Clutter Hacks
Organizeit Projects
Space Treat: How to Stay on Course
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So, you've finally carved out a few hours to start organizing. During the process it's very common to find items that need to be relocated.
For example, say you're beginning with the kitchen cabinets and in order to pull everything out and sort it you need to clear off the counters. While doing that, you find a new tube of toothpaste and a new box of band-aids lurking on the counter. They never made it to your medicine cabinet when you unpacked your grocery bags 7 days ago.
Instead of walking them to their rightful home at the moment of discovery, start a "redistribution" pile so that you can stay focused on the task at hand
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Space Treat: Your Self-Editing Summer Wardrobe
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Summer seemed to really sneak up on me this year. How about you? I just managed to squeeze out a few hours to edit and organize my Summer wardrobe but if you didn't have time this year, just follow the two tips below.
#1 - Place all your hangers backwards on the rod, so that the hanger is hooked from the back to the front, open side facing out. As for your drawers and shelving, traditionally when you fold your shirts, you keep the "belly" part of the fold facing towards you, when you put your Summer shirts in now, arrange them so that the "neck" is facing out. When Summer is over, any clothing that you haven't worn will still be hanging in the backwards direction or arranged "neck" forward in the drawer. When Fall rolls around, you'll know exactly what you don't need to keep for next Summer. Let it go and donate it.
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Space Treat: Prune Away Your Clutter
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What do pruning a tree and clearing out your clutter have in common?
Pruning is one of the healthiest things you can do for a tree:
· It prevents diseased branches from further destruction.
· It supports healing when you remove a damaged limb.
· It encourages a tree to develop a strong structure and restores it's vitality.
This is exactly what happens during the "pruning" phase of organizing.
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Getting Kids Organized IS Possible!
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Kids will be kids, as the saying goes. Which means it may seem like organizing kids - whether tyke or teen - requires a super-sized miracle!
Here are 3 major factors for parents to consider when trying to help kids get organized:
(1) Set the example.
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How to Organize Your Laundry Room
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Why is it that this room always seems to have laundry soap in the wrong places, nothing is within reach and we never have enough room?
Probably because no one has ever really taken the time to decide what needs to be in this space and where it should be.
Should we have shelves, bins or storage containers?
Should we have good lighting?
Should there be a small clothes pole?
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Organize All Your Savings Cards!
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Is your wallet overflowing with club cards, savings cards and discount cards? Mine is!
Seems everyone has a card for their business and I find myself digging for the right one at the checkout counter with irritated folks behind me. Or just skipping the discount because I don't want to bother. (Why don't they just lower their prices?)
You can punch a hole in each of them and string them all on a key chain, but if you have more than a few, this really isn't the answer. I came across this site this morning: Keyringthing.com
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Space Treat: Clutter to Cash
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Thank you to all who wrote in with congratulations and good cheer regarding my feature in last week's Daily News! The writer, the photographer and the featured woman, Lisa, were absolutely delightful to be with so I had a blast doing what I love most - digging people, just like you, out from underneath their disorganization.
And since the focus of the article was about turning your clutter into cash, I thought I'd follow up today's Space Treat and share the best tips for creating a successful listing on-line that sells!
Here you go:
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Space Treat: Measurement Mishap
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Symptom:
Ever find that you've gone through the trouble of measuring a space so that you can outfit it with bins, boxes or shelving only to find that your measurements weren't exactly clear enough to you while shopping for the containers and you ended up with ones that don't exactly fit?
Remedy:
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11 Easy Ways to Store Kid's Toys
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Kids will like to put there toys away where they can find them when they know that each one of their toys has its own 'home'. Make it easy for kids to put their things away by providing hooks, shelves and storage areas they can reach easily.
1- Store toys with small parts (Lego's, puzzles, building logs, cars, Barbie accessories etc.) in: see-through plastic containers, glad plastic containers, coffee cans or plastic ice-cream buckets with lids.
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Space Treat: Bundle Up! And Special Event next week!
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We're still freezing here in NYC! So bundle up - both outside and at home or the office!
