My Organizing Blog
One of my five basic organizing principles, as you may already know, is “Store things where you use them.” As a result, I was keeping my remotes neatly lined up in the same place where I keep the devices that they work with: the cable box, the TV, the DVD player, and the Apple TV device. I bring the appropriate remote(s) over to the sofa when I’m watching something, and then when I’m done, I put them back in that…
I’m not the kind of person who needs to have the latest, greatest electronics. It’s more my style to hold onto something for as long as possible. I have to have a really good reason to upgrade my device. But sometimes the device tells you when it’s time to be upgraded. I bought an iPad Pro in 2018. I was about to start a 3-year term on the national Board of Directors of my professional association, NAPO. Since I use…
I’ve been down on shopping for a while now. You can see my disillusionment in my post from six months ago, The Burden of Ownership. I guess that’s what attracted me to the book “No New Things” by Ashlee Piper. The subtitle of the book is “A Radically Simple 30-Day Guide to Saving Money, the Planet, and Your Sanity”. Piper’s method is chock full of sensible suggestions. Her “no new things” challenge asks you to commit to only 30 days…
It’s hard to know how to dress when the weather can’t make up its mind what season we’re in. I did my laundry yesterday, and I observed that over the past week, I wore one turtleneck, three long-sleeved shirts, and three short-sleeved shirts. There were two pairs of shorts in the load as well. We went from winter to summer (with a short stop at spring) in less than a week. And today we are back at winter. I feel…
Earlier this year, I was one of several volunteers from my local chapter of NAPO (National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals) who greeted customers at The Container Store and offered free organizing guidance. This was happening at The Container Store all over the country on that same day. Spending hours at The Container Store is dangerous for me. I wanted to buy almost everything! I’m sure many of my colleagues felt the same way. The Container Store is jam-packed…
When’s the last time you went through every file in your file cabinet and purged what you no longer need? I was motivated to do so recently because I wanted to update my Afterlife file. As you may recall, I set up an Afterlife file several years ago so that my loved ones would have the information they needed if I became incapacitated or died. You can see more about that process in my post Planning Your Afterlife. At the…
Two and a half years ago, I wrote about losing my watch. (See Use What You Have, Part 3). As I explain in that post, I decided to wear my late mother’s old watch instead of buying a new one to replace the Swatch watch that disappeared. I’ve been happily wearing that watch ever since. It’s so comfortable, and I love the expansion band. It stays on my wrist instead of sliding up and down my arm like the bracelet…
When I first became a Professional Organizer and began working from home, I discovered that my husband often left for work and then returned a few minutes later because he had forgotten his keys, his wallet, his work ID, or his transit card. I set up a tray for him in the entryway closet so that he could place his items there when he got home at night and then easily refill his pockets again in the morning. This tray…
A couple of weeks ago, I was in my spare bedroom plugging in my electric Chanukah menorah and cursing the inconvenient placement of the electrical outlet nearest to the window. To be more precise, I was cursing the placement of a heavy bed right in front of this outlet. I had to crawl on the floor to get behind the bed to plug in an extension cord. And I knew that 8 days later, I would have to do the…
Apparently, I did not get the shoe gene that many of my clients have. I own very few pairs of shoes. I have a shoe bag in my front closet that holds 10 pairs of shoes, and all my everyday footwear fits there, spanning all four seasons. In addition to those ten pairs (a mix of sneakers, shoes, and sandals), there are three pairs of boots that live on the floor under the jackets: one for rain, one for snow,…