Peace of Mind Organizing

The Organized Knitting Club

4 February 2008

I don’t think I’ve yet extolled the virtues of Ravelry, the exciting social networking website for knitters and crocheters. The site is amazing—a fabulous resource for finding patterns, seeing what others are knitting, getting technical advice and “meeting” people with similar interests through its various groups. It’s also a great organizing tool, because you can enter your stash, your needles, your works-in-progress, projects you’re planning to knit. Then all that information is at your fingertips. Imagine being at your friendly local yarn store and being able to see whether you already own the size US11 24” circular needles you need for a pattern (assuming they’ll let you use their computer and internet connection, which my friendly LYS, Knitorious, always does).

Now Ravelry has a new way to take you one step closer to a fabulously organized knitting life with a new group called The Organized Knitting Club. It was founded just last week by a generous and organized knitter named Jenean. The minute I learned about it, I joined. And I was delighted to volunteer to be the Organized Stash moderator.

Jenean didn’t stop there. She also created an adjunct group blog called the Organized Knitting Club. Every Tuesday, starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting an entry about organizing your stash. Other moderators will be posting weekly entries on their topics. I’m very excited to be involved!

If you’re a Ravelry member, I urge you to check out the Organized Knitting Club group. If you don’t already belong to Ravelry, you have to put yourself on the waiting list to be invited (it’s currently in beta testing mode). The waiting list is only a couple of weeks long right now. Just go to Ravelry to sign up.

In any case, please do check out the Organized Knitting Club blog!

Ready to declutter your stash?

29 January 2008

I’ve somehow ended up with some yarn that I can’t imagine I’ll ever knit with. Some acrylic, some fun fur, some other novelty yarns. On a larger scale, I ended up with an embarrassingly large collection of straight and circular needles I’ll never use. Those were purchased on ebay and didn’t turn out to be to my liking.

Today, I parted with those items and not only felt good about creating space in my craft room, but also was able to help others. As I learned about on the Cast On podcast from the fabulous Brenda Dayne, Interim House, a six-month residential alcohol and drug rehabilitation facility for women in Philadelphia, has a knitting and crochet program for their clients. And they need yarn and needles. You can read about the knitting program, and see photographs of the great stuff that’s being created here.

I emailed Kathy Duffy (mcduf@aol.com) who encouraged me to send the donation and told me that they give needles to the women to keep, so they’re always in need of needles as well as yarn.

I put out a call to local knitters, who generously donated more needles and yarn, so we were able to put together a nice box of items.

If your stash and supplies could use a little decluttering, Interim House would like to hear from you!

My go-to site for organizing product ideas

23 January 2008

I love reading other organizers’ blogs. There are some great ones out there. One of my favorites is San Francisco-area organizer’s Jeri Dansky’s blog, Jeri’s Organizing and Decluttering News.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jeri when we both took Jeanne Smith’s Estate Organizing workshop last summer. What’s great about Jeri’s blog is that she compiles these fantastic, themed lists of organizing products, complete with photos and sources.

Today’s entry is all about spice storage. She has some ideas in there I’ve never seen before.

If you like looking at organizing products as much as I do, add Jeri’s blog to your bookmarks. I check it out almost every day.

A couple of time (and money) savers

17 January 2008

This year I’m a quest to save time and be more productive. It’s going well. Thanks to the techniques found in Mark Forster book, Do It Tomorrow (link in the Links section at right) and Don’t Break the Chain I’m more productive than I’ve been in a long time.

Part of my new routine is to schedule time to read organization and productivity blogs. Today, on one of my favorites, Lifehacker, I came across a money and time saver from our friends at Google. It’s GOOG-411. Rather than dialing 411 from your land line or mobile phone to get the phone number of a business, which will incur a charge on your phone bill, dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-4664-411). I realize that takes longer to dial, but if you program it into speed dial, it won’t. Once you’ve dialed GOOG-411, state your location (or enter your zip code on the key pad) and say a business name or—I love this part—a business category. Stating “office supplies,” for example, will get you a list of nearby office-supply stores, from which you can choose. GOOG-411 will connect you, and there’s no charge (except for airtime charges, of course). If you’d like, GOOG-411 will text message you the information.

Here’s Google’s YouTube video about the service. The service is free and you don’t have to listen to ads.

The other free service I wanted to mention I also learned about at LifeHacker. It’s Jott. With this service, you can dictate messages to yourself or others that are transcribed and emailed to you (or other recipient). You register with Jott and give them the phone number you’ll be dialing in with. Once you dial in (Jott is now in my Contacts list on my cell phone, since I’ll be using this service in my car), Jott recognizes you. You say who the message is going to—you must register all your recipients on Jott’s website—and them just talk. In a short while, what you said appears as an email in the appropriate in box. I’ve used it for reminders to myself. It’s a great way to capture ideas while on the run.

Jott’s also free and there are (or will be) ads on the emails you receive. That’s a small price to pay, in my opinion.

Ode to a swift

15 January 2008

There are certain essential pieces of equipment you need when you’re a knitter. You need yarn, obviously. And you need knitting needles. (The longer you’re a knitter, the more amazing your array of needles). You’ll also need a few notions like stitch markers, tapestry needles, perhaps a stitch holder or a cable needle. All these things, though they add up, don’t cost much individually.

For me, there was a bigger-ticket item I wanted, one that felt decadent because it was so much a matter of convenience, not necessity.

