Paper Doll
How to Organize Yourself for a Stress-Free Tax Season
Nobody likes paying taxes, but if you’re organized, the discomfort can be limited to the money leaving your bank account and not all the work leading up to it. Preparing your tax returns (or getting the information to your tax preparer) doesn’t have to be annoying. To that end, every few years, I try to provide a Paper Doll primer on what you need to know and understand to make tax time bearable. This year, it has bonus pop culture to keep you entertained!
SET THE STAGE FOR PAYING THE TAX MAN
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
Tax prep is the homework of the adult world, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be easier (or more fun) than finding the area under a curve or remembering what cosin and tangent are.
Start by creating a comfortable work environment. Clear your desk of clutter and distractions. If that’s not possible (in the amount of time you have), consider moving to a new workspace just for doing your taxes. That might be the dining room table, the guest bedroom, or the conference room at work on a Saturday afternoon.
The key elements are ample workspace, a place to put (and if necessary, plug in) your computer, functional Wi-Fi, a pad of paper for taking notes, access to good lighting and a comfortable chair, and your tax prep documents (of which, more later).
More importantly, do what you can to eliminate interruptions, whether that means working when others are out of the house (or getting out of the house to do your work).
Create the right ambiance for your style. Some people need a window facing sunlight, while I prefer to have my chair face a blank wall to eliminate distractions. Some people need silence, while others prefer white noise. If you used to do your 9th grade math homework with your stereo blasting, try making a tax prep playlist using Hubpages’s 50 Best Songs for Tax Day.
Don’t feel like you have to get your taxes done all in one sitting. If your return is simple (one W-2 and few 1099s) and you’re filing online, you might wrap it all up in an hour. But if there’s a lot of complexity in your finances, plan multiple shorter stints. Find chunks of time to:
- gather (and if necessary, download and print) official documents
- isolate and review all types of income
- isolate and review deductible expenses reflected on forms
- locate deductible expenses reflected on receipts (tangible and digital)
- fill in online tax preparation software like TurboTax or TaxCut, but then walk away and come back later to check your work; or
- make an appointment to sit with a professional tax preparer
Take frequent breaks to keep your mind fresh. Stay hydrated and have light, healthy snacks. When you finally finish, celebrate with a small ritual to reward yourself for all that adulting.
While I’m not always happy with the way my tax dollars are spent, I often find that the filing (if not the paying) of them goes down better with a listen to Irving Berlin’s WWII-era I Paid My Income Taxes Today. (The only version I found with Berlin singing it himself was a bit too jingoistic, so I present singing cowboy Gene Autry.)
GATHER YOUR RESOURCES
One of the most common frustrations my clients have is that they don’t know where to start. The fear of mysterious forms and documents starts the buzz of anxiety. I encourage a few simple steps for making the experience easier to bear.
Time Travel to Last Year
The easiest way to estimate what forms you’ll need this year is to start by looking at what you dealt with to prepare your taxes last year. You should have a folder with everything you (or your tax preparer) used to support last year’s tax returns. Scanning through last year’s taxes and supporting documents will help you create a checklist of what you’ll need for your treasure hunt.
Photo courtesy of Chris Potter/CCPix at www.ccPixs.com under CC 2.0
First, there’s the income side of things. Did you have a job? You’ll be looking for a W-2. Were you freelancing? Find those 1099s! Did you get paid interest or dividends? There will be 1099s for those, too.
Then, on the flip side, there are your expenses. You’ll have some fancy forms, like 1098s for interest paid on mortgages or tuition costs, but you’ll also need to gather receipts.
But that’s generally it, just what did you earn and what did you spend? (Obviously, not everything you spend is tax-deductible. The cheeseburger and fries you eat on your way home from the gym? That receipt can go. The one from when you took your best client to lunch to propose extending a contract? Hold on to that receipt!)
Answer Mail Call
In general, employers and financial institutions are supposed to mail tax documents like most 1099s and 1098s by January 31st, so you should have them in hand already. (Got a pile of unopened mail on top of the fridge? Now’s the time to open it!) Other forms, like 1099-B, 1099-S, and 1099-MISC don’t have to go out until February, so watch your mail. And, annoyingly, Schedule K-1 forms (related to partnerships, LLCs, and S-corps) generally don’t get mailed until early-to-mid March!
Don’t just think in terms of U.S. postal mail. Be sure to check your email, too!
I have quite a few clients, particularly those over 80, who don’t dependably check their email, and don’t necessarily realize that institutions have stopped sending paper copies of essential forms. Instead, they send emails alerting you to the existence of your forms in online portals.
If your inbox is full of hundreds or thousands of unread emails, try using the search bar for terms like “tax forms,” “1099,” or the word “tax” and the name of some of the institutions that should be sending you tax documents.
Let Your Fingers Do the Walking
Waiting for the official mail can be frustrating, especially if you are hoping to get a tax refund and want to get your taxes prepared and your return filed as soon as possible. In many cases, you don’t have to wait — just head to your keyboard, log in, download, and print.
For example, a client was recently frustrated with herself because she suspected that, in a fit of tidying the paperwork from last fall for enrolling in a 2026 health insurance plan, she’d accidentally shredded her 1095-A, her Health Insurance Marketplace Statement. Frustration turned to delight, however, when we logged into her Healthcare.gov account and quickly downloaded another copy.
