chunk of time to get started. I can start with a single minute. (Or perhaps five minutes.) Because before I clean I need to tidy. Tidying I can do in very small chunks of time.

I don’t want to spend my first day off in a couple of weeks tidying and cleaning my house. I’m going to make that day easier by snatching little pockets of time between now and the weekend. I’m going to pick up and tidy a little at a time (rather than just ignoring the disarray). After that, I’ll dust and clean a room at a time. Come Sunday morning, I hope, all I’ll have to do is vacuum—that’s one task I tend to do in one fell swoop.

And, of course, once I get this backlog of out-of-place stuff taken care of, the key to keeping things under control is to be mindful of putting items away as I use them. I know this. I teach my clients this. Sometimes life just gets in the way. And when that happens, I just try to get right back into the routines that help me stay sane (and my house tidy).

New Peace of Mind Organizing Facebook page

11 March 2011

After a number of years on Facebook with a personal account, I’ve finally created a business page. When Facebook debuted its newly formatted pages last month, I decided to take the plunge.

While I try not to get obsessed by things like numbers of people who like my page, I would love it if you would check out the Peace of Mind Organizing Facebook page and click Like (if you’re a Facebook user).

When I have a few moments, I intend to ask my fabulous web designer, Nora Brown to add a Like button to the bottom of blog posts and a Facebook link in the sidebar, but today, I’m asking you to make a couple of clicks. Thanks!

One year later: drawer still organized

9 March 2011

Yesterday, I was discussing a kitchen drawer with a client. Wanting to show her a photo of the Rubbermaid interlocking drawer organizers I pulled out my iPad and showed her a blog post I’d written last year about organizing my kitchen utensil drawer.

I encourage you to read the whole post, which shows what you can do in 30 minutes, but here are the before and after photos:

Talk about a hodge podge of stuff.

That feels much better.

As I was showing this to the client, I noticed that the date on the blog post was exactly one year ago. And I realized that my drawer looks the same now. That made me happy.

That’s unusual, though. Things like drawers or cupboards with lots of little items (for example, the vanity cupboard under the sink in your bathroom) frequently need maintenance. Once organized they can fall into disarray fairly quickly. They require a few minutes of attention every now and then.

There are only a few items in my kitchen utensil drawer that are used with any frequency and they get put right back where they belong, so I’ve been able to maintain order.

Something about using that blog post exactly a year later made me want to share today. It also inspires me to tackle another micro-zone in the house! Watch out, medicine cabinet!

A little thing can make a big difference

7 March 2011

I’m going to be 50 next year and like many people my age, my vision isn’t what it used to be. Reading, in particular can be challenging. I’ve been wearing progressive lenses (distance vision in the top, reading vision in the bottom, with a little intermediate in between) for some years.

But I like to read novels. And I particularly like to read while I’m eating breakfast by myself. I found that wearing my usual progressive glasses was frustrating because I’d have to position my head just so to read the page (and keep moving it as I moved down the page). I also found it hard to read in bed with my progressives.

So I bought two pairs of non-prescription reading glasses at the drug store, but I couldn’t find just the right strength. My regular glasses are good for general use, but when it comes to reading a book, I wasn’t having a satisfying experience. And since I spend time reading at least twice a day, that was getting wearying.

So I asked my eye doctor for prescription reading glasses. Big ones, not those little half glasses. And they’ve made such a difference to my reading enjoyment! We have vision insurance, so it cost only $30 and it’s really enhanced my life.

That got me thinking about all the annoying little things I once tolerated that with a small expenditure of time and effort I’ve made much less irritating. Here are just a few things that come to mind:

• I’ve replaced the small bathroom wastebaskets with larger ones so I didn’t have to empty them as often (or let them overflow).
• I clear off my desk every day so I don’t have to search for things on my desk.
• I process all my email every day—I’m still going on inbox zero I don’t have lingering tasks nagging at me.
• I write down my tasks in my Superfocus notebook so I don’t have to remember them (my memory has taken off with my eyesight as I age).
• I pick up the yard after my dog every day (or at least most days). Now I don’t have a nasty chore waiting for me on Saturday (nor the nasty visual clutter that goes with not picking it up every day).

My life is far from free of annoyances, but I’m going to keep my eyes open for small efforts that can reap huge benefits. Do you have any irritations you’d like to let go of? Maybe we can brainstorm some easy solutions. Feel free to comment.

MileBug: My tax-time time saver

4 March 2011

I’ve been doing my family’s taxes on TurboTax now for four years. I worked on them almost to the point of completion last weekend (let’s hear it for refunds!) and it went remarkably smoothly.

My husband keeps track of our personal finances in Quicken and I keep track of my business’s finances in Quickbooks. All the data were there for me to plug into TurboTax. But there was one task I always had to do manually that took at least an hour (and that hour felt like four). This year, thanks to the great little app MileBug, I was able to forego manually calculating my mileage.

After fifteen years of self-employment, I’d created the habit of jotting down my start and ending odometer readings whenever I drove my car for business purposes (which is probably more than 75 percent of the time). Until last year, I kept a little mileage log in my visor and as I waited for my garage door to close, I’d think about whether the last trip I’d taken was a business-related trip and if so I’d jot down the ending mileage for it. Then, if this trip was also business-related, I’d jot down the starting mileage. But I never took the time to calculate how many miles that last trip was.

So once a year when I was preparing tasks, I’d have to calculate the mileage of each trip, then add them all up to enter into Quickbooks.

Enter MileBug. I’m still entering the odometer readings each trip, except I’m doing it by touching the screen of my iPod Touch. (Since I carry the iPod in my purse with me, it’s always handy.)

