NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION – GET ORGANIZED
January 4, 2018
New Year’s Resolution – Get Organized – Here’s How!
It’s a new year and, if you’re like most people, you’re already compiling your long lists of things to do, stuff to change, pounds to drop and things to get organized. It can be overwhelming really, but only if we let it. You can let yourself off the hook and go the traditional route by only picking one thing, or start off the year with a range of goals to improve your life, home, health and more. “Organize my house” is too general, although it’s fine to think big. You need a plan. Get granular, get focused and enjoy the benefits of your planning and labor in the days, months and years to come.
Making changes really involves three basic steps, assessing, planning, and implementing. Here are a few tips to help manage your program for change as you enter the new year:
ASSESS
- Let your mind roam free and jot down all the things you want to change – in no particular order. Don’t get stressed as you do it. Just consider the things in your life you feel need improvement and the things you would like to be different, more efficient, or better in some way. Keep writing, take a break, and come back to it later if you need to. You can journal, write sentences, draw pictures. Don’t judge it. Just let it flow. Later, you can refine and consolidate your ideas into words, concepts and projects and arrange them in a list format.
- Now go through your words, concepts and projects list and organize them into categories that make sense to you. You can even cut out the words and arrange them on a separate paper. Sticky notes are another way to make your ideas positionable. Save space to fill in sub-categories. Example, if one of your items was “make more space,” you could have subcategories with rooms to purge, declutter and organize. “Improve health” might include things like “exercise routine” and “prepare healthy food at home.”
- Once you have your main and subcategories written, rank them by importance. What needs to be done most? What is interfering most with your happiness? Your efficiency? This is not a high-stress task, or intended to make you worry. There’s no pressure. Remember, you have, not only the forthcoming months but your whole life to complete things. Today, you are just planning and prioritizing. Clearly mark your priorities with bold numbers. You might even use colors that you associate with your priorities.
PLAN
- Set some small goals. Set some big goals too, if you feel ambitious. But don’t overwhelm yourself. You can do a little each day. Set two hours aside on Saturdays or Sundays; spend a half hour completing some task each morning before work. You get the idea! You want to plan enough to get you started in implementing meaningful changes but not set the bar too high, so you feel defeated and overwhelmed. If you have your list planned, it will always be there for you, and that is the first important step.
- If organizing is a top priority, make a plan for how you do it. Do you need to get rid of things? Then plan a couple of hours to sort, bag and toss, and have some bags handy. Organizing by room is a great idea. Why not make a list with goals for each room. If you work on a room a week, it won’t feel overwhelming. Short on time? Then do one room per month. And if you don’t complete it, don’t beat yourself up. It will still be there next month. If you’re really short on time, divide your room organizing into micro-tasks. Example: clean out the desk one drawer at a time, then move onto the filing cabinet. Breaking down projects into smaller tasks will incrementally get you organized, while giving you a forward-moving sense of satisfaction. However you choose to organize your rooms, it’s remember that having a concrete goal is better than a nebulous one and a “feeling” that you’d like things to change. Try to be as detailed as you can in your planning. Be flexible though, and allow for adjustments. Trust me, vagueness is NOT conducive to getting things done.
- If you don’t quite know where to start with organizing, we have tons of articles on our blogs including Organize-It Blog, Ask Our Organizer and the Clutter Control Freak Blog (which has over 1000 articles). Blog posts include methods, tips and even products for getting you organized. If you feel really stumped about a particular organizing challenge, feel free to Ask Our Organizer. It’s a free service and Harriet Schechter (a professional organizer and author) usually gets back to you really quickly. Professional organizer, Donna Lindley recommends sharing some of your goals with others as a way of building accountability. Read her 2012 New Year’s post here.
- Time management is usually something that springs to mind each new year as we assess our lives and strive to do better. For most of us, lack of time is the major impediment to getting organized. Planning your tasks in a day planner is a great way to keep yourself on track – yes – the old-fashioned paper kind are great, and you won’t lose them when your laptop takes a dump. It will all be there for you to pick up, cross off, add onto, or ponder while you watch TV at night.
IMPLEMENT (YES – LET’S GET TO IT)
- Get going on your tasks and be sure to reward yourself as you complete them. Of course, the improvement in your life, room, health, etc. is a reward in itself, but don’t be afraid to indulge yourself in some small way. That could be a treat, a cup of tea, a dinner, a massage, or a family activity after you’ve completed a project.
- Don’t be afraid to include family members or roommates in the work, doing tasks you have agreed on. If you have kids, you’ll be doing them a great service by teaching them organizing skills and good habits when they’re young.
