The weather is beginning to get cooler in many parts of the country and it is time to rearrange your closet and get out some long sleeves, long pants, sweaters and jackets. This is a great opportunity to evaluate your wardrobe and get rid of all of the clothes and shoes that are just taking up space.

There is no reason to store clothes you don’t wear.

Do you have any summer clothes that you didn’t wear this year because you don’t like them, they are out of style or they don’t fit? Don’t hang on to them, don’t put them in storage or in a drawer, get rid of them. Hanging on to clothes you haven’t worn for a least a year is the reason many people can’t find room to put all of their clothes away.

It seems like every car and motorcycle event my husband and I go to results in us receiving more t-shirts. I had three dresser drawers full of new, unworn t-shirts but I don’t wear t-shirts. Last week I brought home another t-shirt from a car show I found that it wouldn’t fit in my dresser. I could have put the shirt up on the shelf but I went and got a box instead. I went through all of the t-shirts and pulled out three I might wear. I put all of the other shirts in a box and took them out to my shop. I am going to sell these shirts on eBay. Hurray! Now I have 3 empty drawers in my dresser that I will put my sweaters in.

It didn’t take me long to do this and the result is more space and less stuff.

Summer is almost over and if you haven’t worn that bathing suit because you hate the color or you didn’t wear the plaid shorts you thought might fit this year get rid of them.

Reduce your wardrobe by getting rid of the clothes you don’t love, that don’t fit or that you just don’t wear. By making more space you may end up being able to keep all of your seasonal clothes in your closet rather than packing and unpacking them every season.

Your Daily 15 – Pick one drawer in your dresser and take everything out. Before you put all of the items back in the drawer ask yourself “Have I worn this in the past year?”. If the answer is no, get rid of it. Why keep your drawers and closets full of garments you won’t ever wear? Styles change so fast that sometime the clothes we think will fit next season won’t be appropriate to wear.

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photo credit: ben matthews :::

Does today’s date seem important but you don’t know why? Did you get a cold shoulder when you came home from work and can’t figure out why? Congratulations, you just missed an important event like a birthday, anniversary or another holiday that requires you to acknowledge the event with a gift or flowers. Here is a free way to never forget an important date again.

Amazon has a free Gift Organizer service that keeps track of important events, gifts given and reminds you beforehand so you have no excuse to miss another anniversary.

Simply go to Amazon’s Gift Organizer and enter the names, birthdays and genders of your friends and family, important dates (don’t forget Valentine’s Day) then sit back and relax knowing that you will receive a reminder email when it gets close to the date. Even better, the email will contain suggestions for items that correspond with the person and the occasion.

The Gift Organizer will even keep track of prior purchases so you don’t accidentally buy the same talking Billy Bass fish for your Uncle Joe’s birthday. Never again forget the 6 week anniversary with your new girlfriend or your god son’s first birthday.

Everyone will think you are so thoughtful when they receive the perfect gift from you, on the correct day!

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photo credit: Mike Sun

Have you ever had a project so overwhelming that just thinking about getting started made you cringe? If you have a ton of clutter this may be you. The clutter didn’t get there overnight and now, just the thought of cleaning it up makes you run screaming from the room.

Okay, maybe it isn’t that dramatic but one thing I hear over and over again is “I know I have too much stuff but I don’t know where to begin”. My suggestion is start with the room you spend the most time in or feel the most stressful in. For some people that room may be the family room and for others it may be the bedroom but whatever room makes you the most uncomfortable is the room you should start in.

Now, you’ve chosen a room but how do you begin. Get 3 big boxes or and a garbage can if you can get it in the house and put them outside the room you are going to tackle. Label the boxes:

The Keep box is for items that you want to keep and that belong in this room. The Donate or Sell box is for items you want to give to charity, friends or family or sell at a garage sale, on Craigslist or eBay. The Goes Somewhere Else box is for items that may have ended up in this room but go in another room in the house (like dishes in the living room).

You need to take baby steps to get organize. Don’t try to do it all at once or you really will be overwhelmed. Get a timer and set it for 15 minutes. Pick up each item and quickly decide what to do with it. Be brutal. You should only keep the items you really need.

If you pick up an item with a price tag still on it that has been laying around for months and months, chances are you don’t NEED it. Sell it, give it away or return it to the store for a refund if it is still within the time frame for refunds.

