simply-org.com Blog

POWER DE-CLUTTERING

For the fun of it…here are my favorite organizing tools.

Did we ever anticipate the amount of email that we would be sending and receiving when it first started? No way. The fact is the “office” has changed from a place to any-place as the internet and email are available anywhere, anytime. The messages keep coming at us and we keep responding, or letting it pile up, or getting stressed out.

It is interesting to see the major time management gurus beginning to address this shift in our culture. I will share that the core principles of time management still apply even with this explosion of messaging.

Stop reading email as it comes in.

Instead read it periodically.

Scattered email reading is really a time waster. There is tons of research on multi-tasking and interruptions which show over and over that interruptions take up to 10 minutes to recover. So imagine you are concentrating on something and also constantly flipping to your email, responding, filing, deleting, forwarding and more. The time it takes to go back to your original project and get your head back into that space can be anywhere from a few minutes to 10. Ouch, that is a lot of wasted time.

• Set up specific times to read email and communicate to others those times so that you manage their expectations as far as your response time.

• Respond quickly that have a simple and quick response.

• Leave the rest in either your in-box or folders you have set up for later When you have time to “do the work” to respond.

• Delete when you are done, or file it away. In other words, clean up your in-box often.

Are you having trouble finding basic things in your home or office? Are you wasting countless minutes looking, looking, looking?

There are a few things that come up over and over with my new clients. One of those basic things is that there is no “home” for things.

“A place for everything and everything in its place”

We have all heard this quote before, but do you practice it in your life?

Here’s an example. I was recently in a house where basic things did not have a home. Supplies for hobbies were in multiple rooms. Sports equipment was in the car, hall closet, and several places in the garage. Mail piles were all over the house.

The first thing this family had to do was to collect things together: all the scrapbooking supplies, sports equipment, mail, photos, etc. The technical term for this is Sort. (OK, you can chuckle at the phrase “technical term”).

The second key was to cull down the amount of stuff in each category.

Third, and very important, is to Assign a Home to each category of things. So the Scrapbooking supplies all went into the home office, the sports equipment in the garage and the mail has a station at the kitchen desk.

Have you assigned a home to things in your house? Take time this week to start working on this. Choose something that you are constantly searching for and losing time.   Start by pulling everything together and assigning a specific home to it. If you are constantly losing the keys, have one specific place where you drop the keys. Always leave them there, and always find them there.

What’s the thing that you need to assign to a home?

You have completed the “rough sort” and got rid of the junk, and you sorted your big pile into smaller ones.

Third Step: Breakdown your categories and set up files

Take the piles from last week’s first sort and start breaking them down to smaller groups. The financial pile now becomes your individual banks, credit cards, investments, etc.

(What about those papers that don’t fall into obvious categories? Make one pile personal items and deal with those later. This might include magazine articles for day trips, an item you might want to buy, a hairstyle you want to show your stylist, information about different counter top materials…you get the picture. We are focusing on financial papers right now. We will come back to these personal papers later….)

Next week we are going to make file folders and put them in a place that makes sense (not the kitchen table or the floor)

Here are a few good links to help you with your tax preparation.

selftax.com online tax preparation from FREE….
Dennis Middleton CPA If you are looking for a CPA to help you with your taxes, I recommend Dennis.

Last week you completed the “rough sort” and got rid of the junk. If you still have questions of what can be tossed, see the IRS link below.

Second Step: Sort Like with Like

*Take that big pile from your quick “rough sort” and start to break it down.

*Use BIG categories like insurance, auto, financial, medical.

*Don’t get hung up on smaller categories and the specifics (yet). Those will come later.

Most likely you will have several types of insurances, but for right now celebrate the fact that you got all the insurance paper in one place. The same is true with financial: banks, credit cards, investments, etc.

Next week we will move to step three: setting up files

Incredibly useful links for Tax Preparation

Click on these links below for useful information for tax preparation.
Self Tax.com This site has FREE through very inexpensive online tax prep.
Dennis Middleton CPA.com If you are looking for a CPA to help you with your taxes, I recommend Dennis.
IRS.gov IRS guidelines for paper retention Here is the source from the IRS.

Tax Paperwork; Where to Start

It may only be February, but it is never too early to start organizing to prepare your taxes.

First Step: get rid of the junk

Wherever you keep your paperwork: the kitchen counter, dining table, home office floor, all of the above…it is time to sort through it and get to the important stuff. Keep in mind a main purpose of getting organized is to find things later. It is really hard to find the important things when they are burried under those that are not important. That is the clutter.

Do a “rough sort”.
1. Quickly start tossing the junk.
2. Pull out catalogs and magazines you will read later.
3. Keep a big pile of everything you are keeping.
Don’t get bogged down with what those things are and where they will go. Just slug through this “rough sort” and get rid of the junk.

What is the Junk?
Third Class mail, any solicitations you did not request, and coupons you will never use.

BONUS: You can see your counter, table or floor and even use it.

Next week we will move to step two.

Mail Tips
Paper in general is a common problem as we try to meet our organizing goals, but MAIL specifically stands out. The mail keeps replenishing 6 out of seven days a week. Here are a few key tips to reduce the stress of your mail.

1. Deal with your mail daily…don’t let it pile up. Choose a time each day and be consistent. Maybe it is while you are eating lunch, or dinner is in the oven, or at 4:00 daily. Whatever works for you is fine.

2. Be committed to make decisions immediately. The piles accumulate because of delayed decisions. The first choice is keep or toss (recycle please)…toss immediately by having a recycle can very conveniently placed where you sort your mail. I know people who sort outside the house and don’t even bring the junk in to the house. Kudos to them!
The second choice is where to put the keepers.
3. Have a destination for the items you are keeping: a box or file for bills to pay (or reconcile), a place for any items that need action (phone call, research, follow up), a place for catalogs and a place for magazines..preferably where you will look at these, like a basket next to the sofa.

If you have old piles of mail, pull out the important items (bills for example) and toss as much of the third class mail (i.e. junk mail) and old catalogs as possible. Contact me if you want some help with junk mail reduction. There are a few great resources to help you reduce your third class mail. simply-organized@sbcglobal.net

If you start with these 3 tips, you are going to get a handle on your mail flow….start today and make a change going forward.