What’s Your Storage Style?

Are you the out-of-sight out-of-mind type of person? Do you cringe when you see the DVD’s and CD’s on open shelves? If you’re going to organize, you need to know your storage style.  My mother, for instance, can’t stand the curling iron laying on the bathroom counter. You’ll never find a lipstick sitting by her sink. (But then, she folds her underwear as neatly as they do at Victoria’s Secret.)  My teenage daughter, on the other hand, likes to have everything out before her. She says she will forget it exists if she doesn’t. I guess I’m somewhere in between.

You can still be organized even if you want to see it all. Corral all your photographs in an attractive wicker basket or maybe a gorgeous silver bowl. Find five baskets just alike and use one for lipsticks, one for eye shadow, one for bronzers — you get the picture. If you’re a great cook, keep all your oil, vinegars and spices neatly arranged on a lovely and useful platter.

But if you want closed storage, consider these ideas. Put risers on your bed to give you more space underneath. Look for baskets and boxes with lids. Keep your shoes in labeled shoeboxes.

It’s unfortunate that the closed organization people think the open people are messy. Actually, they just have a different style!  What’s your storage style? And is it working for you?

 

 

The Simple Life

Elaine St. James is the author of several bestsellers, including “Simplify Your Life” and “Living the Simple Life.” Her simple life is not the Paris Hilton kind we see on a reality show. Instead, she and her husband made a decision to dramatically simplify their lives.

Her books are interesting reads, and you can certainly get some good ideas. But she does overdo it some. My family would never go for eating the same menu every week, day in and day out. For one thing, some of the menus are a little strange. Blue corn chips and guacamole are dinner one day; apples, cheese and popcorn are dinner another!  Just can’t see this one happening at my house. She also has limited her wardrobe to black. While I love black clothes and I actually build my wardrobe around that color, I do have some other colors to liven it up a bit.

But what I do like about her books is that she consciously looked at every aspect of her life to see how she could scale down. Think before you buy; do I really need something else to clutter up my house? Lower my expectations; the kitchen sink does not have to shine like Martha Stewart’s every day. Cancel the newspaper subscription; most of it is depressing anyway and we can certainly get all the news we want from the Internet.  I especially liked “sell the damn boat.” We have ours for sale now. It requires way too much work and way too much money.

I can’t go all out for Elaine St. James’ thinking, but I like the way she gets ME to thinking.

Urgent, Just Not That Important

It’s difficult to get a handle on time. It seems to get away from us even quicker than money! I’ve found it really helps for me to make a list of what I hope to get accomplished. But I usually don’t limit the list for one day. Take right now, for instance. It’s Friday. I made a list Wednesday night for what I wanted to get done Thrusday and Friday. I don’t feel so stressed that way. And having it down on paper does help. Yesterday, about noon, I felt I had been working at the speed of light. And I had! Yet, when I looked at my list I had only done one thing on it. The rest of the time was spent on those little, somewhat unimportant tasks that take up so much time.

Someone once said we often do the urgent instead of the important. How true that is! Yesterday, it was important for me to do some writing for a client, yet it was urgent for the laundry to get done. So guess what got my attention?

And we had a repairman here doing some work. Once again, I needed to write, but here he was asking me about stuff. Not really that important, because there’s no rush to get that work done. But, because he was here (and we were paying him to be here!) the urgent took first place. Not the important.

One of my goals is to get my life focused enough to do the important. The more organized I get, the closer this is to becoming a reality.

What about you? Do you take care of the important? Or, the urgent?

Get It Ready to Sell

We have been thinking about putting our house on the market within the next year. Our twins are leaving for college in a few weeks, and this huge house — all 5,000 sq. feet of it — will just be too large for us. So, we’ve been doing some minor and major repairs, and I’ve been trying to declutter. It’s occurred to me that the moving mentality is a good way to help get a person organized.

I’ve been pretty ruthless, and so far, I’m not missing a bit of it. Oh, my family would have a fit if they saw some of the stuff that went the way of the thrift shop, but since they’re not even aware the stuff is gone, I’m assuming they didn’t even need it in the first place!

Another good idea is to box up stuff you’re not ready to give away, but think you can live without for just a while. Put it all in boxes, seal the boxes and put them in the attic. Date the boxes. If you haven’t needed to open them in a year’s time, toss them. WITHOUT opening them, that is!

Organize With a Binder

Notebook binders are absolutely fantastic organizing tools. I use them for just about any project. Don’t spend your time looking for fancy notebooks to suit each topic. Just get yourself to the office superstore, buy some cheap binders, paper, index dividers and a three-hole punch and start organizing! Here are some ideas:

1. Personal Cookbook: Print your favorite recipes you use all the time. Label index dividers with your categories, such as appetizers, main dishes and desserts. File each recipe in the appropriate section. Use plastic page protectors to save your recipes.

2.  Household Information: Add all the information you need to run your home. You might have your pest control contract, names and telephone numbers of teens who can cut the grass, the plumber’s cell number.

3.  Health Information: List all the family doctors and their telephone numbers. Keep prescription numbers for drug refills. Include health forms your kids need for school.

4.  Car Information: Include copies of car warranties, the tire and oil maintenance schedule and the names and telephone numbers of good mechanics. You should also keep newspaper and magazine clippings of cars you may be interested in purchasing.

5.  Home Decorating:  Are you involved in some decorating projects? A binder will become your best friend. Include pictures, paint chips, fabric swatches and any random ideas you have. Take the binder with you when you’re shopping.

Think Before You Buy

We’ve all got too much stuff, way too much stuff. Years ago, my husband and I attended a financial planning seminar. The speaker suggested that if you wanted to buy something to write it on a piece of paper and date it. If you still really wanted it 30 days later, then buy it. This is a great way to simplify your life.