Touch each object only once, decide what to do with it and move on. You have 15 minutes to get this part done. At the end of 15 minutes STOP. In the worst case scenario 15 minutes allowed you to make enough room in the doorway of your cluttered room to be able to step in and best case is you now have a path started. Great! Congratulate yourself because you just completed the first step to getting your room clutter free. Now, go do something else. Tomorrow you will spend another 15 minutes repeating this process.

Repeat these simple steps EVERYDAY on one room. Don’t attempt to clean every room in the house at once. You need to take baby steps and even just spending 15 minutes a day organizing you will see real progress in no time. You didn’t get disorganized overnight and you are not going to become clutter free overnight either.

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Here is the video of our theater in our home. I talk about what is in there and where it came from if I know. I don’t talk about the cost since there are receipts to show that.

Once you make a video, put it someplace very safe like a safe deposit box. You want to be able to prove you had what you said you had. The video is the first step in getting a home inventory together. You also need to keep receipts for everything you purchase so there is no question about how much the items were worth when you purchased them. If you have antiques or jewelry you may also want to have appraisals done then updated every five to ten years so if something happens to them, you get reimbursed for the current value not the amount you purchased them for.

I used a Flip Video Camera to take this video and as you can see it is adequate for the job. It’s important that you document your stuff so you don’t add more stress to the situation when trying to remember everything that is damaged or missing. If you took just 15 minutes a day, you could document each room in your house, garage or business in no time.

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photo credit: schnaars

Do you find yourself dreaming about the day your house is organized? You’re not alone. Everyone can’t have a team of people come in and do it for them (unless you are one of the lucky people who aren’t embarrassed to show the world their mess on TV). Quite frankly, if you let someone else get your house organized there is a high probability that the house won’t stay organized. Getting rid of the clutter is only part of the problem. Once the clutter is gone, you need a process to stay organized. This is why I advise the 15 minutes a day strategy.

You may or may not have kids but chances are that once your home is organized 15 minutes is all it takes to get it tidy daily. The key is to do it daily, every single day, whether you feel like it or not. If you and your family get into the habit of putting things away right after they use them then 15 minutes a day will be simple.

But what if your house isn’t organized now? Then you need to make the same 15 minute a day commitment to put everything you took out during the day plus take time to declutter the stuff you already have.

I just got laid off from my job and now I am working from home. I brought home everything from my job office and put it in my home office. What a mess. My goal for the first week was to take everything out of my office and sort it into keep, toss, donate or move to the right location. I sell a lot of items online and I tend to end up with tons of inventory in my office. I also love technology and never throw away the old stuff when I get new stuff. Don’t even get me started on how much paperwork I accumulate.

I got up last Thursday morning and decided it was time to get the office tidied up. I waited for my husband to leave for work (this is a must since I didn’t want him rolling his eyes or making comments while I was organizing MY stuff). Deciding to throw something you own away should be your decision, not anybody else’s. You don’t want to start a fight because your spouse doesn’t see why you keep the doll your grandmother gave you when you were five even though you never look at it. Tell them to go find something to do for the day so you can make your space beautiful.

After the house was clear I took everything out of the office and put it into piles in the living room according to what it was. Paperwork, old electronics, office supplies, books, photos, etc. were all sorted by type. I didn’t spend any time really looking at them; I just moved them out and sorted them by type. When the office was empty I quickly dusted and vacuumed. I was able to accomplish this in four hours. Now my office was empty but my living room was filled with stuff.

The next step was to get things put away. I started with the books since that was the easiest. My bookshelves were completely empty and I only put the books back on them that I wanted to keep. The rest of the books went out to my eBay / Amazon selling area in the garage. I even ended up with two empty shelves that I promptly made into filing areas. I put two stacks of in/out boxes on them; one for me and one for my husband.

I ventured back to the living room and sorted the electronics according to what I need to keep and what could be sold, tossed or donated. Most of the items were in great shape so I think I will sell them online. Now the pile of stuff in the living room was down to half the size it was originally.

The next pile to tackle was paperwork. I sorted the papers into three piles. One pile was things I needed to do, one pile was for things to keep and one pile was for thing to shred. I am not going to file anything right now since the goal is to just get the office organized and the living room back to normal before my husband gets home from work.

