Tomorrow I’m leaving for Atlanta, Georgia, to spend the rest of the week at the annual conference of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO). This will be my seventh time attending the NAPO conference and I’m excited to come home with new ideas for my clients and my business.
What I don’t intend to come home with is hotel freebies. You know, those little bottles and tubes of shampoo and moisturizer, sewing kits, shoe polishers, and shower caps.
When I help clients clean out medicine cabinets and makeup drawers, I find a lot of these, as well as single-use samples of makeup, creams, and facial cleansers. There’s nothing wrong with getting something for nothing. The problem occurs when people bring them home but have no plan in place to use them.
These items may appear to be free, but when they take up too much valuable storage space, they cease to be free. They begin to charge a psychic cost.
Everybody should have a spot where items related to travel are stored. If you keep a few travel sizes of products for your next trip, that’s great. However, if you have collected so many of them that you’ll never use them up even if you go live on a cruise ship, then you’ve got too many. Keep in mind that on your next trip, the hotel where you are staying will probably already have shampoo and moisturizer. So do you really need to bring the freebie from the last hotel?
I have travel-size bottles which I refill with my daily products when I travel. I would rather use my tried and true products that I know are going to work well with my hair and skin.
If you’ve collected too many freebies and samples, then pick out a few favorites and use them in your bathroom now. The rest can be donated to a program for the homeless.