Instead of sprinkling your day with various activities you need to accomplish, make better use of your time around the office and house by bundling like tasks into separate categories.
That means gather up a bunch of phone calls and whip through them in one fell swoop. Then move on to the next bundle. (Do your phone call bundle first, that way if you have to leave a message you'll still be around to answer the return call while you're finishing up another bundle.)
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Get Organized: T-A-X-E-S!
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In the words of Dave Barry, "It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta."
Filing taxes = huge pain in butt. We all know it. We all go through it once a year. And while there's no way around tax season, there is a way to make the process less stressful.
P.R.E.P.A.R.A.T.I.O.N. (I'm hearing a collective sigh from all the procrastinators out there!) A little bit of preparation can make a huge difference in your tax filing experience.
Here are 5 steps to a help you file your taxes, on-time and un-frazzled…
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12 Ways to Plan Ahead and Save Money
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How early do you plan ahead for the holidays? Two months? Six?
Sara Noel of Frugal Village has an article here with some great ideas for planning ahead NOW for Christmas to save you some big bucks! Here's an excerpt:
Christmas is over, and the tree and decorations are put away. Phew. But frugal people are already getting a jump-start on Christmas 2009.
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10 Ways to Keep Clutter from Taking Over
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As I was walking through a clients home the other day, I was amazed at the storage space that she had in her home. The only problem is that every inch of it was jammed full of clutter.
Clutter is things that take up space but you don't use, is in the way and makes your house bulge at the seams.
When I walked into her house, it was really nice and homey looking and gave you an inviting feeling
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The Mighty Morphing Power Planner
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(My title dates my kids, huh? lol!) For anyone who follows this blog, you know my love of sticky notes. Well, lately my system of sticky notes at work has morphed into something interesting.
I keep a my big work planner (a big black binder) open on my desk at all times. I have several sections for the different aspects of my job - projects, blogging, site banners, As-Seen-In items, information, etc.
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7 Holiday Anti-Stress Tips
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Here are 7 Tips to help you ease your stress and get ready for the holidays without having a major anxiety attack:
1. Write a list of everything you need to do for the holidays. Make it a general list. For example: Don't list what you'll get for each person, just write "buy gifts".
2. Next - go through your list, eliminate anything you don't HAVE to do, & rearrange it in order of what needs to be done first. Then hang up your list where you'll see it.
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Diagnosis: Donation Dilemma
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Symptoms:
• In the spirit of the holidays you feel moved to finally pull out that pile of charitable donation request letters and contribute.
• You begin to wonder, how much did I give last year, and to whom? Where are my check records? Or if you donated directly via the internet and a credit card, you may have no record at all.
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De-cluttering Your Feed Reader
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I have two gmail accounts - don't ask, it's a long story - and what I've been doing is using the one as my main Google Reader account and the other for some blogs I wanted to keep track of, but they don't post regularly so those posts can pile up.
I've been subscribing like crazy to both my Google Reader accounts so they're getting out of hand and it's not uncommon for me to find 81 items unread, which is unusual for me.
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Paper, Paper and Still More Paper
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If you're ever going to keep up with all the paper in your life, you have to decide on a system and keep tweaking it.
Read more about how to deal with mail clutter and decide if my system will work for you as is, or if you need to make slight adjustments. I'm cool with that!
One of the biggest mistakes people make with organising paper is jumping to the filing instead of eliminating the source.
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Recycle Paper the Easy Way
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I've always said that if you make something too complicated, it just won't work, no matter how well-intentioned you are. That's why it's so important to make your systems easy, especially if you live with other people and you want them to live by your organising "rules".
That's true for designing a good flow for laundry in the home and also for recycling paper in the office.
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Clutter Control: Organizing Computer Passwords
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For the longest time, I had the bad habit of creating usernames and passwords for different websites that I visited thinking, “This password is easy enough; I’ll remember it.” And for the first two or three, I did.
Then I started jotting them down quickly while I was creating them, only to misplace or accidentally toss them later.