- Try to be consistent about the changes you make. Forming positive habits is part of the resolution and change you bargained for early on with your pencils, pads and planners. If you need to go back to them and add “daily” or “weekly routines” to keep things in order, by all means do so.
- Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get everything done on schedule. Just keep chipping away at your list and do the best you can, keeping your eye on the future and the better life and habits you’re going to enjoy in the coming year. You’re making changes and that’s the important part, and remember, organizing is a process; it’s holistic; it’s a journey, not a station. Allow for your needs to change as your life unfolds and take periodic assessments to make certain you’re still on the right course.
You also might enjoy the Clutter Control Freak 2017 – Healthy Eating blog post on the stacksandstacks.com blog.
4 Steps to Photo Organization
December 29, 2017
Organize-It is pleased to present guest blogger, Jennifer Niloff, a passionate scrapbooker who turned her enthusiasm into a very successful digital archiving and photo printing business, EverPresent. Organizing and preserving old photos is something we all need to do and tend to put off. Jennifer will get us motivated to finally address our photo collection issues with this helpful blog post.
Photo Organizing is Super-Easy Using These 4 Steps
1. Consolidation: Gather everything in one place and sort out the obviously bad.
The first step to organizing your photos is to get them all together. Once you start sorting and selecting your photos, it will set you back to come across a set of albums or photo boxes in the back of your closet that you forgot about. Check all the nooks and crannies, ask family members and gather as much as possible into a large space you’re comfortable dedicating to this project for a little while. The more spread out all your photos are, the more overwhelming it will feel to get started.
As you’re consolidating, now is a good time to set aside or throw out any photo that is obviously bad. These are the photos that are so dark or so bright there are no details or visible people. These are the blurry photos and the groups of landscapes that are tucked into the back of albums. Getting rid of any of these right from the beginning will make the rest of the process go much smoother.
Here are a couple of things to consider on what makes a bad photo:
- Blurry
- Under or overexposed
- Bad faces
- Closed eyes
- Fingers or a thumb covering part of the lens
2. Prioritization: Find the photos you can’t live without.
Now that you have everything together, just dive in. We always recommend utilizing the ‘three pile method’—photos you can’t live without, photos you maybe don’t need and the photos you aren’t going to keep. 
You won’t find every bad photo in your initial consolidation of your photos, so the bad pile for this part is the same pile of bad photos you’ve already started.
Your pile of photos that you can’t live without should cover all the basics: weddings, graduations, milestone anniversaries, school pictures and professional family photos. Keep in mind as you’re creating this pile that you don’t need every single one of these photos. If you have a sheet of the same fifth grade school picture of your son, cut out one and toss the rest. You want to save the photos that move you.
Anything you’re on the fence about should automatically go into the maybe pile. The maybe pile is the most important and the most difficult. It’s easy to make instinctual reactions about what’s terrible and what’s amazing, but not as easy to decide between which photos to keep that don’t strike you as incredibly important.
3. Selection: Sort through the ‘maybe’ pile and make hard decisions.
The most important piece of advice we can give you for sorting your maybe pile is to be ruthless. You’re going to go through this pile multiple times, and each time you go through it will require a more thoughtful approach, so the first time should be quick. Take your maybe pile and sort through as fast as possible. Trust your gut instinct to weed out any photos that you don’t need from that pile. You’ll be surprised at how many you eliminate doing this after you’ve completed your ‘can’t live without’ pile and know what you have in there.
For the photos you are still deciding on, here are a couple of tips to help you narrow down what really matters.
- Good faces matter. If they’re not looking at the camera, you’re not going to be fully capturing the moment and we suggest not keeping it.
- Duplicates are unnecessary. The iPhone burst function that creates a huge number of photos that are basically the same is rooted in tradition—people have been doing it with their film cameras forever. For the 10-15 photos of your son’s first birthday party in your ‘maybe’ pile, pick one or two (or none at all!) because the best photos from that event should already be in your ‘can’t live without’ pile.
- Keep a photo if it makes you pause. You’ve been through your piles multiple times by now, and if a particular photo still makes you question whether or not it belongs in the ‘maybe’ pile—save it.
- The future also matters. If you have any projects in mind for these photos, you can use that in your consideration of your ‘maybe’ pile. Photo gifts that utilize a single photo are going to be culled from your ‘can’t live without’ pile, but photo gifts that require a number of photos to tell a story need more. If you’ve saved all the best vacation photos from your favorite family trip as a child and want to make a photo book, include some of the beach photos or scenery you might have in your maybe pile for background pictures or that little something extra that brings the narrative together.
4. Organization: Find the system that works for you!
You’ve sorted your ‘maybe’ pile into your ‘yes’ and ‘no’ piles, you’ve thrown away all the photos you aren’t keeping and now the big decision happens—how do you organize your ‘can’t live without pile’?
