Peace of Mind Organizing

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!

My new favorite product: origami-inspired magnetic bookmark

25 February 2011

I keep my task list in a Myndology disc-bound notebook with repositionable pages. I bought it at the Container Store. As I blogged about last week, I’m using Mark Forster’s SuperFocus task-management system, which I’m really digging. (Again, I promise a full review after I’ve used it for a little while.)

With SuperFocus, it’s important that I keep track of where I left off on my task list, so I needed a good way to mark my page. I initially just used a Post-it note, but I found that unsatisfactory from an aesthetic standpoint. When I was browsing at the Container Store, I came across the magnetic origami bookmarks from Girl of all Work. Here’s a photo from Girl of All Work’s website:

Aren’t they pretty? The little magnet is strong, so I they don’t fall off the page. I’m also using one to mark the page of the thick novel I’m currently reading. I love that the bookmark is always handy—I just leave it in place when I’m reading and move it when I’m finished, something that’s harder to do with a paper bookmark.

I love taking the time to embrace little pleasures, like a bookmark that’s pretty and does its job well.

Q&A with author Leah Ingram

23 February 2011

I’ve been acquainted with Leah Ingram, author of the new book,Toss, Keep, Sell!: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, for going on fifteen years. We were members of the same professional association for writers back when I was a freelance writer and both still belong to the online writing community, Freelance Success. Leah’s created a name for herself as an expert in saving money, thanks to her popular Suddenly Frugal blog and her book of the same name. When I became aware of the topic of her newest book. I couldn’t resist asking her to do a Q&A for my blog.

Who will benefit most from your book?

Recovering spendthrifts—people who use to spend, shop, and dine out freely, and then when the economy tanked, suddenly needed to live frugally. I know from being one of those recovering spendthrifts that, thanks to my “shopper-tainment” days, when I went shopping when I was bored. I had more stuff than I needed so plenty of clutter to clear out.

What prompted you to write it?

I wanted this new book to serve a dual purpose: to help people get their homes organized, and discover ways that they could get cash for their clutter. This book grew out of my earlier book Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less, which grew out of my blog Suddenly Frugal. The secret to living frugally is to continually reevaluate your spending and saving, and find ways that you can cut back on daily or regular expenses. But when there’s nothing left to cut, you’ve got to find ways to bring in more money. I’m lucky, in that I’m a self-employed writer and I can always take on additional assignments to bring in more income. But most people don’t have the time to get a second job. Hopefully, Toss, Keep, Sell! will help them figure out ways to put more cash back in their wallets.

In researching your book, what was the most surprising or impressive way you uncovered that people can make money be getting rid of their excess stuff?

The person who held an “estate” sale in her suburban tract home. Truthfully, I thought only rich people with mansions had estate sales, but this person was able to pull it off—she basically turned her entire house into a “department store,” and walked away with $4,000.

What’s your favorite place to sell stuff?

I’m really into consigning my clothes these days. I try to consign twice a year—once for warm weather clothing and once for cold weather clothing—and knowing that this is on my “schedule,” it keeps me on track for thinning my wardrobe on a regular basis. Also, once my clothes are bagged up, if the consignment store rejects them, then I just drive to my local Goodwill and donate them. That’s win-win for me, my wallet, my closet, and people who could use new clothes.

One of the categories of stuff that I find that many of my clients have difficulty parting with are items given to them as gifts. Do you have any advice that would help them let go of unwanted gifts?

I call it gift guilt, and I definitely address this in Toss, Keep, Sell! Simply put I suggest that readers do a 180 on the situation and ask themselves, “Do I expect everyone I give a gift to to keep that gift indefinitely, even if they can’t use it or don’t like it?” Most people realize that the pressure that they put on themselves to keep and display gifts that they don’t really love they would never put on most other people. And usually that frees them up to add it to their yard sale box, list it on eBay, or just get rid of it.

Author Leah Ingram

What do you think is the secret to keeping a home clutter-free, after the decluttering is accomplished?

Keeping a home clutter-free is exactly like keeping off weight after you’ve reached your goal. It’s all about maintenance. You can’t go back to your old habits and expect everything to stay the same. While I’m not always good about cleaning up each room of my house every single day, you can bet that the main areas of my house are tidied before we go to bed at night or at least once during the day. Just this morning my kitchen was a disaster area from the kids having breakfast before school, me packing lunches, and no one getting around to loading and unloading the dishwasher. So the sink was full. Rather than stomp away in disgust, after everyone had left this morning—and before I took my dog for a walk (part of my morning exercise routine)—I set the timer on my stove for 15 minutes and “challenged” myself to get the kitchen back in order before the timer went off. Not only did I clear off all the counters, load and unload the dishwasher, and wipe down the table, but I did a quick (albeit not perfect) mopping of the floor. Then I could leave to walk my dog with a free mind and a clean kitchen welcomed me when I got back later.