Starting with your list of all of the institutions that have sent you tax documents in the past, and then adding any that know about your income/outgo, log in and search for a menu title like “tax forms” or “documents.” For example, log in to your:
- Bank accounts for 1099s
- Brokerage/investment accounts for 1099s
- Lender sites for 1098s
- Social Security for SSA-1099
- Health Insurance Company for annual summaries of medical and pharmaceutical expenses
- Paypal, CashApp, Venmo, Square, and similar platforms (for 1099-K and other records of income and expenses)
Remember that you may also have receipts that came to you by email. (If you haven’t gotten into the habit creating a “receipt” folder in your email or printing receipts for potentially deductible expenses, this is this is the time to start.)
Further, if you need to access information that’s on your prior tax returns and you don’t have them accessible — for example, if you’ve been the victim of a natural disaster, or you and an ex haven’t been able to amicably share data — you can get tax records and transcripts directly from the IRS.
Once you file your taxes, make a list of all the forms you received this year (and how/where you acquired them), and tuck that list into your tickler file for next January. Check off each form as it arrives, and you’ll have a better sense of when you’ll be ready to start working on your 2026 taxes in 2027.
KNOW YOUR FORMS
Much of the fear associated with tax time comes from the fact that the language referring to the different types of forms seems like gibberish.
Here’s a reminder of what each of the most common forms related to income and deductible expenses represent.
Let’s start with income.
W-2 (Wage and Tax Statement)
Were you an employee in 2025? If so, your employer should have provided one W-2 to you and one to the IRS, reporting how much you were paid (in wages, salaries, and/or tips). If applicable, the W-2 should should also indicate how much money was withheld (from you) and paid to another entity.
Federal, state, and local taxes, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), unemployment insurance, and a few other withholdings are considered statutory payroll tax deductions, because they are governed by statues (AKA: laws).
Sometimes, courts rule that an employee’s wages can be garnished (which sadly has nothing to do with caviar or sprigs of parsley). In these cases, individuals who owe money from lawsuits or are behind on child support may have money removed directly from their earnings, before it ever gets to their paychecks, to ensure it goes directly to whomever is owed. A W-2 will reflect this.
A W-2 may also report voluntary payroll deductions, amounts withheld from paychecks with your permission. Examples include your portion of health and life insurance premiums, contributions to a 401(k) or other retirement fund, employee stock purchasing plans, one-time or ongoing donations to the United Way, union dues, etc.
In theory, a W-2 should be mailed to the address listed on your W-4. (The W-4, is the form that tells your boss how much to withhold based on your number of dependents you have.)
Smaller companies may just hand you your W-2 instead of mailing or emailing it, but if your W2 is missing, consider:
- Did you change employers last year? You should have received W-2s from each employer. (If you changed jobs at the same company, you’ll receive one W-2 from each employer, not one per position. If you changed companies within a larger corporation, though, you may get one for each.)
- Did you change addresses since you filled out your W-4? There’s only so much a former employer will do to track you down to give you your W-2. Keep the Madge in HR updated!
Don’t assume that if you don’t have your W-2, then nobody knows what you made. Remember, your employer sends the IRS a copy of your W-2. Since the IRS knows what you made, be sure you do, too! (If your former company went out of business or is otherwise not returning your calls, the IRS has a procedure to help you file your taxes in the absence of a W-2.)
Examine your W-2 it carefully. Do the numbers seem right? Compare them to the final pay stub you got for last year. Calendar years may end mid-week (or even mid-pay period), so the numbers won’t correspond perfectly, but they’ll be close enough for you to spot if something is seriously wrong. The sooner you call your employer’s attention to an error, the sooner you can prepare your return.
W-2G (Certain Gambling Winnings)
Gambling Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels
The W-2G is the wild-and-wooly cousin of the W-2. While a W-2 is for money you make while working, the W-2G is what you get while playing. If you win more than $600 in any gambling session at a casino, the “house” should request your Tax ID (generally your Social Security number) and either prepare a W-2G on the spot or send it to you in January.
Casinos aren’t interested in keeping up with your losses, just your winnings, so they only tell the IRS about what they paid you. If you want to deduct losses to offset winnings, the IRS requires receipts, tickets, statements, or other records to support both your winnings and losses.
1099s
A 1099 is a form that basically says, “Hey, you weren’t an employee but we paid you money this year.” You get a copy; the IRS gets a copy. (Cue Oprah: “You get a copy! You get a copy! Everybody gets a copy!”)
There’s not just one type of 1099; actually, there are 22 different kinds of 1099s as of 2026! Don’t worry, you won’t be tested on this. But it helps to be familiar with some of the more common versions, like:
You may not have interest in 1099s, but 1099-INT reports the interest you receive — from interest-bearing savings and checking accounts, money market bank accounts, certificates of deposit, and other interest-paying. It also reports whether (U.S. or foreign) taxes were withheld and if there were any penalties assigned for early withdrawal from an interest-bearing account.
If you received less than $10 in interest, your bank may not send a 1099-INT.
