Best Results Organizing

Happy New Year, Paper Doll readers!

January is designated National Get Organized Month. To help you get started on the road to organization without causing the old January Gym Membership Effect, today’s post gives you tiny, easily-digestible tips for achieving organization without pulling any muscles or becoming overwhelmed.

SHOW 2011 PAPERS TO THE EXIT

Holding on to paper you don’t need builds clutter. Go from room-to-room, zone-to-zone, purse-to-bookbag and isolate the paper that’s just weighing you down:

Expired Coupons — You receive no financial benefit from expired coupons. If you’re keeping them to remind you to purchase something, start a real shopping list, instead.

If you want to release yourself from the mildly anxious feeling that you shouldn’t have been schlepping the coupons around all this time, unused, do a good deed with them. Military families living on-base can use manufacturer’s coupons (i.e., not store-specific ones) at their commissaries/PXs for up to six months after the expiration date. So pop them in an envelope and send them off via guidance from:

Coupons to Troops
Troupons
Overseas Coupon Program
GrocerySavingTips.com

or check with your local American Legion Auxiliary chapter to see if they collect, package and ship coupons to military bases. [Canadian readers: I’ve had trouble finding a similar program up north. Please share any information in the comments section, and I’ll add it to this post.]

Greeting Cards — The classic Paper Doll post, Hallmark Holidays and American Greetings: Card Clutter should give you the confidence to make the necessary decisions regarding which cards to recycle and which (few) to preserve. Cards lacking deep personalization or extreme entertainment value should go, but Card Memories’ Greeting Card Keeper Albums that we reviewed in 2010, offers a storage solution for those truly special sentiments.

Magazines and Newspapers — If they say 2011, they’re not news, they’re history. Knowledge is power, but information clutter is Kryptonite. It leaves you mired in piles, paralyzed and unable to act on the information because you can’t make dependable use of it.

If you didn’t get around to reading those holiday decorating tips or recipes, it’s OK. They’ll be back again in about ten months with only slightly altered graphics. Deliver magazine donations to shelters, clinics or hospice venues and toss the newspapers into your recycling bin. Make room for the future in your home and office by letting go of the past.

Floozies — Longtime Paper Doll readers know how I feel about floozies (loose, homeless paper scraps). All those bits and pieces represent potential utility, but as they are, it’s too hard to find the information you need when you need it. Floozies tend to congregate in certain areas — stuck to your computer, on or near your desk, in the kitchen and by the phone chargers. Be relentless in policing this vice, gather those floozies and take them off to the hoosegow (or, y’know, a clear surface, like the dining table).

Start separating your sticky notes and scraps into categories, and once grouped, find alternative ways to keep the information but toss the paper:

• Passwords — Transfer them to a password notebook like the Internet Password Organizer (now in paperback) or use a password management program, like LastPass, KeePass or Mitto. 

• Phone numbers and addresses — Don’t depend on your memory of where you stuck someone’s number or address. Add the contact information to your phone, computer or Snoopy address book. As with calendars, the key is to commit to a system, any system, and stick with it.

 

• Things you want to buy — If you’re old school like me and prefer paper, get yourself a cute little assignment notebook or Moleskine. Otherwise, pick your favorite app (Remember the Milk, Grocery Gadget, etc.) to ensure that you’ll know what you need to acquire when you’re in a position (and location) to acquire it.

• Books or movies you want to check out — Your Amazon wish list or Netflix queue is perfect for reminding you of media that’s worth another look, even if you eventually borrow the items from your public library.

• Web sites you want to explore — Use Bookmarks or Favorites, so they’re available when you are. Afraid you’ll forget about them (as if a half-destroyed Post-It sitting under a coffee cup from last Friday is going to remind you)? Set an alarm on your computer for a particular time each week to remind you to peruse your recently-collected sites; purge the ones that fail to live up to the hype, and organize the worthy ones in bookmark folders.

• Creative ideas — When the muse is active but you’re busy doing other things, it’s natural to grab for the nearest piece of paper to capture your brilliance. But deal with the backlog by sorting your brilliance into categories and then make up a plan for how you’ll incorporate the ideas into your endeavors. For my purposes, different notes might be suitable ideas for Paper Doll blog posts, references for Best Results for Busy People newsletter articles, notions for ebooks, and so on. Just keeping a separate folder for each major creative area of your life will corral the papers while preventing the loss of (potentially) staggering genius.

Have you got too many floozies, and not enough time to do more than group them? Or maybe you wish you could make them portable? Grab your camera, get shots of each category in a gridded, Pinterest fashion, and upload them to your computer for easy zoom-in access.

BECOME A (TAX) COLLECTOR

April 15th may seem far away now, but think how quickly the last three months have sped by. Take just a few minutes a day over the next week or so to make the road to tax season free of paper blizzards.

Call your pharmacy and request a printout of your prescription purchases for the previous year. This will give you a jump start on calculating whether you can deduct medical expenses when you do your taxes. You should be able to get your own printout and that of your children, but your spouse may have to request his/her own.

When you pick up the prescription purchase forms, just drop them in your tax prep folder. No tax prep folder, you say? That’s easily fixed.

Create tax prep folder(s) for 2011 items so that as soon as 1099s, W-2s and other tax forms start arriving in mid-to-late January, you’ll have someplace to put them. (Go ahead and make a folder for 2012, so there will  be a place to put the tax-related receipts you collect throughout the coming year.)

If your financial life is simple, one folder may suffice, but if you’ve got complexity, consider separate folders for charitable donations, investment information, financial or real estate transactions, medical expenses and “miscellaneous taxable event” notes. Alternatively, use one of the Smead Tax Organizers we’ve reviewed previously.

Take a peek at last year’s tax return (you know where it is, don’t you?) to make a list of the forms and notifications you should be expecting, and check them off as they arrive. If you’ve got newly acquired taxable assets, like stocks, add those to the list. These notes will help you figure out if any W-2s, 1099s or 1098s are missing. For more on what these forms represent, review the classic Paper Doll post on what goes into A Taxing Treasure Hunt.

TRAVEL THROUGH TIME

Visit the past — In One Last Flip Through The Calendar, we once examined how reviewing the lessons of the past could help make for a stellar future. Pop back in time to that post so you can revisit the lessons of the year gone by — the successes, surprises, opportunities, recurring events and missed connections — and put them to good use in building 2012.

Journey to the future — It’s impossible to organize your time without having a system for planning all of your obligations (and desired activities) and figuring out when you’re going to get around to them. “Someday” is simply not a day on the calendar.

If you haven’t figured out what kind of planner would rock your world (eliminating chaos and giving you back control), and if your visions were still full of sugar plums last week, be sure to catch up with Paper Doll Marks the Calendar for a Successful 2012.