I grabbed a box and put all of the paperwork to keep in it. I put it in my office right next to my desk. Over the next week I will go through the receipts, scan them and shred them. I find it is easier for me to keep all of my files electronically rather than filling up file cabinets with paper. I put the items I need to follow up on in my new inbox on the bookshelf. Tomorrow I will tackle the inbox papers but right now organizing has to be finished. I took all of the papers to shred out to the garage and put them through the shredder. My shredder is a monster (three feet tall and will shred CDs and credit cards) and I found a place in the garage that it fit better than in my office.

Now all that was left in the living room were inventory to sell online and office supplies. I promptly put all of the office supplies away. The inventory items were taken back out to the garage and put away.

The total time it took me to get the office back into working order was eight hours. I find it is easier with a big task like organizing a room to devote an entire day to getting it straightened rather than do it in little chunks. I could have never left my living room a mess for more than a day so this was really my only option. Also, when you focus on one task rather than multi-tasking, you get more done in less time. Now my office is organized and fun to work in.

I spend 15 minutes a day, first thing in the morning, scanning my receipts and have them almost done. Another day or two and the scanning box will be empty.

Getting organized is a chore but the results that come from it are so much more rewarding. The stress is gone because everything is in its place and I am able to focus on working rather than worrying about the fact things need to be put away.

Let me know what works and what doesn’t work for you in the comments.

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photo credit: moppet65535

The past few months have been a challenge for me to say the least. I’ve spent some time away from this website to focus on some other endeavors and am very happy with the direction my life is taking. I really enjoy organizing and love to help people get their stuff in order and I want you to know how much I appreciate your support and will make a solid effort to keep giving you useful tips.

How is your year going so far? Are you staying caught up on your business and personal paperwork? Have you been filing weekly and keeping up on your bookkeeping? If you haven’t had the time or inclination to do paperwork, what are you waiting for?

It’s only April 1 and if you set aside some time each week you can get caught up and stay up to date with that dreaded paperwork. One easy time saver when keeping records (you know, the ones the IRS might want to see) is to purchase an accounting program. I use Quickbooks for my personal bookkeeping as well as my business bookkeeping. The nice thing about Quickbooks and many similar programs is that you only have to buy them once then you can set up as many personal and business accounts as you need.

I would like to give you a push or maybe a shove to get the first quarter of the year’s paperwork in order. This may take you an hour or a day but you don’t have time to wait. Tax time is right around the corner and next year is coming at you faster than you can imagine. Take an hour this week and see how far you can get with balancing your checkbook, categorizing your first quarter expenditures and filing. Three months is more than enough time to have accumulated a pile of paperwork and if it isn’t filed, next years taxes may be taxing.

Your Daily 15 Minutes – Get a box or a bag and put all of your 2009 receipts in it that haven’t been logged or filed. Then take 15 minutes each day and either enter them in you accounting software or your checkbook and file them. The accounting software or even a spreadsheet will help you with categorizing your expenses so you know how much you spent on food, utilities, entertainment, etc. and gives you a solid starting point for next years taxes. If you are at a loss as to where to begin, contact me and I would be happy to help.

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photo credit: charlesdyer

Yesterday I was sending some links to websites I have designed to a potential client and found out that one of my website databases was corrupt. It was so bad that the site wouldn’t even load. I started to panic when I realized I didn’t have a recent backup of this site. In fact, this site hasn’t been backed up since last April and I have a ton of new information posted on it that I didn’t want to have to recreate. There are multiple MySql databases on this site and I didn’t want to overwrite every one when there is only a problem with one of them. In the end I was able to enlist the help of my web hosting company and they fixed the one database with my old backup which didn’t affect the rest of the site.

Having gone through all of this it reminded me that it is just as important to backup your websites as it is to backup your computer. If my website hosting company had a disaster there is a possibility that I wouldn’t be able to recover my site. I am now adding monthly backup routine for all of my websites so I don’t have to worry about data loss.

If you have cpanel access to your website, backups are a breeze. Just go into your cpanel and look for either Backup or Backup Wizard and follow the instructions. You can do two different types of backups. One is just the databases and the other is your entire site. There is a great article with instructions and pictures that explains the backups in greater detail at themelab.com

After my little event yesterday I decided that it is important to do both the full site backup as well as backing up each individual database into it’s own file. I don’t mind asking my web host to reload my backup but if I had backed up my databases individually it would have made my downtime much less.

Your Daily 15 - Go to your cpanel and make a backup of your website. Download the backup to your computer then burn it onto a disk and file it somewhere safe so that no matter what happens you will be prepared. Add this task to your calendar and backup your sites monthly so that there is no chance to loose all of your hard work.