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10-minute clutter hacks - Computer
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Don't get fooled by the Organising Myth that you have to have a block of 2 - 3 hours to get anything significant done.
Not true!
Here are some tasks that will literally take you only ten minutes.
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Stacks and Stacks Helps Canadian Village Go Green
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The tiny village of Whale Cove in Northern Canada is finally going to have a recycling program, thanks to the efforts of a young villager named Sarah Igviksaq and StacksandStacks.com. This new program would help Sarah's small community pay for their sports teams to travel through the territories and do their part to save our planet.
Here is the letter we received from Sarah:
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Where Did All These Shoes Come From?!
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I did not know that a family of five could own so many pairs of shoes! I am always shocked at how many, and how quickly they pile up by the front door. And if you are one of the unfortunate ones (like me) who don’t have an entry way at the front of your home, the shoes wind up spread across half the living room if they aren’t kept in check. But how? With no entry way, I’ve had to get creative with our shoe storage.
Here are a few ideas:
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Can't Let Go of Old Baby Clothese? Here's the Solution!
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A lot of us have old baby clothes that we just can't bear to part with - a little pink Easter dress or something Grandma gave us when Junior was born…
Fortunately, I was able to narrow it all down to just my favorite few from each of my three kids, which I keep in a zippered bag in a trunk in my living room. But I know several people who just can't seem to do that.
Here are a couple of great ideas for keeping those same memories, in slightly different form:
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Fall Organizing Tips
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Autumn officially began a week ago. For most homeowners, this signals a shift from indoor organizing to outdoor organizing. Time to think about storage for garden supplies, grills, and patio furniture.
And along with the inevitable seasonal wardrobe change which will soon take place, the garage is a great place to start.
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Ellen’s Penicillin Method of De-Cluttering
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This post came from Declutter 101: Strategies To Cut Clutter | Organized Home. This was such a great analogy, I just had to share…
Often, decluttering efforts chase their tails in an endless loop. The home manager declutters the small table in the hallway and moves on. By the following week, a whole new species of clutter has returned to the cleared area.
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4 Tips to Tame E-Clutter
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Well, what good is organizing your office and desk while your computer is spilling over with clutter?
Here are four helpful tips to move you towards electronic bliss!
1. Make time daily to delete emails. I've told you before that my goal is to delete 100 emails daily so I go through my inbox, sent items, folders, etc. every couple of days.
2. When you download photos from your digital camera, choose the best ones there and then and delete the rest. I don't know about you but I usually take about 3 or 4 pictures if I can (if the subject is not moving) so that I can choose the absolute best pictures.
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10 Tips to an Organized Mind
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By organizing your mind, you get rid of clutter that fills the brain, which causes stress and anxiety. We all have enough things in our lives that are uncontrollable that can create problems, so why not organize the things that we can control, giving us a true feeling of accomplishment and stress free living.
These 10 tips will help you to keep your mind on-track and help you organize your life:
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Tips to Getting Your Child Organized for School
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Today's children have the overflowing paperwork and bulging day planners of pint-sized CEOs. And organizing those activities and assignments takes capable assistants: Mom and Dad.
"Without parental intervention, virtually all elementary school children, and many middle and high school youths, will be unable to manage the flow of information from school to home and back again," said Dr. Anne Rambo, associate professor of family therapy at Nova Southeastern University in Florida and author of the book "I Know My Child Can Do Better!"
Institute a daily backpackunpacking ritual, she advises. Sit down with the child after school and sort through all the contents, putting them in one of six piles: trash, supplies, books, things to keep such as graded papers, longterm assignments such as instructions for a book report due next month, and shortterm assignments such as homework due the next day.
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Don't get overwhelmed. Mind-map it!
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Sometimes, when you're not very far along on the Journey to Organisation, you may start feeling overwhelmed.
There are SO many places to start so you become indecisive.
Should I start in the kitchen? Should I start in the study? Should I start in my craft room? Maybe I should tackle the kids' rooms?
HELP!
Okay, okay, re-lax…
Here's what I suggest you do:
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