What’s your favorite bit of decluttering advice?

See above, especially given how much you can get done in 15 minutes. I write in the book that you might not finish a project or decluttering or organizing in 15 minutes, but you will be surprised to discover how much of a dent you can make.

In your book’s introduction you write, “There’s no reason to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour to hire a professional organizer…I believe you can do it all by yourself.” That makes me curious: have you ever worked with a professional organizer? While I agree that many people can declutter on their own—and they are the audience for your book—as a professional organizer I can say with confidence that there are many people who have very good reasons to hire a PO (and benefit greatly). Do you care to comment?

I’m sorry if that comment offended you. Yes, I have worked with a professional organizer, and maybe the problem was that she wasn’t a very good one. She came in two or three times and told us how to make her system for getting organized work rather than looking at the nature of our lifestyle and helping us design a system that worked for us. I did take a few tips away from her, such as dumping all of my kids crayons in one Rubbermaid container, the markers in another, and that way I didn’t have random writing utensils floating around my house. So while a professional organizers didn’t work for me, eventually I came up with my own systems, which I’m hoping will work for my readers who would like to take the DIY approach to getting organized and getting cash for their clutter.

Taming cord chaos

21 February 2011

In my office I’m cord challenged. Like most people I have loads of electronic devices and their cables snake all over the place. I keep promising myself that one of these days I’m going to focus on the problem and come up with a great solution.

In the meantime, I did pick up a fabulous product at the Container Store the other day to handle one little area of cord confusion.

The outlets are few and far between in my office, so I have a surge protector plugged into an outlet in the far corner of my office. It’s stretched as close to my desk as possible so that I can plug a desk lamp into it (along with a floor lamp and my shredder). For ages, it’s sat there looking ugly. Here’s a photo:

My scrambled mess of cords.

Yesterday I bought a CableBox. It took about two minutes for me to put the surge protector and the excess cord lengths in it. I put on the lid and voila:

Two minutes later, it's a lot less chaotic.

Isn’t that an improvement? Now I need to figure out if I can use it with the major cord mess under my desk.

Exploring the website of BlueLounge, the company that makes the CableBox, I happened across their Studio Desk. Wow.

I want one.

It’s a desk with a hidden (but easily accessible) storage compartment beneath the surface of the desk for a surge protector, cords, peripherals. There’s a subtle slit across the top so that desired devices can be on the desktop, and plugged in beneath the surface. A single cable runs down the side of the desk to an outlet. Now that’s cord control. If I were starting my office from scratch, I’d be sorely tempted.

Final reminder: free shredding event

18 February 2011

Tomorrow’s the free shredding event sponsored by NAPO-St. Louis and Shred and Protect Document Services.

Between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m., Saturday, February 19, you can bring in one box (up to 25 pounds) of unwanted paper and have it shredded free of charge. Additional boxes are $5 each. NAPO-St. Louis members (including me…I’m working the 9 to 11 a.m. shift) will be there to help get the boxes out of your car for you.

This is a great chance to free yourself of unnecessary paper. If you’re like most people and have a pile or box/bag of paper waiting to be shredded, bring it on in. Or take the opportunity to go through a file drawer. I’d be willing to bet money you have some papers in there you can free yourself of. If you have under 25 pounds of it, you don’t even have to worry about sorting out the sensitive material. Just bring it all in.

Here’s the skinny:

Free shredding event

Sponsored By: St. Louis Chapter of NAPO & Shred and Protect Document Services

When: Saturday, February 19th 2011 from 9:00am – 1:00pm

Where: Shred and Protect Document Services 1429 Strassner Dr. Brentwood, MO 63144 (Hanley Industrial Court)

Why: The purpose of the event is to provide a safe and easy solution for the St. Louis Community to dispose of unneeded paperwork that is taking over their homes, businesses and lives. We strive to protect both consumers from identity theft and the environment by recycling the paper.

How: Free Shredding for one box (up to 25 pounds) and all other boxes shred for $5.00 per box. Cash and checks made out to Shred and Protect Document Services will be the accepted forms of payment.

Contact Information: Shannon Zipoy, NAPO St. Louis Marketing Director, 314-330-9394 or Shannon@anorganizedlife.us.

Hope to see you there!