Best Results Organizing

 

Organize now so you won’t lose deductions, pay more taxes, or get in trouble with the IRS!

(See my review, here.)

For more ideas, consider:

• How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 1) — The Questions
• How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 2) — The Methods
• How to Collect, Organize, and Preserve Family Memories and History (Part 3) — AI & More

4) Know What’s In Your Wallet

Have you looked at what’s in your wallet lately? Would you notice if one of your credit cards went missing? It’s a new year — did you put your new health insurance card in there? 

• Pull everything out of your wallet.
• Discard or put away anything that doesn’t belong in there. (Receipts for taxable events, like medical expenses? Keep. The name of a book your friend recommended? Log it in your Notes app or put it on hold at the public library before you forget.)
• Take an inventory of everything in your wallet. Depending on your patience, you have two options:
  1. Lay two columns of cards (side by side), face-down, on a copy machine. Press “copy” and then flip each card in place to the rear-side, and copy that, two. Repeat the process until everything in your wallet has been secured. Alternatively, you can scan these to your computer and save it all as a multi-page PDF. If you ever lose your wallet, you’ll be happy to have the account numbers, expiration dates, security codes, and contact numbers for your licenses, insurance cards, and credit and debit cards.
  2. Use your phone to take photos of the front and back of the cards and upload the pictures.

Whichever method you choose, password-protect digital versions of this document in storage or on your phone, and keep the paper copies in your fireproof safe or lockable file drawer. 

ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL SPACES IN 2026

Digital clutter may not take up physical space, but it wears down our batteries, both in our devices and our personal batteries because of the overwhelm of excess.

6) Declutter Your Phone Apps

The Pareto Principle says that 80% of our success comes from 20% of our efforts. It holds true in many ways; 80% of the time, we wear the same 20% of our wardrobe, kids play with the same 20% of their toys; we use the same 20% of our apps.

It’s why letting things go from the 80% we hardly ever use makes us feel less cluttered and more productive, even though we anticipate we’ll feel anxious about having let them go — that’s why they’re cluttering up our digital spaces in the first place!

• Flip through your home screens and take inventory — What apps did you download and never even try because they required creating a login? What apps did you give up on because they were buggy? Let go of low-hanging fruit.
• Clean up by deleting apps you used the least often (or never). To see the last time you used an app on iOS (for iPhone or iPad), follow this path: Settings>General > iPhone (or iPad) Storage. There are a few different ways to check app usage on Android devices.
• Addicted to your phone? Check your Digital Wellbeing feature on Android or ScreenTime on iOS. Uninstall whatever is obviously distracting you with overuse. 
• Move distracting apps that you can’t (or can’t bear to) uninstall to your last home screen page to create more friction and make it less likely you’ll happen upon them when looking for your bank app.
• Fill your first home screen with apps you need and want to use because of the benefits they bring to your well-being.
• Organize the remainder of your apps by dragging-and-dropping them into folders labeled for shopping, dining, social media, productivity apps, etc. Keep them — just make them less convenient.

The point isn’t to get rid of your digital life. Just eliminate what distracts you from what’s important.

7) Clear Out Your Voicemail Inbox

In the olden days, people called you and either you were home and answered, or not home, and never knew you had a call. (If you’re GenZ and reading this:  yes, really.) At work, if you weren’t at your desk during working hours, a receptionist took a message. After hours, either the “answering service” took your urgent call, or people waited until you got in on the next business day.

In the 1980s, we got answering machines and our messages lived where our landline phones did.

In the 1990s, we had voicemail, and at the turn of the century, people started calling less and texting more. Now, too many of our messages are spam, and voicemail fills up.

Have you ever called someone — or worse, returned a call — only to hear “This voicemail box is full and is not accepting messages. Please try again later.” 

What if your message is important? Do you text? What do you do if it’s a business? On the flip side, if your child’s school, your doctor’s office, or a client needs to reach you, do you want them to suffer this frustration?

Clear up your voicemail box with the following steps:

• On landlines, dial in, listen, and start deleting messages.
• On cell phones, iPhones and most Android phones show transcribed messages. Known contacts should appear by name, making it easy to figure out whether a message is still needed even before you read it. Unknown numbers may be spammers (swipe left!), but may be people you’ve never entered into your contacts. Review those messages, and anything that doesn’t make the cut, delete!
• Save numbers for contacts you may need in the future. — Add a last name and any context necessary. I have a contact saved as First name: MaryBeth, Last name: “Hit my car in the parking lot.” 

Until recently, the only “Terri” in my contacts was my hair stylist, but when I was in Portugal and Spain in September, I added my tour-mate to my regular iPhone contacts. Just before my last haircut appointment, I voice-texted, “I’m here, but looking for parking. I’ll see you in a minute.” When I got to her space, she said she hadn’t received my message. A moment later, my tour-mate Terri texted, “You’re here to see me?” with a series of laughing emojis. Doh!

Last names (and context) are important! 

• Be ruthless in getting rid of old voicemails. What should make the grade? Messages that you save for:
  • work purposes — but confer with your boss or your IT department regarding rules in this regard
  • legal purposes (such as when someone is stalking or harassing you, or offering a set of deal points for a contract.
  • sentimental purposes — but be judicious. Can you picture yourself sitting in an airport, listening to a loved one’s message over and over? 
• Download messages you want to keep permanently. On iPhones, tap the voicemail you wish to save and you’ll see the share icon in the upper right corner; share the resulting MP3 to your photos or notes app, Evernote, social media or wherever else, just as you’d share an article or a picture.