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photo credit: bethography – melting mama

I have one, my Mom has one, my co-workers have one and I bet you have too.  I’m talking about junk drawers.  You know, that one drawer in the kitchen or laundry room that you put everything in that doesn’t have a home or where you put stuff when suddenly company is at the door.

I haven’t opened my junk drawer in months but today I was looking for a little rubber foot that goes on my espresso knock box.  My junk drawer had old broken birthday candles, a lighter, shoe laces, keys to who knows what, and two dozen miscellaneous items that I don’t think I have looked at in the past year and a half.  I did however find some velcro that I needed for a project so that was a good thing and I found the little rubber foot I was looking for.

I dumped out the entire drawer and threw most of the stuff away.  I put the shoe laces in my dresser which is near my shoes in the closet.  I put the velcro with my sewing stuff and the lighter didn’t work so I tossed it.  By the end of my little clean up I didn’t have anything to put in my “junk drawer” so since it is in the laundry room, I put my dish towels away in it.  It’s nice to have that little mess cleaned up.

Your Daily 15 – Take a few minutes and go through your junk drawer.  Throw away all of the pens, lighters and batteries that don’t work anymore.  Put as much stuff as you can away where they should really should go.   Although you may still  have stuff in the drawer, once you’ve cleaned it out  it will have usable stuff instead pens without ink, broken crayons and used up note pads.  Now rename it “Utility Drawer” and remember that it isn’t for junk anymore.

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photo credit: bionicteaching

Let’s face it, there is certain paperwork that you must keep like insurance policies, tax returns, leases, mortgage documents, etc.  These items can pile up fast and keeping them organized is very important. If your paperwork is stashed in drawers, boxes or in stacks, finding these items can be difficult.  Check with your accountant and attorney to see what items you should keep in your permanent files.

Imagine if something were to happen, would you or your loved ones be able to find your insurance policy or mortgage paperwork? What if you are in a car accident and need to find out what your health or vehicle coverages are, could you find your policy?   Don’t delay, you need to get these items filed.

Your Daily 15 – Start this year off right by getting your permanent files in order. Get some file folders and labels and make a separate folder for each type of item. I like to make my permanent files a different color or have different colored labels than my monthly or yearly files just so they don’t inadvertently get misfiled. Make one folder for each tax return year, one for health insurance policies, one for vehicle insurance policies, one for lawyer agreements, etc.

Gather all of your documents and get started filing. Usually you will only get one copy of these documents so if you can’t locate a copy of your life insurance policy, don’t waste a lot of time looking for it, call and get a copy. This will more difficult with things like tax returns and mortgage documents so you will really need to try to find the originals.

While you’re at it, let a loved one know where you keep these documents in case something should happen to you.

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photo credit: buba69

Well 2009 is here and after I got home from running errands today I realized I hadn’t made my new year files.  I usually do this weeks in advance of the new year but somehow it just got away from me.

There are many different ways to set up your files and I actually use two different methods; one for personal and one for business.  My yearly personal filing system is really easy.  I use just thirteen file folders with a label each month and one for bank statements.  I scan most of my paperwork in digital form but I always keep my original bank statements, ATM and credit card receipts until the statements come in, receipts needed for warranties, receipts for charitable tax deductions, copies of rebates I have applied for, and anything else I think I may need the original of.

Here is the process I use is for my nearly paperless office:

1. Once per week I take all of the receipts and paperwork that I have accumulated and scan them and name them according to the naming conventions I talked about in a previos blog post.
2. I open my accounting software and enter the transactions.
3. I shred all of the cash and check receipts unless I need them for a possible return or for warranty reasons.
4. I put all of the receipts for credit card and debit card purchases in the appropriate monthly folder to hold until the credit card statements and bank statements arrive.
5. When the statements come in, I scan them then match all of the receipts to them.  If there are no discrepancies, I shred all of the credit card receipts keeping only ones that I need for tax deductions, warranties, etc.
6. Once I pay the credit card statements I shred them too.
7. I keep the bank statements in the folder I set up just for these statements.

This whole process takes approximately 30 minutes a week for my personal filing and everything is easily accessible since I scanned it.

Your Daily 15 – Today go and get a box of file folders and file labels if you want them.  Write, type or label the folders with the name of the month and one for Bank Statements.

Making folders will get you on track to organize your paperwork.  Even if you aren’t scanning your receipts, you can put all of the months receipts in the appropriate folder and have everything in files, not piles.

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