Here’s a screenshot of MileBug on the iPhone from the Milebug website:

At tax time, rather than calculate my mileage, all I had to do was create a report with just a few touches, and email it to myself.

There it was in my email inbox: a beautiful spreadsheet of all my mileage for the year. I plugged the bottom-line number into TurboTax and I was done. It took about 2 minutes, if that.

I’m sure there are other great mileage apps out there, but Milebug has worked well for me. It’s available for the iPhone/iPod Touch, and Android and Nokia/Symbian-based smartphones.

My Life Matters planner: review and giveaway

2 March 2011

I have trouble remembering to take my vitamins and calcium supplements. And at the moment, I’m having trouble integrating daily exercise into my schedule.

I think that’s why the My Life Matters planner appeals to me so much. It’s designed to allow women to pursue balance: there’s space to plan and note all aspects of your life: mental and emotional well being, physical health, spiritual well being, relationships, finances, work, life dreams, and passion.

I had the pleasure of meeting one of the creators of the My Life Matters planner, Laura Thake at a NAPO St. Louis meeting. When she showed me her beautiful planner, I told her I thought my blog readers would love it. So she sent me one so I could explore it a little bit more. And she offered to send one to one lucky blog reader.

Here’s a picture of the cover (from the My Life Matters website):

You can get complete information about the planner at its website, but I’ll list a few things here that I really like about it:

• It’s beautiful. The graphic design is lovely without being overpowering
• There’s a month-at-a-glance page for each month so you can get a birds-eye view of the month’s appointments
• There are three pages for each week: a two-page spread covering Monday through Friday and an additional page for the weekend
• On these weekly pages, each day has a checkoff area for health and well-being, where you can check if you’ve taken your medicines and vitamins, if you’ve eaten your daily amount of healthy foods, and write down what your workout was (or will be, if you use it for planning)
• The page opposite the weekend page has blank space for each day of the week, giving you lots of empty space to write, which you can use for planning purposes or as a journal of what’s happened
• Each month has a page devoted to the month’s goals and reflections on the accomplishments of the prior month
• Each month also has a lined page for journaling about the coming month
• Each month has two pages devoted to budget and expenses
• It comes with a photo pocket so you can carry a photo of a loved one with you wherever you take the planner
• It comes with lots of instructions and also permission to use it just how you want to

Since each month is 25 pages, it feels very expansive. The designers have cleverly divided the planner in half: January to June is bound together (it has spiral binding) and July to December is a separate volume. If all twelve months were bound together it would be a so thick and heavy you’d never want to take with you.

Giveaway!

Laura at My Life Matters has offered to send a six-month planner (January-June 2011) to one lucky reader of my blog. To enter, just make a comment below and/or tweet about the giveaway. (Be sure and put my twitter handle, @janinea, in the tweet, so I’ll see it.) If you comment and tweet, you’ll get two entries.

A winner will be selected at random on Tuesday morning (March 8). I’m sorry, but the giveaway is open to people in the U.S. and Canada only. I’m making that stipulation so that My Life Matters doesn’t have to pay for overseas shipping.

If you’re looking for a paper planner that helps you keep track of all aspects of your (and feel good about yourself!), this is definitely worth checking out. The website is loaded with photos of pages and possible ways to use them.

Office closet makeover

28 February 2011

My office is in an extra bedroom of my house. It has two closets, one of which is a small reach-in closet that’s original to our 103-year-old house.

When this room became my office in 2001, I was a freelance writer. I decided to put my four-drawer filing cabinet in it, which pretty much took the whole closet. I put a bookshelf on the top of the shelf in the closet to store some papers. And that was that.

Over the years, I didn’t tend to the closet and it became more disheveled. I virtually never touched the stuff on the shelf.

I was itching to install some elfa shelving in my home and decided this closet was a prime candidate. I recruited my friend, Sally to come help me transform the closet. Step one was decluttering.

Here’s a photograph of the closet before we started.

The messy closet before we started

We spent a couple of hours decluttering and I was ruthless. I got rid of book manuscripts, release forms from interviewees for books that are now out of print, all sorts of stuff I hadn’t look at in nine years. I did keep some sentimental items and some evidence of accomplishments in past jobs.

When we were through for the day, the closet already looked much better.

After a couple of hours decluttering

We explored some options for the closet. I knew I wanted elfa and I knew that the file cabinet was a big impediment to using that closet with elfa. So I decided that between that day and a couple of weeks later when Sally agreed to come back, I’d weed out my files so that the ones I needed in my office would fit in an elfa file cart.

I went to the Container Store, bought an elfa Office in a Closet kit for only $162 during their sale. I also picked up some desk accessories to put on the shelves. And I bought an elfa file cart.

When Sally came back, we moved the file cabinet to our unfinished basement and I moved two file bins worth of files from my writing career into that cabinet. We painted the closet to match the Restoration Hardware silver sage paint that my office is painted in.

A week later, Sally came back and helped me install the Elfa. I knew it would be simple, but I’m not handy with a drill and didn’t want to try it on my own. Sally assures me that Elfa is as simple as purported and very smart and adjustable.

Here’s the after picture:

We painted the closet and installed some Elfa...ahhhh!

I did such a good job of decluttering that I don’t have a whole lot to store in the closet at the moment, but I love having room to grow.

It feels positively liberating and I smile each time I look in the closet. (I keep the door open, so I can gaze in from my desk.) Having a friend do this kind of project with you can make all the difference in the world (as can hiring a professional organizer, if you’re short of friends crazy enough to help you this way). Thank you, Sally!