Whether you’re TikTok’s viral man in finance, 6’5″, with blue eyes, and a trust fund or your grandma bought you one share of stock in Disney for your 10th birthday, you’ll get a 1099-DIV to indicate the dividends or capital gains you received as an investor. (Note: if you have a DRIP — a dividend re-investment plan — you many never see these dividends as checks sent to you. They’re literally re-invested in your portfolio.)
Again, if you didn’t earn at least $10 in dividends, you are unlikely to receive a 1099-DIV.
1099-G (Certain Government Payments)
This random-sounding form can cover everything from state unemployment compensation to tax refunds, credits, and offsets at the state and local level. It can also be used to report payment of taxable grants, agricultural payments, and other nifty things where a state or local government gives you money.
The 1099-K reflects payments to you from third-party settlement organizations (TPSO) like PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, or Zelle and platforms like Etsy or TikTok. This form was supposed to go into effect several years ago, but due to the pandemic, its use was delayed, and for several years, the threshold was $600, but has now been raised to $20,000 (and 200 transactions).
If you’re self-employed (a freelancer, an independent contractor, etc.), clients should send a 1099-NEC. However, although 1099-NEC came into use in 2021, some offices still send 1099-MISC by mistake. Just remember, whatever form you get, the IRS knows about it, so don’t try to hide that money.
Also remember that even if someone paid you for doing work as an independent contractor, they may not know they should be sending you a 1099-NEC or any form at all.
So, if you are self-employed or irregularly employed, it’s essential to keep track of your own incoming revenue. (Otherwise, if the person who paid you ever gets audited, it could trigger some messy situations for you, too.)
Now that the 1099-NEC covers income for freelances and independent contractors, this one is much more “miscellaneous.” As I’ve said before, it’s the junk drawer of tax forms!
1099-MISC is used to report payment of royalties, broker payments, certain rents, prizes and awards, fishing boat proceeds (yes, really!), crop insurance proceeds, and some payments to attorneys that wouldn’t be reported on a 1099-NEC, like if you received a settlement that required an attorney to get paid a portion contingent upon your winning.
If you get Social Security benefits, you should receive an SSA-1099. (Non-citizens living outside the US, like widows/widowers receiving spousal Social Security benefits, may get a SSA-1042.) The 1099-SSA tends to come on a weirdly long form, folded and sealed such that it makes its own envelope. Unfortunately, it looks like junk mail, so watch out for it and replace it, if necessary!
You Never Give Me Your Money, or Why Income Isn’t Always “Real” Money
A 1099 doesn’t always indicate that you were literally paid money. For example, remember how I said that you may get a 1099-DIV, even if you never actually got the dividend payment because it was re-invested?
Similarly, a 1099-C indicates that someone forgave a debt, like a student loan or a credit card balance. That forgiveness is a relief, but you may owe tax on forgiven debts, and the 1099-C alerts the IRS that since you didn’t pay money owed (and got to keep it), it’s as if you received money.
1099s May Be Hidden in Plain Sight
Sometimes, instead of sending a 1099 in a separate envelope, a bank or brokerage house may include a 1099 form in the same envelope — sometimes perforated at the bottom of a quarterly or end-of-year financial statement, or on the reverse side of a related form. Brokerage houses often send multiple forms as a “combined 1099,” scrolling across multiple pages.
Check all that boring-looking official mail!
Of course, income is only half of the equation. On the other side, you get to use forms and receipts to determine how much you can deduct or write off.
So, let’s look at expense documentation.
1098 (Mortgage Interest)
A 1098 is not a 1099 that’s been taking Ozempic. A vanilla, no-frills 1098 reflects the interest paid on a mortgage, which is generally deductible on federal taxes. Renters don’t pay interest, so they don’t get 1098s; neither do homeowners with paid-off mortgages.
Sub-types of 1098s reflect money you’ve paid for things other than interest on property loans:
- 1098-T shows tuition you paid; you’ll get this from a college or training school.
- 1098-E reflects you’ve paid interest on a student loan; it will come from your lender.
- 1098-C indicates the value of a donated car, boat or airplane. So, if you’re a fancy-pants, monocle-wearing Thurston Howell III or his wife, Lovey, you’ll get this from the agency or organization receiving the donation.
1095-A (Health Insurance Marketplace Statement), 1095-B, and 1095-C
You’ll get a 1095-A if you enrolled in health insurance coverage through a state or federal exchange.
1095-B (supplied by companies with fewer than 50 employees), details the the type of coverage you had through work, the period of coverage, and your number of dependents, so you can prove you had the Minimum Essential Coverage (MEC) required by law.
A 1095-C is similar, but for employers with more than 50 employees.
Schedule 1-A (Additional Deductions)
The Schedule 1-A, to be used with the 1040 return, the 1040-SR return (for seniors) and the 1040-NR (for non-resident aliens) is a new form for calculating some of the new deductions related tips, overtime, new purchases of cars manufactured in America and the enhanced deductions for seniors (see below).
Got all that?
IMPORTANT NEWS FOR THE 2026 TAX SEASON
Know Your 2026 Tax Deadlines
The federal tax deadline is Wednesday, April 15, 2026.
If you file a (valid) extension request, you have until October 15, 2026 to file your tax return. However, you still have to PAY what you (estimate that you) owe by April 15th to avoid a fine.
