The #1 Organizing Mistake

I am an office supply junkie!

Organizing Tips

I love to go to the office supply stores and get all the matching organizers like pencil cups, paper trays, folders, covered memo boards…you get the picture.

It all looks so nice and neat in the store, and I can just imagine my stuff in them.  I know that once I buy all this stuff, I will finally be organized and I can get on with my day.

Sound familiar? This is one of the most common mistakes we make – we confuse buying “stuff” to get organized with actually organizing our things.  We waste tons of money on things that really won’t help us get organized.  Ask yourself this question, “Do you struggle with how to make that new organizing ‘thingy’ work with your stuff?”  If the answer is yes, you purchased the wrong item. You can’t buy yourself organized.

Truth of the matter is, most of us don’t need to spend much money, if any at all, on organizational tools.  The first thing you need to do when organizing your space is determine what you need BEFORE you go to the store.  That way you will have a plan of what you will do with your new purchases and won’t be swayed by great displays or helpful sales people.

For example, if you have a ton of paper on your desk that needs to get organized, what do you really need?  Maybe just a box with hanging folders will do.  Or maybe you have tons of receipts; maybe you just need an accordion file to organize those receipts for tax time.  Whatever your organizational challenge is, take the time to analyze what you need first, then decide if you need to buy something to help you get organized.

If you already have too much organizational stuff, and it’s just getting in the way, consider getting rid of it.  You can either sell it at a garage sale, or invite some of your friends over for an office supply swap.  That’s a great way to recycle your unused items and get together with friends!

So, before you buy another organizational tool, follow these action steps:

1. Determine what particular challenge area you’re going to work on.
2. Evaluate your challenge to find out what supplies you’ll need to get organized.
3. Look at everything you have to see if you can use it to organize your stuff before you buy anything new.
4. If you have to buy something to get organized, make a list before you go shopping. To reduce impulse organizing buys, go online and shop for the one item you need and only purchase that item.

Joshua Zerkel is a Certified Professional Organizer and is the President of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers. He is also the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a productivity and organizing consulting firm based in San Francisco. Josh specializes in helping entrepreneurs and small businesses find easy ways to get control of their information, technology, and clutter so they can reduce stress and make more money. He also specializes in working with men. Although he doesn’t consider himself freakishly organized, Josh does admit to spending his free time alphabetizing his comic books and fixing the tags on his MP3 collection.

Josh has been featured in various media, including CBS News, ABC News, the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, Organize Magazine, Online Organizing, and many others, is a regular columnist on the Franklin Covey website, and co-hosts the “Thrive Solutions” radio show on Thrive in Balance. Josh is also a popular organizing instructor in the San Francisco business community, speaking to small and large companies about the different techniques they can use to optimize efficiency and productivity in their work environment so they can serve more clients and make more money.

For more of Josh’s practical (and sometimes pithy!) organizing tips, sign up for the Custom Living Solutions newsletter at http://www.customlivingsolutions.com/organizing-newsletter.htm or call 415-830-6345.

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De-Cluttering Your Digital Photos

Easily organize your digital photos in 4 easy steps!

Helpful Organizing Tips

Digital cameras make it easy and fun to capture your memories. Many digital cameras can store hundreds of photos at a time – many more than the 24 or 36 that film cameras can. Organizing the sheer number of photos that can come from one memory card can be a challenge. Managing your digital photos can be easy – and fun – with a few simple tips:

1. Toss the junk. Unflattering photos, bad camera angles, and just plain awful shots can take up lots of space on your hard drive. Before organizing your photos, go through your digital photo collection with a fine-toothed comb, and make sure that you’re only keeping photos that you like. Not only will you free up space on your computer, you’ll make it easier to organize your photos by reducing the number of photos that need to be sorted.

2. Sort and separate. If you’ve been keeping all of your photos in one folder on your hard drive, it can be tough to find the one that you’re looking for. Instead of using just one folder, create multiple folders by month and year, or by month/year and subject or event. Once you have your folders set up, them sort your photos into their new, separated homes. As you take new photos, create folders in the same manner to store your new shots. This will make it easy to find your photos later on when you’re looking for them.

3. Software makes it a snap. Once you’ve set up your folders, managing your photos is easy, using readily available software. On a Mac, iPhoto is the standard, and on the PC, I usually recommend Picasa or Adobe Photoshop Elements. These software tools are designed to make it easy for you to organize, fix, search, and print your digital photo collection. Using software, you can browse your photos in various thumbnail sizes, repair the dreaded red-eye effect, add tags to your photos to make them searchable, and create slideshows to share with your friends and family.

4. Backup for safety. Losing all of your memories if your computer crashed could be disastrous. For that reason, I always suggest backing up your digital photos to CD or DVD (preferably the rewritable variety, so you can reuse your discs again and again). Many of the software programs used for organizing digital photos have a backup feature built-in, which can make the process of storing you files for safekeeping very easy.

Photos (digital and traditional) are meant to be seen. Once you’ve organized your photos, it’s easy to share those memories in photo albums, prints, and slideshows. Spending a little time organizing your photo collection can make sharing your memories easy and fun once again.

Joshua Zerkel, CPO® is a the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm, specializing in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For more FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.

© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.

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Summer Organizing Tips

Summer… ahhh. When summertime comes, there’s a palpable change in the air – a feeling of fun, relaxation, and freedom from worry. Or at least, that’s how it can seem! Of course, the details of life and work don’t just go away with the change of the seasons. Especially if you’ll be traveling this summer, things can get pretty complicated.  That said, there’s plenty you can do to prepare yourself for maximum summertime fun! Here’s a few organizing tips ideas:

Forget about your bills. Are you spending time sitting down to pay your paper bills? This is probably one of the last things you’d want to spend your time on during the summer when you’re trying to relax. If you haven’t already, pull out each of your monthly bills, and set them up for automatic payment (wherever it makes sense to do so). What I typically recommend to my clients is to choose one of your credit cards to charge all your bills to via auto-payment, and then you only have to worry about paying one bill instead of several. I think this is a lot better than having your bills deducted from your checking account – if there’s an error, your credit card company can go to bat for you. Of course, this system works best if you pay your credit card off in full each month.