The answer to this will come from what you’ve already gathered as you were sorting. Most families don’t label or separate their photos chronologically, so attempting to do that from a pile of loose photos is going to be incredibly difficult. We recommend separating your photos into overarching themes. Once you’ve done that, store them in archival photo boxes you can easily find at Michaels. Having your photos scanned into a digital format is the best long-term choice for preserving your photos before they deteriorate.
Here is a list of themes you can consider as you’re organizing your ‘can’t live without’ pile. You may also find as you’re grouping your photos by themes that a chronological pattern becomes more apparent and you can organize your themes in a pretty accurate timeline.
- Separate branches of the family
- Your children individually and general family photos
- Important events like weddings can be grouped together
- Organize groups of photos by vacations
- Holidays can be sorted as a general group, or by individual holidays like Christmas
Jennifer Niloff is a lifelong scrapbooker who turned her passion into the nation’s leading photo-organizing business, EverPresent. Established in 2012, her company now employs over 40 professionals and serves clients nationwide. Jennifer writes on topics ranging from photo-scanning services to digital photo organizing to using photo books and edited slideshows as the best methods to share your important family photos and videos with loved ones.
Quick Holiday Cleaning Tips for the Non-Obsessive
December 20, 2017
The holidays are upon us and guests will soon arrive. You already decorated and your house looks great, but you just didn’t have time to do the deep cleaning you had hoped to achieve before your barrage of guests show up. Your cousins are staying over for the weekend and your college kids are bunking together to accommodate them. Your kids already know you are sometimes a slacker and marvel at the amount of household stuff, art supplies and refuse you were able to stuff in the craft room closet. Yay you! They love you anyway, so no worries there. Lock the door and no one will open it or get injured in the toppling mess when the curious cat tries to sneak a peek into your hidden spaces (i.e. Aunt Sara).
Aunt Sara is going to scrutinize the heck out of your housekeeping habits, but she would do that regardless of the state of sterility you achieve in your kitchen and bath (some people are just like that). So how should you prioritize? The clock is ticking and you still have thirty gifts to wrap, shopping to do, and then the food prep. Plus you’re working… This is the part where you have to prioritize and figure out what matters most to you on the holidays. What and who—because really, there are only a few days left and a few hours to accomplish everything you need to do.
Now it’s time for you get out a piece of paper, have a cup of calming tea (lavender or chamomile), and reminisce about your favorite holidays. Which ones stand out in your mind as more successful, more enjoyable, more joyous, more relaxed, or simply had more flow? Jot down your thoughts in a “best holidays” column, then make short lists of what it was that made it best. Was it the food? Having your family together? The synergy of your guests? The gifts? The reactions of the gift recipients? The matching candy-striped toe socks worn by your entire clan? The excellent wine? Or maybe the love you shared?
So be honest with yourself, did “cleanest house in the hood” come up anywhere near the top of your list? Well, if it did, you know what you have to do. You will need to prioritize the most important cleaning tasks that you can possibly accomplish in the limited amount of time you have. You could pare down Good Housekeeping’s 7-day Plan and focus on the most visible rooms. House Logic has a quick-and-dirty (or clean) checklist of the most vital cleaning tasks for a guest-worthy home. HGTV has a plan for cleaning your house in 45 minutes or less (my favorite). Of course, this assumes you have kept up on your maintenance to a great degree. Regardless of how “deep” your cleaning goes, you need to assess your time, define your tasks, and set limits for yourself. And most importantly, don’t forget to make room for joy in your holidays. Don’t hesitate to enlist your partner and kids as well. Work in a reward after cleaning (family pizza party) and you’re well on your way to holiday fun.
For those of you who discovered cleaning towards the bottom of your “discovery” list, the HGTV article is probably the one for you. Also, for overall holiday organizing, you can’t beat this Budget Dumpster article with five smart holiday organizing tips. And if you want to pour yourself another tea as you refine your holiday cleaning and organizing plan, head on over to the Organizing Maven’s site and check out her free Less Stress – More Joy Guide to help you get the most out of your holidays.
Also, consider this: your kitchen, bath and entryway are probably going to be the most scrutinized by others (and the dining area). So those might be your priority rooms for concentrated cleaning.
I fully intended to write you a cleaning guide, but as I wrote this and assessed my own work and other priorities, I realized that lots of people already did it for me (no need to replicate their ideas)! So you don’t really need me after all. Plus, Aunt Sara got pushed to the bottom of my list, so I’m steeping another cup of tea and having a lovely evening as I add Zentangles to my incredible short list of Christmas must-do’s. Enjoy your reading and happy holidays!