Tips to Organizing Your Life

As one year winds to a close and another is poised to begin, it’s a great time to get organized and lay the foundation for extraordinary success in 2016.

You’ll end the year healthier and happier, because experts agree that getting organized is one of the most impactful and stress relieving changes you can make.

The first step is to decide whether to start with work, home or technology, based upon which area is in the biggest disarray.

Why? Tackling the toughest area first will make the biggest immediate impact on your life, and provide encouragement for you to work on other areas.

Let’s look at three critical areas: home, work and technology.

Home Organization

After cleaning out and organizing many homes, I have found that most homes have five main types of clutter: paper, clothing, knick-knacks, household appliances and nonperishable food items. Tackle one type of clutter at a time.

For example, organizing nonperishable food in your kitchen or elsewhere in the home has an obvious solution – just eat these items, if they haven’t expired or gone past the “Best If Used By” date. You will get your mealtimes organized and save on the grocery bill for a few weeks to a month by planning meals that include these items.

Views vary on how long canned goods are safe to eat. Experts now say that acidic foods such as juices, pickles, fruits or tomatoes can keep for 12 to 18 months. Meat and vegetables may be good for up to four years – but sometimes with a change in taste and color. Don’t eat food from cans that are swollen, have dents or other damage.

The three other home clutter culprits – clothes, paper and knick-knacks and household appliances -- can be handled using “10 Easy Steps To De-cluttering” you’ll find in our blog archives. A shortened version follows.

First, go room by room, setting up a staging area of several boxes and a table right outside the room to be de-cluttered. Mark the boxes “Keep,” “Discard,” “Donate,” or “Not Sure,” and begin sorting everything. Take no more than five seconds to decide which box each item goes into. Place all papers – which you will sort later -- on the table.

After sorting everything, it’s time to follow through on their disposition. First take the “Not Sure” box and take no more than three seconds to decide whether you keep it, throw it away or donate it. Place all items in the appropriate box.

After everything is relegated to a box, get rid of each box. The “discard” box or boxes go out to the garbage immediately. “Donate” box items get picked up by the charity or you take it to the donation center the same day. Finally, with the “Keep” box, find a permanent place for each item -- in the original room or somewhere else.

Work Organization

The first step here is to purge your office of all unnecessary paper, using the home de-cluttering steps of gathering, sorting into like piles and putting papers into keep, discard or not sure piles. The goal is to get rid of all paper clutter – starting with your desk – the center of your work life.

In most work spaces, incoming items fall into three categories: important documents; items you need to keep such as books, magazines and new office supplies and office equipment; and junk.

Your next step is to create a “catch it space” to sort everything as it comes in. This space should be in an obvious place -- near the office door or entrance to your cubicle. It forces you to find a place for every item coming in – or to throw it out immediately. Utilizing this area regularly will help keep your office clean with minimum effort.

Another option is creating a “tickler file” system. When you receive a letter, document or advertisement, decide its importance. Resolve to act on it immediately or place it into a tickler file, so it will be addressed within a few days -- 10 days at the very most.

Technology

Two important aspects of organization at both work and home are Filing Systems and Password Management. Experts say a combination of online and paper-based systems work best.

Popular online filing systems include: “Dropbox,” “Google Drive,” and “Picasa” – all of which have a free and a paid version. Each lets you create documents on your computer, store them “in the cloud.” From the cloud, you and others you invite can access them from multiple locations.

It works well for people who work on documents at home and at work. If your system “crashes,” you won’t lose files you have filed “in the cloud” using one of these systems.

But, don’t throw about your file cabinets or file boxes yet. Many documents still need a “hard copy” life too. The key is to throw away or digitize as many paper documents as possible, and file the ones you need in paper form right away. Not filing documents is the biggest creator of clutter.

When it comes to passwords, cyber security experts estimate that the average person has 19 of them. Since most people can’t remember that many different, complicated passwords, organizing solutions are needed.

A low tech one is to create a password notebook kept at home or in your wallet. You could also create a password file on your computer, with a secret file name.

The most popular digital solution is an online password manager, such as “Last Pass.” Since it stores all of your passwords, you need only remember the password to it. It has both free and paid versions.

For more information on organizing your life, contact Decently and In Order at http://decentlyandinorder.us or call us at 513-259-0143.

-- Robert Ramsey, President of Decently and In Order