It’s true that if you won’t owe anything, there’s no penalty for filing late (without an extension), but then you’ll be delaying receiving a refund.
Age Has Its Advantages
Did you know that adults aged 65 and older may qualify for a new $6,000 deduction this year, in addition to existing standard deductions?
The deduction starts phasing out for single filers with incomes above $75,000 and for joint filers above $150,000. Once you hit the threshold, the deduction gets reduced by six cents on each dollar above the applicable threshold. Once your adjusted gross income hits $175,000 (for single filers) or $250,000 (for joint filers), the deduction is effectively reduced to zero.
This $6,000 deduction applies regardless of whether you take the standard deduction or choose to itemize. Also, it’s not permanent, applying only from this year through the 2028 tax year.)
Direct File Is No Longer An Option
A few years ago, I shared information about a government program that allowed people with simple returns (income solely from from employment, unemployment compensation, or Social Security, and only taking a standard deduction) to file directly with the government at no cost. The current administration has cancelled this program.
If you’re seeking a no-cost or low-cost way to file your taxes without working with a professional or filing through paid commercial software or online platforms, consider the following options for filing your 2025 returns:
- file out a paper form (often available in public libraries) or use IRS Free Fillable Forms
- see if you are eligible (depending on your adjusted gross income) to use IRS Free File and file through one of the eight online programs
- seek volunteer tax preparation programs like the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance VITA and Tax Counseling for the Elderly (TCE)
Don’t Procrastinate If You Plan to Mail Your Return
Filing tax returns at the last minute is a time-honored tradition. I’ve seen postal workers outside in the late hours, clad in reflective gear, taking possession of people’s returns.
Unfortunately, if you prefer to mail your tax return, filing on the last possible day may not be workable anymore.
At the end of last year, the US Postal Service announced that it was changing the methods for postmarking mail. They will still stamp the current day’s date on your tax return envelope, birthday card to your grandma, or care package to summer camp when they get to a USPS processing facility. The problem? It might take longer for your mail to get from where you give it to them to an actual facility.
Apparently the USPS is looking at ways to save money. One of those strategies includes reducing the frequency with which it picks up mail from local post offices. This means fewer trips from your drop-off point to a processing center, and THAT means it’s less likely that you’ll get a same-day postmark.
So, if you put your mail in your outside mailbox with the flag up, it could take a few days to get where it’s going. If you drop it in a blue maiilbox in front of a post office that isn’t a processing facility, it could take at least another day. Grandma may not care when an envelope is postmarked, but the IRS does. (And if you’ve got a deadline for mailing something for legal purposes, it definitely does.)
So, your mail may not get postmarked the same day you send it, even if you send it from a post office. That means that finishing your taxes at 11:30 p.m. and jumping in your car to head to the post office on the corner just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Your best option is to file and pay your taxes online. But if you must mail your return, you may want to ask at your local post office if they are able to manually stamp and postmark your tax return.
While it will be more expensive, another option is to use a private shipper for your tax paperwork, like FedEx or UPS.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Paper Doll is a Certified Professional Organizer, not CPA or enrolled tax preparer. Always verify your questions with a tax specialist. If you receive a funky form and don’t know what to do with it, the IRS has a surprisingly easy Forms, Instructions and Publications Search.
Most importantly, remember that the sooner you get organized for tax time, the less likely you are to end up like Homer Simpson.
Paper Doll’s Cheat Sheet for Celebrating Time Management Month
Happy National Time Management Month!
There’s an irony that this observation takes place during the shortest month of the year. It’s as if someone said, “Hey, our problem is that we never feel like we have enough time to do what needs to be done. Let’s honor that challenge — with the fewest possible days to do them!”
It’s a challenge, a prompt, a call to action, a reminder — to focus on our choices of priorities, and use time to serve those priorities. If, instead of barreling through each day, reacting to what’s thrown at us, we can use this month to remind us to take a proactive approach.
The reward? The possibility that each day of February can offer baby steps to help us ramp up our productivity, reduce our stress levels, and achieve not only what is expected of us, but what we sometimes dare not expect of ourselves.
SO HOW CAN YOU MANAGE YOUR TIME?
It would be lovely if we could just get in the Doctor Who TARDIS to jump past slow days and let time stretch on when we need to do something complicated. Then again, as fans have learned over 60 years, if being stuck in one time weren’t bad enough, being a stuck time traveler is even worse.
Time management involves the following elements, each with it’s own challenges. Today’s post gives you multiple posts through which you can time jump to find the advice that best serves your needs.
Know What You Want from Your Time
Last year, a few days before the start of Time Management Month, I shared Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time. It examined the unexpected complexity of time (and why children perceive time more slowly than adults), looked at the “finitude” of life, and explored the analog and digital ways to remind ourselves to focus time passing so we didn’t lose the forest for the trees.
It was also a deeply personal post, as I was sharing the joy of seeing my favorite band and feeling returned to my young adulthood again. I’ve been thinking about that post a lot lately, for two reasons. First, I recently started counting down 60 weeks until I turn 60 (!); second, I will be seeing The Floating Men again in concert later in February. I already know that time will stand still for a few hours!
