Fall into Organization with a ‘Playbook’ for Your Team

Hopefully you enjoyed a relaxing and recharging holiday weekend spending time with family and friends. Now that school is back in session and work is in full swing after the summer vacation season, fall is the perfect time to get your household routines and family schedules in line.

Time-Saving Tip #8: Streamline your routine with a simple household binder.
All you need is a small binder- use a spare one you have around or try these eco-friendly binders from greenroom, available at Target - some sheet protectors or a 3-hole punch, and some dividers. Simply hole-punch (or slip into sheet protectors) all those important papers, schedules, pieces of information that might otherwise get lost in a pile on the kitchen counter. This might include extracurricular or daycare schedules, important contact info, including babysitters, tutors, and coaches, upcoming events, and more. You can even step it up a notch and include a family chore chart, a master calendar or extra features like lunch-box ideas so these tasks can easily be shared among family members or helpers. Use the dividers to separate types of information or create a section for each family member - you can customize your binder to meet your family’s needs.

Get everyone involved in the binder - gathering information, deciding on what to call it, and most importantly, where it will live. If everyone in your house knows about the binder, you stand a fighting chance of being on the same page. Now wouldn’t that be nice?!

Bottom Line: Create a simple household binder as a place to store and organize your family’s activities and you’ll have your playbook prepped for a winning team!

Weekend Inspiration: Organized Gifts

This week on our green blog, I wrote about making gift giving a little greener. But it occurred to me that you can also up the organizing ante when you give. One of my tips for staying green while giving is to stick to the gift registry unless you have another special idea. But if you find yourself batting registry clean up (i.e. scooping up the odds and ends left on the registry), which is a perfectly valid gift giving strategy, or simply have several smaller items to piece together, here's an idea to tie them all together.

You can make a really great looking and functional gift by buying a universally appealing organizing container to package your small items. Wrap each item in tissue paper, or even leave them exposed and just use a few bows and some tissue to 'nest' the items in. Here's a picture of such a gift I'm bringing to a baby shower tomorrow. Two recent gifts I've received came packaged in containers that I love and use daily!

Other ideas for organized giving...

Give a tote bag, car trunk organizer, travel toiletry case or another organizing 'tool.' Just be sure you know it will fill a need and will not be likely to end up as additional clutter.

I love to give Container Store, Home Depot or other gift cards, especially if the recipient is working on home projects. This way you are helping out but letting them choose their own 'tools.'

And last but not least, if you know someone is interested in organizing help, you can give gift certificates for home and office organizing services. We offer these at www.OrganizingBoston.com (shameless plug, but it's true).

What are your ideas for giving organized gifts?

Weekly Feature: Scenes From a Professional Organizer’s Home

As a professional organizer, clients often ask me – “So what’s your home really like?” They want to know if it’s a case of…

a. I can do this for others but neglect my own space

b. My house looks like a Martha Stewart photo shoot or a Container Store catalog

c. Or some happy medium of a reasonably organized, real home

I hope you’re happy to know the answers is closest to C, which is not to say that I wouldn’t like B. The reality is busy schedules, multiple household members, and the challenges of modern life mean that to-do lists, unfinished projects, and room for improvement are always present. I don’t come home, kick off my organizing shoes and sit on my perfectly fluffed couch with my Real Simple magazine and a glass of wine (though that sounds pretty good and sometime happens). I do, however, have systems in place that usually keep our house in good shape. Over that past couple years, (we’ve been in our condo for 3), there have been a number of home improvement/organizing projects and lots of trips to the local Goodwill donation drop-off. We are pretty much down to having only what we need and love in our space, which is good considering the limited storage space we have.

Over the next couple months (or until you get bored or I run out of material), I will pick reasonably organized spots in my home to highlight in the hopes of not only giving you a ‘reality TV’ glimpse into a professional organizer’s home, but more importantly some ideas you can implement in your space. Who knows, I may even get brave and show you some of the ‘works in progress’ which might inspire me to get them done so I can show you the results! So stay tuned and feel free to make requests, ask questions, and share ideas and scenes from your own space.

How My iPhone Changed My Life

Ok, so that might be a bit dramatic, but my husband asked me that question the day I got my new ‘friend’ (just 2 days ago, but who’s counting) and I was a bit surprised to realize that I already had an answer. This is not meant to be a product endorsement, though after just 2 days, I can say that I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone who has been thinking about switching should ‘just do it.’

To get to the point, my iPhone has already helped me better implement 2 organizing strategies…not bad for one little device in just 2 days. First, it has helped me downsize the amount of stuff that I need to take with me. Just like that, my paper calendar became obsolete. I know this is a personal choice, but it’s what I needed – a mobile, easy to use, easy to update calendar. I also used it today to store my grocery list – eliminating paper lists that are admittedly sometimes left on the kitchen counter (where they clearly do no good). It is so easy to access information in my email and online that there will be less of a need to jot down or take with me little bits of info like addresses, ideas, etc. I still carry a notebook that I use to jot down things when I’m with a client, but overall, I’m less weighed down heading out the door. Now if I can just figure out how to juggle the scan-as-you-go grocery scanner (another great and fun time-saving invention) and my iPhone, I’ll be in great shape!

Even more importantly, my iPhone is also helping implement the idea that every little bit counts. As an organizer, I am out and about, not sitting at my desk for any stretch of time. Keeping up with email and to-do lists has been challenging with this on-the-go lifestyle. I would find myself spending way too much time on my computer in the evening because that’s the only time I felt I could tackle the accumulated email and follow up items. Even though I was already using a smart phone and getting email on the go, I never really felt inspired (or able) to do much with it other than preview it to deal with later. I am now happily using little blocks of free time on the go (not while driving of course) to whip through my email – deleting, responding, checking out links, you name it. You can get lots done in 10 minutes with such a user-friendly device.

This strategy can carry over to lots of things…the clean laundry spilling out of the basket, the stuffed full ‘to file’ folder, the piles of mail you’re afraid to look at. You may not have 2 hours to deal with an unfinished task, but you can make a dent if you commit to just 10 minutes on a regular basis. Just take the first item you see and deal with it – fold it, file it, shred it – whatever the case may be. Using these short bursts will also help you decide to decide – don’t put it aside any longer – if it takes the whole 10 minutes to deal with that one piece of paper, that’s fine, at least you’ve taken care of it (or begun the process). Little bits of progress still feel great and may just inspire you to keep going!