Plan ahead for maximum discounts. If you plan ahead, you can save a ton on summer travel. Use fare finders like Kayak (www.kayak.com) to help streamline your searches, and you’ll be able to compare deals from many airlines, hotels, and rental cars at once. Although they can be somewhat annoying, e-newsletters from your favorite hotels and airlines do sometimes feature sales and other bargains, so if you are planning on traveling using one of those vendors, you may want to sign up for their newsletters and then unsubscribe when you are done booking your travel – otherwise they can just end up as clutter in your inbox. If you’re not a big planner but still want to find great deals on last-minute travel, try Lastminute.com (www.lastminute.com). To maximize your time actually spent at your destination rather than your time getting there, look for direct flights, and try to travel with only a carry-on.

Dining on a dime. Once you’re at your destination, use a site like Restaurant.com (www.restaurant.com) for significant savings on dining out. With this site, you select the coupons you want from a list of restaurants, and buy just those. For instance, you can buy a $25 off certificate for around $10 – but if you use a discount code found on sites like CurrentCodes.com (www.currentcodes.com), you can get a discount off your discount – essentially bringing the price of a $25 off coupon to just a few dollars. Using these coupons, I’ve dined at some amazing restaurants with my friends and family, for a fraction of the cost of the people sitting a table away from me. What’s also great is that most of the restaurants on the site are small, independent venues, so you get to support local merchants while saving money on a fantastic meal!

Double your pleasure… by getting duplicates of the things you regularly need to travel with. For instance, instead of packing and then unpacking a toiletries kit, purchase duplicate items of all the lotions and potions you need, and keep a fully stocked kit in your bathroom. When you’re ready to travel, you won’t have to scramble to re-create the kit for every trip. Same is true for your electronics. If you have to unplug your laptop, cell phone and mp3 chargers every time you travel, it’s a huge timesaver to just get a second set of these gizmos, and keep them in a pouch or bag that can easily be grabbed and slipped into your luggage. I like the travel charger organizers from Kanagraoom Storage (www.kangaroomstorage.com).

Of course, there are many other ways to get organized to save time and stress during the summer. What are some of your ideas for having a simply organized summer?

Joshua Zerkel, Certified Professional Organizer®, is the founder of Custom Living Solutions, a San Francisco-based productivity and organizing consulting firm who specializes in helping busy people save time, space and money by getting organized at home and at work. For FREE organizing ideas, visit www.customlivingsolutions.com or call 415-830-6345.

© 2009 Joshua Zerkel and Custom Living Solutions. All Rights Reserved.

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Are your counter tops overloaded leaving you no place to prep your food?

Organizing Tips

• Start by putting like things together – vitamins/daily medications; bills to pay; mail; keys, business cards; receipts etc.

• NOW is the time to put those items where they belong – bills to pay/mail/receipts go to your desk to be acted on; vitamins/daily medications get put into a decorative basket; keys should be kept near the entry door either on hooks or in a bowl/basket.

• If any food is on your counter, try limiting the amount to just fruit and any bottle of oil/vinegar that is too tall for your spice cabinet.

• All other food items/spices and such should have a dedicated space in your pantry or cabinets.

• If you must keep important papers for your children’s school, purchase a decorative ‘hot pocket’ from your favorite office supply or organizing store. Use different colored folders for each child/person.

• Should you have other items that don’t belong on the counters – find them a home elsewhere so you can use the counters for their intended purpose.

For all of your moving/relocation/home staging and organizing needs call Peggy at 415.846.0569

from boxes to dinner parties in 48 hours! PHA wants you to be moved….!

www.peggyhughes.com

peggy@pha415.com • PHA / Peggy Hughes Associates

Rustic Kitchen Decor

Our rustic kitchen decor category is the ultimate source for your cabin or lodge accessories. Our collections include Maskwa Ridge, Maine Salt Glaze Pottery, Marilynn Mason Dinnerware and Brushwerks.  All you need to decorate your cabin or lodge.

Bear at Home is your single source for fine rustic decor. We’ve searched the globe for the world’s elite brands and selected the top housewares, gifts, rustic accessories and home furnishings to warm your home. Cabin Decor, Rustic Bedding & Rustic Lighting products to transform your rustic cabin or lodge.

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Those Pesky Receipts

Many of my clients are getting much better at saving their receipts throughout the year… and, some of them have followed my direction and taped those little bits of paper to an 8.5 x 11″ piece of recycled paper so that their filing system stays nice and neat.

Some have even purchased expanding file pockets and filed them by category so come tax time, everything is where it needs to be.

QUICK TIP: on the 15th & 30th of every month, set aside a half hour (or so) to organize your receipts by category – enter them into your excel/quicken/quickbooks software and file them in their categorized folders. You’ll be on top of the game for taxes!

And, for those of you too busy to organize receipts on your own, PHA is offering a 10% discount for the month of March…so, in addition to our ‘package’ rates, call before March 31st to take advantage of the additional 10% discount!

PHA is also extending this 10% discount to those clients who already booked financial organizing time! Thank you – you know who you are…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

from boxes to dinner parties in 48 hours! PHA wants you to be moved….

For all of your moving/relocation/organizing and staging needs call Peggy at 415.846.0569

www.peggyhughes.com

peggy@pha415.com • PHA / Peggy Hughes Associates

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