Literally, memento mori comes from the Latin reminder that we will someday die. It is a challenge — much like Time Management Month — to weigh the aspects of your life, decide what you value, determine what you want to achieve, and be prompted to recognize the passage of time so that you do not fritter your life away.
(Lots of frittering is bad. A little frittering helps you refresh your brain. An apple fritter is just yummy. But I digress. If you are digressing too often, you may be hungry, so see the section below about taking breaks!)
Time management isn’t really about managing time. The seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years pass, no matter how much we wish they might speed by or slow down. Rather, time management is a misnomer for what is actually task management and self-management.
Time management is a misnomer for what is actually task management and self-management. Share on XPrioritize Tasks
It’s essential that we use our time both effectively (doing the right things) and efficiently (in the speediest way but with the greatest reduction of errors). If we throw ourselves at whatever task shouts the loudest, we may miss important deadlines.
Although I’ve covered the concept of prioritizing many times over the years, I shared my most successful approaches in Use the Rule of 3 to Improve Your Productivity. That post allowed me to reference one of my favorite tools, the Eisenhower Decision Matrix (which, as you may have read in Paper Doll Shares Presidential Wisdom on Productivity, wasn’t actually invented by Eisenhower, but presidents often get the credit for popularizing nifty wisdom).
That post also talked about key skills:
Knowing what to do — as a result of a brain dump that gets everything out of your head and onto a piece of paper or screen so that nothing is forgotten or missed.
Knowing what to do first — that’s where the decision matrix kicks in, and then the next first thing gets done after that, and the next, and so on.
When we focus on important and urgent tasks over those that are important but not timely, or urgent but not, ultimately, important, we train ourselves to prioritize ourselves out of overwhelm.
Scheduling Effectively
In her book The Writing Life, author Annie Dillard famously shared:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order— willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Dillard explored the constantly existing tension between being productive — for ourselves (to achieve our goals) for, as they said in the 70s, “the man” (academia, industry, capitalism) — and being present or showing up (for our partners, our children, our friends, and for justice for our neighbors far and wide).
Planning our days, and then our moments and hours, assures that we get things done. But getting things done, which is important for achieving our goals, is not the same as living our lives.
We must have, if not always balance, then opportunity for variety. After all, all work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy. We must work, but we must also play. We must dine and sleep. We must make time for boredom to reinvigorate our creativity. We must dance, preferably while singing into a hairbrush.
Scheduling should take into account all of the pieces of our lives. Just as we make “homes” in our houses for our clothing and accessories, our food and our food preparation tools, and so on, we must make room in our schedules for all of the other aspects of our lives. The best way to do that is with time blocking. It doesn’t mean that you’ll schedule yourself so tightly that every moment is accounted for and pre-determined.
Time blocking just means that you’ll create safe spaces for your priorities. Start with these posts to get some insight on how to build time blocks into your schedule.
- Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity
- Surprising Productivity Advice & the 2023 Task Management & Time Blocking Summit
Do the Tasks
I find that one of the most common places where people’s time management practices fail is that no matter how well they plan their schedules, they don’t actually do the work. It’s like how just buying a gym membership doesn’t actually get us into shape.
Shocking, I know.
To often, people have omitted the most key aspect of time management, and that is to put their butts in the chair (or in the car, to get them to the gym or to run the errands).
Longtime readers know that while I believe motivation is important, action precedes motivation! This means you must do whatever it takes to get your tiny patootie into position.
An object at rest tends to stay at rest; an object in motion tends to stay in motion. (That Isaac Newton knew his stuff!)
You need to get yourself in motion to the point that you are either in micro-motion (typing, reading, writing) or macro-motion (doing a workout, cleaning your house). It might look like you are at rest if you’re in micro-motion, but at the very least, your eyeballs and your brain are a flurry of activity.
For both motivation to get yourself into action and strategies to get started and keep going, avail yourself of the advice in the following posts to get to the starting line, focus, and actually do the tasks!
- Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done
- Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions
- Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek
- 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
Track Your Time
You can tell yourself where you’ll travel in time, but although you will always travel forward, it will almost assuredly not be in a straight line. The problem with real life is that it takes us off-course.
No matter what we plan, interruptions from others (and unwittingly, from ourselves) creates not merely bumps in the road but ten megaton blasts in our day. The trick is to figure out whether these are unavoidable one-time problems or actual trends.
I’m a huge fan of time tracking to see where my minutes and hours go, and spend the second full week in January participating in Laura Vanderkam‘s annual Time Tracking Challenge.
Last year, I wrote How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity, and how it helps with mindfulness and focus, prioritization (see? we always come back to prioritization), data-driven decision-making, stress-busting, and accountability. It also explored the benefits and occasional obstacles of time tracking and offered up a bevy of tools for making it easier to track your time.
If you feel like you’re planning your schedule, but still get to the end of the day with too few of the right things achieved, review that post and see how you might identify what’s going awry with the help of time tracking.
Block Interruptions and Push Through Obstacles
Once we spot the interruptions and obstacles in our days, we need to be vigilant about holding our boundaries.
If you have trouble keeping small children (or spouses, colleagues, or employees who behave like small children) from interrupting your focus, or you find that you are the one standing in your own way, the following posts can help you fight the battle, recapture your time, and post sentries along your boundaries to prevent future incursions.