On Android phones, tap on the message to see a list of options. Click one of the save or archive options you prefer and select the storage location. For more voicemail-saving techniques, read Smith AI’s How to Download and Save Important Voicemails.

8) Clear out your email inbox

For years, people have laughed at me, saying that search worked so well and email providers granted so much storage space that it was no longer necessary to clear inboxes. Still, I blithely went on advising my clients to regularly clear their inboxes, and to create a hierarchy based on categories matching their analog filing systems.

Recently, I’ve felt vindicated as Gmail and other email providers have been adding storage limits, and people recognize that search (even AI-assisted search) sometimes takes longer than going to a particular sub-folder with a helpful title.

Email is a headache! According to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, on average, 28% of work time is spent reading or replying to emails. And the average worker — and yes, you’re all above average — checks email 11 times per hour. 84% of us keep email open in the background while working, making it oh-so-easy to “check” our email.

The problem is that we CHECK IT over and over again looking for that dopamine hit, but we often look at emails without doing anything with them, like opening the fridge in hopes that someone has magically made something delicious and put it in there.

You may think that Inbox Zero is the cure, plowing away at email but getting further behind in important work. James Clear has said, “The most invisible form of wasted time is doing a good job on an unimportant task.” Email clutters our lives like that.

There’s no permanent state of inbox zero (unless you stop sending outbound emails and block all inbound senders), any more than finishing all of the laundry today will create laundry basket zero unless your family plans on becoming very tidy nudists.

Processing email isn’t your job, it’s just one method of communication and information acquisition, and it’s not always the right one. Instead:

• Unsubscribe from whatever you never read. (It’s like buying vegetables that you know you should eat but they disappear into the back of the fridge and eventually get slimy.) Take five minutes a day to declutter your future inbox.
• Set up a simple hierarchy of subfolders with names of major projects, client names, or whatever works for you. Having a place for emails to safely, dependably live will encourage you to manually or automatically route necessary ones of your inbox. As with voicemail, don’t feel like you should save everything. 
• Learn how to use your email platform’s filters or rules function to automatically sort mailing lists to one sub-folder, anything you’re always CCed on even though you know it’s nothing to do with you to another, and so on. 
• If you’re overwhelmed by your huge backlog, move everything from more than a month ago to a folder you call “Archived” and start with a minty-fresh inbox. You can always go into the “Archived” folder and sort if you’re feeling enthusiastic, but at least you’re dealing with something more manageable.

You’ve heard the expression that “time is money,” but time is actually more valuable than money. You can return a purchase that falls short of expectations to get a refund. Time can never be refunded. 

To improve your productivity, the first thing you must do is get a handle on how you’re spending your time. 

Read my How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity from last January to understand the benefits of time tracking, including mindfulness and focus, prioritization, data-driven decision making, stress reduction, and accountability. The post also prepares you to face challenges and overcome the obstacles, and offers strategies and resources for tracking your use of time.

Track for just one day, or participate in a weeklong time tracking project such as Laura Vanderkam’s annual event. Register for her 2026 Time Tracking Challenge from January 12-19, 2026. I do it every year!

11) Get a Better Sense of the Passage of Time

For some people, knowing what time really “feels” like takes some effort.

First, put real, analog clocks wherever you tend to get lost in time. Is that your desk (even though you wear a watch and your computer has a clock)? Is that the bathroom, because you lose awareness of time while doing your hair or soaking in the tub? Is it your car, which has a perfectly serviceable clock but the time is always wrong because you never learned how to change it for Daylight Saving Time?

Next, read about all the ways timers can help you get a better sense of your time.

• How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 1
• How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 2: Picking a Good Timer 
• How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 3: Tangible Timers
• How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 4: Digital Timers
• How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity — Part 5: Hybrid Timers and Bonus Material

12) Time Travel in Your Planner

If you use a paper planner, hopefully you already have one for 2026; if not, that’s step #1. But even if you are 100% digital, this advice goes for you, too.

It’s tempting to just fill in your January pages and figure you’ll adjust as you go along. But even if you’ve had the same meeting every Tuesday for the past 5 years, somehow, some way, you’ll double-book if it’s not in your planner or calendar.

Spread out at your desk or your kitchen table, grab a cup of cocoa or something to soothe you into the new year, and do the following:

• Page through each week of last year’s planner and copy everything that recurs by date (like birthdays and anniversaries).
• Add events that happened in 2025 and are already scheduled to happen again, but not on the same dates (like conferences, work retreats, medical tests and appointments, etc.).
• Use last year’s schedule activities to prompt you to make a list of anything you might need to schedule or add to your long-range tasks, like meeting with your accountant, scheduling annual medical tests/exams. 

13) Eliminate What Doesn’t Excite You

To recoup other “lost” money, follow steps in these Paper Doll posts:

• Show Me the Money — A 2025 Guide to Finding Forgotten Funds & Unclaimed Property
• Lost & Found: Recover Unclaimed Money, Property, and Savings Bonds
• How to Track, Lower, or Cancel Your Recurring Subscription-Based Bills
• Organize and Lower Your Medical Bills: Spot Errors, Negotiate Costs, and Save Money

22) Break every task into its smallest possible step. If you can’t get started, the first step is probably not small enough.

23) Cut yourself slack. Give yourself grace. 

24) Progress, not perfection.

25) Albert Einstein said, “Organized people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” Be lazy!