Table of Contents

-Introduction
-Did you know?
-Monthly Mission – Bathrooms
-Check Out These Pages! – Relevant pages and new site additions
-What To Do With Magazine Articles

Introduction

It’s officially fall! Time to pull out the Halloween decorations and plan costumes, if you haven’t already.

I’d like to remind everyone how important routines are. I had a little reminder lesson on the importance of maintaining my own routines. What happened was, I usually pay my bills on Mondays. But, I got complacent with the transition back to school and the change in my daily schedule and routines. Well, I almost missed paying a bill on time but I happened to see it the day before it was due. For me, paying bills late is something I never do! I would have been so angry at myself if I had to pay a late fee for not keeping up with a simple task on a regular basis. Done weekly, it really only takes a few minutes and much of it is automated. So, in response, I’m trying to put together an efficient daily routine for while the kids are in school and I’ve already made it a point to get back to paying bills on Mondays!

What things must you get done that should be part of your daily or weekly routine? Think about the problems you’ll avoid, or the peace you’ll enjoy by just doing a few things as part of a routine. Also, life changes and we need to be prepared to make adjustments to routines when that happens.

83% of human resource managers say the appearance of an employee’s workspace affects their perception of the person’s skill level and professionalism.

Source: Real Simple Magazine, August 2011

Time to clean out that medicine cabinet and tidy up all your toiletries. To read more about the October monthly mission, click here.

Here are some pertinent pages on the website you may have missed along with any new pages.

Organizing Children's Artwork - Some simple and space saving ways to organize the vast amount of artwork our children produce.

Before and After Photos - If you enjoy seeing before and after photos of organizing projects, you can find them all right here.

Living Room Storage Make-over - See how we recently re-organized our living room (play room) with a new Ikea wall unit that's great for storing lots of stuff.

The Family Wall Calendar - How to efficiently use a large family wall calendar to keep track of everyone's appointments and activities.

Home Filing System - Keep all your paperwork in order so you can find what you need at a moments notice, and learn what to keep and what to toss.

Garage Makeover - before and after photos of my personal garage makeover. See how we tackled the problems and ended up with a functional garage.

Streamline Your Morning Routine - Ideas to help you get out the door in the morning and be on time for work or school.

Bathroom Drawer Make Over - How to organize a bathroom drawer, an example with before and after photos.

Stop Clutter - Quick simple tips on how to stop the clutter from coming into your home in the first place.

I just spent about 2 hours sorting through pages of magazines that I’ve ripped out. The pile went back a little over 2 years. And after all that time I spent (wasted) I only kept about 5 – 10% of the pages, and I’m still not convinced all of them need to be kept. One thing I noticed was a lot of duplicate types of articles. This seems to be the pattern with magazines… the stories always repeat themselves, especially if you get more than one magazine. And just how many articles about how to do laundry more efficiently do I need?

While deciding what to toss, I ended up throwing away all of the pages I ripped out about exercise and diet programs. Obviously, if I haven’t started it within the past two years, I truly doubt I’m going to use them any time in the future. I did hold on to a few informational articles, which I should use and then toss. I also kept a few recipes that looked interesting to try (and I desperately need to try some new recipes) and a few pages with home organization ideas, because they give me inspiration.

I have done the same thing in the past… ripped out numerous magazine articles and filed them nicely in a folder never to be seen or used again. So, why did I continue to rip out articles? I always think it’s something important that I should remember, or that I should keep the paper to refer back to. The thing is, over time, some of those pages become out of date and useless. Also, now we have the internet and if I had a question about something, I’d look it up on the internet before I go searching to see if I have an old magazine article about it stored away.

So, how can we reduce the pages we rip out of magazines? And if we must, what’s the best way to preserve them?

Do you really need to rip it out? One thing I have been doing more recently to reduce the number of pages I actually ripped out of magazines was to dog-ear important pages as I was reading them. Then, when I’m done reading the magazine, after a couple days, I go back through the magazine to see if there is anything important enough to rip out. But, I ONLY look at the pages with folded corners. And even then, a lot of those are no longer of interest to me.

Scan and Input - Scan important articles to be saved on your computer. Be sure to file them into folders so you can be sure to find them later.

File – Use a file box or file cabinet and organize articles by subject (exercise, food, gardening, etc.) into hanging folders.

Notebook – Get yourself a 3-ring binder with plastic sheet covers. You can use dividers to separate articles by subject. Or, if you have a lot of articles, you could even do one subject per notebook.

Use the Internet – With internet access these days, we really don’t need to hold on to magazine articles like we did in the past. We can look up anything of interest and find great ideas and the most current information. If you have some favorite sites, be sure to bookmark pages and organize them on your computer so you can find them. Sometimes an article will refer you to a website to check out as well.

Hopefully these ideas will help you to save only what’s truly necessary and prevent you from wasting a lot of time down the road trying to sort pages only to throw most of them away.

Until next time, happy organizing!

Tracy Greene
Plan-and-Organize-Life.com