- 52 Ways to Say NO to a Request So You Can Say YES to Your Priorities
- Paper Doll On Understanding and Conquering Procrastination
- Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Finish Off Your Unfinished Tasks
- Whoopsie! What To Do When Your Week Doesn’t Go As Planned
And sometimes, between time tracking and overcoming your obstacles, you figure out that some things just aren’t possible.
Don’t Forget That You Need to Sleep, Rest and Take Breaks
It’s easy to focus on the task aspect of time management, and yes, self-management does involve conquering your personal inertia (like lack of motivation). But it’s not all in your head — sometimes, it’s in your body!
You can start by scheduling yourself to tackle tough physical tasks when you’re brimming with physical energy and saving the complex mental tasks when your brain is at its peak. That’s different for each individual, so it’s important to track your energy.
Managing your energy is also essential for getting yourself into the groove and using your time well. Lack of motivation may be mental, but it just may be that you are exhausted or burnt out.
Take note of when you’re most likely to make excuses for not getting things done. Pay attention to when you need a snack, a conversation, a walk in fresh air. Don’t know when that is? Then note the times you’re flagging, that you’re reaching for the phone to doomscroll, or just generally feeling cranky.
As you work on self-management, remember that just as your devices need to be recharged, so do you. Check out the following posts when you’re trying to figure out how to bring your best, most energized self to the tasks at hand but it’s not quite working:
- Organize Your Sleep When the Clocks Change and Beyond
- Take a Break — How Breaks Improve Health and Productivity
- Take a Break for Productivity — The International Perspective
- Celebrate the Global Day of Unplugging
- Global Day of Unplugging 2025: Phones and Apps to Reduce Phone Use and Improve Your Life
- Organize To Reverse a Bad Day
TIME MANAGEMENT FOR THE REBELS
With all of the advice out there on how to set yourself up for managing your time, the truth is, some people just need something more, something different, something weird. Just as some office workers need bedazzled or sparkly charging cords
or colorful file folders, others need something that’s just a little left of center.
Big Picture Yearly View
Depending on how complicated your life is, the type of calendar you need may vary.
I depend heavily on a monthly view on my paper planner. I work best when I can see how heavily scheduled I am in terms of client sessions and Zooms so that I can see the flow of days and add my personal obligations and joyful plans accordingly.
I rarely allow myself to have so many fixed events in my schedule that I need to actually see my daily time blocks in a printed or digital calendar. However, many of my clients swear a digital view of their daily schedule, one quarter-hour block after another.
I have one client, a retired artist, who draws his own calendar when we set the next month’s session. From a blank page, he counts forward from the end of the month to visualize the start date of the next month, and draws boxes for each. Meanwhile, another client has 12 large (two-and-a-half foot high), colorful monthly pages decorating her office walls so she can see the ENTIRE year just by swiveling her neck; in addition, she she schedules appointments and gathers task categories in her Planner Pad, but echoes the fixed appointments on her digital calendar.
Only you know what level of scheduling detail you need to see to keep yourself moving forward successfully.
Neato Calendar 2026
Just in case you’re a true minimalist, and the idea of schlepping around a physical planner or typing things into your phone gives you hives, the free Neato Calendar has you covered. It puts the entire calendar on one single page.
Each month has its own column with the day of the month and a letter code for which day of the week it is; weekends are shaded in. It’s probably ideal for people who either have very few events on their calendars, or want a separate calendar to keep track of just one thing, like which days are trash pick-up vs. recycling, or mileage driven, or whose day it is to do one household chore.
This open source (free to the public) calendar page is too wide for me to provide a legible screen capture here on the blog, so this is just a chunk from the middle of 2026. To print, don’t forget to use landscape settings and the option to fit to one page. I suspect for best results, it probably needs to be printed to a longer sheet than is standard in the US, perhaps a sheet of legal paper, though I suspect it was designed for the longer A3 paper (11.7″ in x 16.5″) popular in Europe.
The main advantages of this super-minimalist calendar calendar are that it’s free, lightweight, portable (to the point that it could be folded and put in a wallet), and it’s so minimalist that by its nature, the user can’t get overwhelmed by details. The main disadvantages are that it lacks nuance and granularity. You’re not going to truly manage much of your time with this calendar, but you may be able to manage one aspect of your time use.
I should note that last year, in anticipate of someday using the link, I’d found an identical one-page yearly calendar called Neatnik, created by Adam Newbold; the only discernible difference is that Neatnik comes with a friendly greeting screen.
A Weekly View
Most planners provide a monthly view with the option for a weekly or daily view, and for those who want granularity, the daily view is usually a top choice. Some people operate best seeing one week at a time.
I’m already a fan of the funnel system of Planner Pads, and if they were more colorful, I often think I’d use them myself, as my clients are always delighted when I explain how they work.
Ink & Volt Dashboard Spiral Deskpad
It’s hard to find a weekly view scheduling tool on par with PlannerPads. While I can often find weekly task pads, I’ve never found a similar product with planning space for categorized tasks, tasks scheduled by day, and appointments.
Recently, I saw ads on social media for the Ink & Volt Dashboard Spiral Deskpad that, while not equaling a PlannerPad, does offer interesting features.