That makes a lot of financial sense, but it also makes a lot of sense when it comes to organization. I’ve really been trying to resist the temptation to bring more stuff into our house. Sure, I’ve given bags and bags and more bags to Goodwill, but if I’m bringing new stuff in at the same rate, what good does it do?

Think of your goals. Are you trying to save for a new car, a new house? Hoping to put the kids through college without any loans? Maybe you’re just trying to have a little extra for a rainy day. Every time you feel tempted to buy something, ask yourself this question: Is this getting my closer to my goal or further away?

We come in with nothing, and it’s sure we’re not taking anything with us when we leave. Many years ago, my Great-Aunt Susan died. My mother went up to the house where the daughters were in the attic going through all the boxes of things Great-Aunt Susan had saved. Cards, ribbons, thank-you notes, dried up corsages, yellowed and torn newspaper clippings. She had saved it all. And the daughters were pitching it out without a thought, because, of course, it didn’t mean anything to them. I’m not saying it’s bad to be sentimental. I’m just trying to convince you it’s not necessary to save it all. If you throw out a birthday card, that doesn’t mean you didn’t appreciate it.

Think about it. Now, go get a trash bag. 

Paper, Paper Everywhere!

What’s happened to the idea of a paperless society? Didn’t “everybody” say computers would bring an end to paper? Guess what, paper’s still here and apparently is never going away — at least not in my lifetime.

But, you know, there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to put your hands on a piece of paper you need. Because of disorganization and paper clutter, we’ve all spent too many hours searching for stuff and then even more precious hours waiting at the Social Security office or the Health Department or wherever it may be getting a duplicate copy. Or think about all the money you’ve wasted because you couldn’t find the receipt you needed to return something.

I’ve finally come up with a system that works for me.

1. The One Year Drawer: Years ago, I tried making separate files for everything, with the idea I would neatly file each day. Come tax time, I would whip out my files and have that miserable assignment done with quickly. Well, I did file every day, at least for the first couple of weeks in January. Now we have the One Year Drawer at our house. It’s a drawer in the kitchen where we throw everything we think might need come Uncle Sam’s favorite time of year. No, it’s not filed into categories. But it’s all there. Every last piece.

2. My personal in basket: David Allen, the personal productivity guru who wrote “Getting Things Done” gets the credit for this one. (David Allen is my hero — more on him in later posts.) I have one very large basket in my home office. Everything goes in there. The mail, the bills, clippings I want to keep, stuff I’m not sure about. Everything. The key is to actually go through your in basket at least once a week. At first, you’ll need an hour or so to do this, but as you keep it up, you’ll require less time. You don’t have to act on everything in your in basket each week, but you do have to look at everything. All the bills get paid on time that way.

3. Standing files: Our twins just graduated from high school. A yellow folder that says “school” has been on my kitchen desk since kindergarten. I have an attractive wicker file stand there. Each year, I’ve filled the folder with anything related to school, and each summer I’ve cleaned it out. This year, we’ve also had one that said “college.” (She wipes a few tears from her eyes.) All the ACT stuff, tuition deposits, orientation information has all gone in that one folder.

4. Work basket: I’m a freelance writer, and I work out of our home. Even though I have a home office complete with desk, fax, printer and all that kind of stuff, I frequently write on my laptop at the kitchen table or on the porch or sometimes propped up in bed. I have a linen basket that contains all my current writing projects. If I go out of town, all I have to do is pick up that basket, and my office can be anywhere.

There are lots more methods to handle paper, but these are four that have worked for me. What do you do to stay on top of the beast?

Organized Forever!

Organized forever? Well, now wouldn’t that be great! Some women long for fame, fortune and beauty. Not me. No, I want the clothes in my closet to stay organized by color. I yearn for the junk drawer in the kitchen to be neatly categorized. Will the day ever come when my garage looks like the ones on HGTV? Will Pottery Barn ever contact me to photograph my house for their catalog?

Organization is a perpetual quest for me. While others might see me as quite organized, I’m always trying to improve. With a husband, teenage twins, a home and two part-time jobs, life seems to always be one step ahead of me. Not to mention, I think I’m having a mid-life crisis, complete with hot flashes.

My messy family is no help at all. I’ve come to realize I’m the type of person who just doesn’t function well in chaos. I can’t cook if the kitchen is a mess. I can’t go to sleep in a bed that’s not been made all day. I’m a writer, but I can’t sit down to write when there’s laundry to be done, bills to be paid and tubs to be scrubbed.

My husband is just the opposite. His AD/HD personality goes for a more spontaneous, off-the-cuff type of life. Let me give you an example. We recently went to visit his family in California. There we were, standing in an extremely long line at the Avis counter at LAX, when he said he thought our car was Avis. Thought, not knew for sure. He said he was absolutely positive it started with an A.  It did. The car was Alamo, not Avis. That was just about midnight. No confirmation number, no printout, no nothing. Just an “A.”

Our teenage twins apparently take after their father. They don’t seem to mind the floor being littered with clean clothes, dirty clothes, half-eaten muffins and CD’s. How they got through high school this way is beyond me, yet they graduated with honors. In a few weeks, they’ll be freshmen at college, six hours away from Mom. I guess they’ll make it.

So, the purpose of this blog is to keep track of my organizing progress and hopefully get some ideas from others. Are you organized? Do you have some tip that makes the routines of life easier, simpler, maybe almost non-existent?  Please share.

As for me, I’m still trying. And I’ll let you watch my efforts as I continue to strive for living likes the pages of Real Simple magazine. Now, if I could just find where my daughter dropped the last issue . . .