Peace of Mind Organizing

Check out these great organizing blogs

22 April 2008

When I was at the NAPO conference in Reno earlier this month, I was invited to a meeting of professional organizers who blog about organizing. What a great group of people and a fantastic opportunty to put faces with names (and blogs), as well as learn about some blogs I was less familiar with.

One of the fun parts was coming home and checking out all the blogs. I’d like to share a few that are new to me. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I urge you to visit them regularly!

Megan Spears: Order2Disorder Blog
Brandie Kajino: The Home Office Organizer
Krista Colvin: Organize In Style
Lissanne Oliver (from Australia!): SORTED! Organising and Decluttering blog
Wendy David (from New Zealand!!): The Organising Guru
Lauren Halagarda: Organizing B.I.T.S. & Bytes
Emily Wilska: The Organized Life
Lorie Morrero: The Clutter Diet Blog

In addition to these blogs, present at the meeting were bloggers whom I already visit regularly (and have mentioned here) like Aby Garvey, John Trosko and Monica Ricca. If you haven’t already, please do check out these blogs:

Aby Garvey: Creative Organizing
Jeri Dansky: Jeri’s Organizing and Decluttering News
Monica Ricci: Your Life. Organized
John Trosko: Organizing LA Blog

John, Monica and Lorie organized this terrific gathering. Thanks so much for including me, guys!

P.S. I now have an RSS Feed link at the top of this page (thanks for requesting it, Meagan). Feel free to subscribe to my blog!

Update on my email taming

21 April 2008

Just a few days ago, I wrote a blog post about taming my email box. I vowed to use the trusted-trio method, which I read about on Lifehacker, to empty my email inbox. I said I’d try it out and report back.

I had about 6,000 messages, split between two inboxes, one for my business mail account, one for my personal mail account. I started going through the personal email account box, deleting as much as possible, filing messages I wanted to keep in the new “archive” folder, messages that required action (there were precious few of those, thank goodness) in the new “follow up” folder, and ones pertinent to things going on currently in the new “hold” folder.

Plowing through 6,000 emails started to feel a little overwhelming, so I implemented the inbox 0.5 method of dealing with 50 percent of the email backlog per day .

So here’s the update. After two days of effort, so far I’ve deleted or refiled 4,500 of my 6,000 emails (3,000 the first day, 1,500 the second day). My personal email inbox is empty. It’s a glorious thing. I’d never really understood why people thought that was so desirable. But, my goodness, I feel so much more in control.

I have 1,500 (1,455 to be precise) still to process in my business email box. I have a long plane ride ahead of me this week (more on that in a later post), so I’ll probably finish the job then.

So far I haven’t had much occasion to use the Archive folder (which is probably significant in and of itself), but thanks to Mac’s fabulous Spotlight quick-search feature, I know I’ll have no problem finding the emails I seek.

I’m looking forward to two empty inboxes and the empowering feeling I’ll gain from them (not to mention, more control over my email).

We had an earthquake!

18 April 2008

St. Louis isn’t exactly known for its earthquakes, though we’re near a major fault and back in the early 90s there was an unfulfilled earthquake prediction that got everyone thinking about disaster preparedness.

This morning about 4:30 a.m., my husband and I were awakened by the sound of the windows in our 100-year-old home rattling. It was bizarre. We speculated on the cause. I thought a high gust of wind. He suggested it was an earthquake, which I dismissed out of hand.

When I checked our local paper’s website this morning, I learned it was indeed an earthquake, measuring a relatively mild 5.2 on the Richter scale.

At about 10:15 this morning, as I sat at my computer, the house started to gently shake. I’m guessing it was an aftershock. It lasted for what felt like quite a little while (though probably less than 10 seconds). And it was kind of freaky. I realize that it’s something Californians live with, but it was unfamiliar to this midwesterner!

All of a sudden, I’m thinking I need to buy and read uber-organizer Judith Kolberg’s book, Prepare for Disaster: Organizing Your Family and Your Home for Any Natural or Unnatural Disaster.

I’m glad that we have earthquake insurance!

Taming the email inbox

17 April 2008

I have to admit that I’m a bit of an email packrat. It seems fairly harmless to me, as long as my hard drive is large enough, and somehow having the history of many of my email interactions gives me comfort.

That said, when I switched computers in July 2007, making the thrilling leap from a PC to a Mac, I abandoned the 25,000 email messages (that’s right: 25,000) that were in my inbox on my PC. (They dated back 10 years.) I had probably ten times as many messages filtered into folders.

My system, such as it was, worked for me. But it was liberating to have a fresh email inbox to start with when I bought my MacBook. That was almost nine months ago. Despite having Smart Folders and regular folders in Mac Mail, I have accumulated over 6,000 email messages in my inbox. I think I need to lighten the load.