I wanted my own swift and ball winder. If you’re not a knitter, you have no reason to know what those things are or why you’d use them. I’ll explain. When you buy yarn, it’s often already wound into ready-to-use ball. But sometimes the yarn you want will come in a skein, a loosely coiled length of yarn that you can’t knit from. Skeins are usually twisted into an easy-to-display hank like this:

A skein of Noro Cashmere Island yarn

Untwist the skein and you have a loop of yarn sometimes yards wide. You need to wind it into a ball:

A ball of Cashmere Island yarn (in a different colorway)

The old-fashioned way to do it (you may have seen your grandmother or mother do this—I know I did), is to have a helper hold his or her hands a few feet apart with the skein looped over them. Then you wind, by hand, the yarn into a ball. That requires an assistant (though you can use a chair back, or your own feet instead) and the hand-wound ball isn’t very neat. Or at least it never was when I tried to do it. Another alternative is to have the store where you bought the yarn do the winding for you. But that’s time consuming and sometimes I would forget to ask.

A swfit and ball winder automates the process. And I now own one. In fact, I used it to create the ball of yarn pictured above. Now I don’t have just any swift. I have a new-fangled vertical squirrel-cage swift. Here it is:

My squirrel-cage swift and ball winder

As you can see, you loop the skein over the little barrels that resemble hamster wheels. They’re adjustable, so you can get just the right tension (skeins of yarn are of variable widths). Then you thread the yarn onto the ball winder, which rests on top of the swift, and wind away.

One thing I love about this particular type of swift is that I don’t have to put it away and set it up. The more traditional umbrella swift clamps onto a table, as does the ball winder, and has to be put away (unless you have a dedicated table for it). My swift is tucked into the corner of the room in which I store my yarn and is ready to use at all times.

My husband gave this swift to me for my birthday. It’s handmade and he got it here. (It’s the “Alternate Vertical Swift.”) I’d be lying if I said I didn’t guide him toward that decision and this style of swift. It’s nicely made and makes my knitting life just a little bit easier—and it saves time. I’m one lucky knitter!

ETA in 2018: Please read the comments below. While I loved the swift when I got it, it’s proven to be problematic over the years. Ten years later, it is pretty much unusable, except as a place to mount the ball winder.

The amazing power of a clean desktop

13 January 2008

The habit I’ve been trying to instill with the Don’t Break the Chain method that I wrote about in a recent post is clearing my desktop at the end of the workday.

I know full well that this can be a huge productivity booster: when I sit down in the morning at a clutter-free work desk, I’m able to get right to work. When I’m greeted by teetering piles of paper and other clutter, I usually try to do some tidying up first or just feel overwhelmed and go get a cup of tea. Sometimes I try to ignore the clutter and work around it.

In any case, I’ve long told my clients of the wisdom of taking a few minutes at the end of the day to clear the desktop. Trouble was, I couldn’t seem to accomplish it myself. After a day or two of trying, I’d always need to walk away from my desk for some reason and wouldn’t bother clearing it. Just a day or two of accumulated clutter and clearing the desktop started to feel like a chore I needed to schedule time for.

Everything changed on January 5, 2008. That day, I actually took every single item off my desk, filled three small boxes, dusted my desk (the cat hair!) and put back only those things I actually use. I took the suggestion of taking everything off the desk from an interview John Trosko, NAPO LA chapter president, did with BusinessWeek.com. That podcast is on John’s terrific blog. Truth be told, I had a backlog of papers from my desk that I placed in a decorative box and went through little by little throughout the week. The box was not stored on my desk and it is now empty.

I know you’re dying to see the clean desktop. I took this picture this morning and I didn’t do any photo styling. It’s exactly how I left my desk last night.

My desktop this morning

So once I had a clear desk, it was a breeze to keep clean. In the past week there was one day where I went back down to my office after dinner to clean up my desk, motivated by wanting to highlight that day in red on my Don’t Break the Chain site. Here’s my chain as of this morning:

My clean-desktop chain is now eight days long!

The power of the clean desk has been amazing. I have a list of things to do in the morning in the hour or so after I get up and make coffee and before I shower, walk the dogs, and go see clients. Thanks to the clean desk, I’m actually getting through that list. I know it takes more than a week to form a habit, but this one is so rewarding that I’m very hopeful that it’s actually going to stick.

"Don't Break the Chain"

9 January 2008

As part of my new emphasis on time management this year, I started off the new year by checking out some productivity blogs. I came across this great post on the wonderful blog Lifehacker that introduced to me a concept that in just a few short days has really had an impact on me.

That post credits Jerry Seinfeld with explaining the concept of accomplishing things on a daily basis. He recommended to the writer that if you have something you’d like to create a habit of doing every day (in Seinfeld’s case, write; in my case end the day with a clear desk) mark an X on a calendar each day you do it. After you’ve accumulated a few X’s, you won’t want to break the visual chain you’ve created.

Sounded like a good idea to me. I downloaded (also from Lifehacker) a year-long compact calendar and as soon as I got my desk all cleared off (a couple of days later), I started making my X’s on the calendar, which I put on a bulletin board.

But then Lifehacker turned me on to something even better. Inspired by the Seinfeld blog post, someone (I’m afraid I don’t know who) created this website, Don’t Break the Chain. It allows you to create your chain and mark each day on the calendar when you’ve accomplished your task. Here’s a screenshot:

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to make that X. It really does motivate me to clean off my desk. It’s interesting because I know from experience how powerful it is to have a clean desk every morning. I just haven’t been able to keep it up. Now it’s only been a few days, but I’m feeling very jazzed up by this.

Thank you, Lifehacker! And thank you, Jerry Seinfeld.