Available on the Ink & Volt website for $31 (or Amazon for $33 in Black, only), it has 52 undated sheets, a landscape layout, and a left-handed-friendly top-spiral binding. Select from among nine colors of covers: Onyx Black, Midnight Blue, Carbon (grey), Matcha (green), Mulberry (shown below), Black (but less black than the Onyx Black), Cloud (white), as well as two pre-order only shades of Bleu (a sort of light sky blue) and Fleur (a light pink).
There are six areas of focus, with a highlighted section for your top three priorities within that focus category. There are also spaces for weekly highlights, a habit tracker, and a section for themes and highlights by day. My favorite aspect is that the checkboxes are printed right on the page to make it easier to check off your successes in a tidy, orderly manner.
Find Your Moment in Time
In the 5-post series on timers (linked above in the task-doing section), I championed analog timers over digital ones for productivity and focus. To be able to truly see the passage of time, an analog clock (like most of the analog timers I shared) gives you a visual appreciation of what time it is and how it relates to the moments used and the time remaining. But hey, if you’re rebel or you just need something to delight you in a different way, I’ve yet to see something more unusual than this next item.
Author Clock
Author & Company has created Author Clock, which tells time by quotations from literature. Using more than 13,000 passages from more than 2500 books by famous authors, time is told with a sentence or fragment from a literary work referencing a moment of the day. New quotes (and software upgrades) are added by WiFi.
Quotes are available in English, French, Spanish, and German, with each language collection specially curated by Author & Company’s editorial team.
The frame is made of solid oak, with brass dial controls, an easy-to-read E-Paper display that changes from minute to minute, and a rechargeable battery. There are also parental control settings, in case you want to ensure that more mature quotes aren’t seen by little time-tellers.
You can customize a variety of the features, including font style and size, quote frequency (from every minute to every hour), and even add in “vague” quotes, like one relating to “A few minutes to midnight.” A digital clock in the screen’s header is optional.
There are two versions:
Author Clock Volume 1 has an E-Paper measure 4.3″ E-Paper screen and sits on a brass base. It’s suitable for sitting on your desk or nightstand, for when you are close enough to see the smaller letters.
The larger Author Clock Volume 2 has a 7.8″ E-Paper screen. The brass base is removable, in case you want to mount it on the wall and view the larger letters from across the room.
Happy February, and however you manage your time, I hope this month brings you moments to treasure.
Don’t Get Locked Out: How to Set up a Recovery Contact for Apple and Google
Our relationship to technology gets ever more complicated with each passing year.
People are glued to their phones. Some folks fall in love with their AI chatbots. We get so frustrated when we can’t live with our technology, but we know from experience we also can’t live without it.
So what do we do when we get locked out?
Previously, we’ve talked about what to do if you are no longer walking the planet. As I explained in these posts from the Paper Doll vault, there are preparations you can make in case you aren’t around to access your Apple, Google, or social media accounts:
- Paper Doll Explains Digital Social Legacy Account Management — This post walked through the main concepts of managing your social media legacy, how to inventory your social media digital assets, and the steps to take to secure legacy access to social media accounts, like Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
- How to Create Your Apple & Google Legacy Contacts — This post delved into the specific steps necessary for setting up legacy contacts for Apple and Google to ensure that your loved ones can secure your digital assets (photos, email, etc.) once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.
But what do you do if you’re alive but your access to your digital stuff is not?
Maybe Grandpa forgot his password (or all of his passwords).
Maybe you have been hacked. After all, the first thing the bad guys do is change your password so you can’t see all the other nefarious things they’re doing (and often fill your your Outlook or Gmail inbox with junk to obscure the clues that would point to the hack). When things go awry, you can use all your passwords, passkeys, and 2-factor authentication skills, but sometimes, you need a human solution.
You need someone to vouch for you. This is where the concept of a recovery contact comes in.
Today’s post will review how to set up and use a recovery contact to regain access to your digital resources. But first, let’s get clear on what a recovery contact really is.
WHAT IS A RECOVERY CONTACT?
It may seem that a recovery contact would be the same as a legacy contact.
You might think that you could set up just one or the other and use them for the same purpose. After all, the purpose of a legacy contact is to designate an individual to give official access to your accounts after your death. Why not just pretend that you’re “only mostly dead” to get back into your account?
As explained in earlier posts, a legacy contact doesn’t just randomly give someone your login credentials, like leaving a key under the digital mat. Rather, it sets up a secure process for giving a trusted contact access to the data stored in your accounts after you die to that everyone can achieve financial and structural closure.
A recovery contact, however, works differently. Rather than giving someone the ability to get into your accounts and control them, a recovery contact is the individual whom, when you get locked out of your account, gets to stand up for you that you are really who you say you are and deserve access to your own account. (There’s not a lot of literal standing up. Usually, they receive a code and give it to you. So it’s more like they’re meeting you on your front step to hand you your spare key.)
What’s the Difference Between a Legacy Contact and a Recovery Contact?
Again, they can seem similar, but are used for different purposes.
Key Traits of a Legacy Contact
An Apple Legacy Contact, or what Google calls an Inactive Account Manager, is designed to be used after your demise, upon your appointed contact providing proper documentation (like a death certificate).