I read with interest this detailed post on managing email on Lifehacker. The writer, Gina Trapani, credits the originator of this method, Merlin Mann, with coming up with the Inbox Makeover method, which she has modified.

In summary, you create three folders: Follow Up, Archive, and Hold and file everything that would otherwise languish in your inbox into these folders. That way your new email, which lands in the inbox, gets your immediate attention. You have quick access to the items requiring action, and you can enjoy the serenity of an empty inbox every day.

I’m going to give this a shot. I’ll start tomorrow morning, try to keep it up over the weekend, and report back on Monday.

Super-cool designer notebooks

16 April 2008

Raise your hand if you’re an office-supply junkie. You can’t see me, but I’ve waving my hand in the air. I love office supplies. I can (and do) spend hours in Office Depot and Office Max. I especially love beautiful journals and spiral-bound notebooks. I love the feel of quality paper against my pen. I love the look of gorgeous colors and lines that are just the right distance apart.

So I was delighted when I saw a post a few days ago called Battle of the Designer Notebooks on the fabulous productivity blog, Lifehacker. This post has links to five notebooks that make my heart sing. Lifehacker’s asking readers to vote for their favorite.

I find myself drawn to the Levenger’s Circa notebooks, which I used years ago. (Here’s a deal on Circa – buy their Simply Irresistible Sampling Kit for $40 and get a $40 gift card with the order.)

One notebook on the list that I wasn’t familiar with is intriguing. It’s the Chronotebook. It appears to be Japanese. It has a round circle in the center of each page, representing a clock. You map your tasks around the circle by time. Or at least I think that’s what you do.

Clicking around Lifehacker I came across the Action Method and its products, including the Action Book, Action Pad, and Action Runner. That certain arouses my curiosity.

As I blogged about here, I’m also a fan of Miguelruis notebooks and was sorry not to see them on the Lifehacker survey. I also love my Russell+Hazel cloth-covered mini binder, which I purchased from my friend Aby at Simplify101.

They don’t have notebooks per se, but I love the 8.5-x-11-inch pads from M.O., a Smead company. They have ruled, grid, and plain (which has just one taseteful vertical rule). The paper is lovely. I just discovered that they’re now offering a Starter Kit for $49.95, with a sampling of their writing, filing and presentation products. Irresistible. Literally—I just ordered it.

I’d love to hear about your favorite notebooks and other office supplies!

How do you spell procrastination?

15 April 2008

In my life right now, the answer to that question is T-A-X-E-S. I have to hang my head in shame and admit that my taxes aren’t done. But I’m quite sure they will be by the end of the day.

I usually have my taxes done by a tax person and—I’ll admit it—more often than not in the last 10 years I’ve filed an extension. But perhaps spurred on by the promise of an extra check from Uncle Sam after my taxes are filed, I set a goal to get them in on time.

But I’ve been avoiding the task all year for fear that I’d have to write a big tax check, as I have in some years past. I avoided it so successfully, in fact, that it became too late for me to turn it over to my tax person. So I decided to give Turbo Tax a try. I used it about ten years ago with apparent success. And I’m ten years older and wiser (and have 13 years of self-employment under my belt) so I figured I could handle it.

Thankfully, we keep great electronic financial records and the paper records are filed appropriately. So getting my hands on the information wasn’t difficult. The hardest part was putting my behind into the chair and getting started.

In today’s News & Observer, the daily paper in the Raleigh, N.C., area, there’s a fascinating article on procrastination. It breaks procrastinators down into three types: thrill seekers, avoidance procrastinators, and decisional procrastinators, who are paralyzed by indecisiveness. I have a solid history of procrastination and I think I fall squarely into the middle group.

The other great thing about the article is that it quotes my friend, organizer Geralin Thomas, and tells how she helped a client overcome procrastination.

I’ve made great strides in kicking the procrastination habit since my writing days. (Most writers are inveterate procrastinators.) And in that quest, I should take to heart the lesson that this year’s taxes taught me. That big check I was worried about having to write to the IRS? It’s looking like we’re actually getting a refund. [Edited to add: Yep, we qualified for a refund!]

Back to reality

14 April 2008

After a glorious time at the NAPO conference in Reno (best part: interacting with fabulous organizers, worst part: staying in a hotel and casino full of smoke!), I’m home. I arrived home about midnight on Saturday night. Barry and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary yesterday.

As usual, I’m finding the transition back to real life to be a little challenging.

In addition to conference follow-up (I have a bazillion emails to send), I need to unpack, prepare for a talk I have to give tonight, and focus on a certain April 15 deadline.

Then there’s acting on all the great ideas and inspirations I took in at the conference. And there’s something about being around 800 organizers that makes me want to get my house better organized.

And of course I have wonderful clients to see this week as well.

So all my time-management and productivity skills will be put to the test this week. My first strategy is keeping this blog post short. I’m renewing my commitment to blog each day Monday through Friday, so you can watch this space to see how it’s going!