The key traits of a legacy contact are that it:
- provides (limited) access to your data after you’re gone — an Apple Legacy Contact can access anything in your iCloud account, while a Google Inactive Account Manager has more curtailed access
- does not allow logins or account control
- may be time-limited
- involves a separate set-up process (for a separate Apple ID, for example) for access by the legacy contact
Key Traits of a Recovery Contact
An Apple or Google Recovery Contact is designed for short-term account access assistance. You get the access; they don’t!
The key traits of a recovery contact are that it:
- helps you regain access while you’re alive and kicking (and probably kicking yourself for forgetting or losing your password or somehow bringing this problem on yourself)
- does not give ongoing access to your account
- does not grant access to actually seeing your data
- only works when you initiate the account recovery process
The bottom line is that your recovery contact helps you get back into your (digital) life, while a legacy contact helps your loved ones wind it down.
Situations Where You Might Need a Recovery Contact
It might seem like it’s obvious — you need a recovery contact when you’ve been locked out, but why might that happen?
- You’re locked out of your account because of suspicious activity (by someone else) or your own failed login attempts attempts (like too many misremembered or mistyped passwords).
- You forgot your password and you’ve lost your device.
- You forgot your password and you can’t access your email.
- You forgot your Apple ID.
- Two-factor authentication is sending codes to a device you no longer have.
- Your phone has been stolen and you no longer have the device with Google’s associated passkey.
- You got really angry at the person to whom you were talking while walking across a bridge and in a fit of pique, you threw your phone into the lake, river, or ocean. (Does anyone really do this? It keeps happening in movies!)
- You upgraded devices and now your new device doesn’t know the things your old device kept sacred.
- You’re ill or injured, and it’s making it hard for you to manage your own tech or you’re having trouble communicating with caregivers helping you.
- Your device access is limited during travel emergencies.
- Your phone got “factory reset” while you were trying to make things work again.
I had a client who had to wipe his phone (that is, restore it to factory settings) such that the phone no longer recognized who he was. He had two-factor authentication set up, so Apple looked for a second device to which to send the code.
Normally, if you’ve got an iPad or a Mac connected to the same Apple ID, your two-factor authentication should work. My client, however, had mostly Windows products, and was getting more and more stressed out. However, because we’d set up his child’s iPad (mostly for toddler videos) with my client’s Apple ID, he was able to get up and running again.
However, we used the opportunity to set his wife (who has her own Apple ID) as his Apple Recovery Contact so that he never had to worry about this again.
From a tech organizing perspective, recovery contacts are especially helpful for people managing multiple devices, juggling shared/family tech, or dealing with caregiver situations.
HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR RECOVERY CONTACT
Choosing a recovery contact is much like choosing a legacy contact, but you’re looking for different characteristics and skill sets.
When I talked about setting up a legacy contact, I focused on the attributes of a good digital executor:
- Whom do you trust to carry out your wishes, or anticipate your preferences if you leave no instructions?
- With whom will you still be in close contact by the time a digital social legacy has to be managed?
- To whom are you comfortable giving access to private conversations?
- Which of your friends is likely to stay current enough with technology to be able to handle your digital legacy?
However, for your recovery contact, you want to look for different features in your peeps.
A good recovery contact is reliable, responsive, calm, and appropriately nosy (but only when invited to be).
A Good Recovery Contact Won’t Ghost You
You recovery contact needs to be reachable in real time.
- Do they check email and/or text messages frequently?
- Are they unlikely to miss time-sensitive notifications?
- Will they dependably check (and not ignore) a message because it looks like it might be automated?
If someone has 37,000 unread emails or the number bubble above their text app icon looks more like a phone number, this isn’t a good recovery contact for you.
A Smart Recovery Contact Will Verify It’s Really You
You recovery contact shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction to share your information.
- They’ll pause to consider and confirm that it’s really you who triggered the recovery process and not a Russian baddie in a hacker farm.
- They’re comfortable calling or video-chatting with you to confirm it’s really you who’s stuck before taking any required steps.
- They won’t blindly follow instructions just because Apple (or Google) said so.
Your ideal recovery contact will have at least mild skepticism rather than unquestioning compliance. (Good characteristics for a fellow citizen, as well as a recovery contact, eh?!)
An Ideal Recovery Contact Will Stay Calm Under Mild Stress
We all know folks who freak out when a football game runs long and their show doesn’t start on time. That’s not who you want. Pick someone who:
- Won’t start spiraling when they see the words “account recovery” or “security alert.”
- Can follow step-by-step instructions without melting down.
- Knows when to ask for help instead of guessing and clicking, willy-nilly.
The Best Recovery Contact Has Mental Bandwidth and Time to Deal to Help
Speed matters during account recovery, especially if someone has hacked you. Select a recovery contact who:
- Is routinely available during work hours (or during the hours you’re likely to need help). — If your bestie works 12-hour shifts, she may not be the best option.
- Is in a profession where interruptions won’t be dangerous or impossible. — Brain surgeons can’t just step out to handle your iPhone kerfuffle.
- Can likely respond within hours (or even minutes) and not days.
While we should respect everyone’s work style, your work-from-home friend is probably a better option than your pal who is an airline pilot. Your retired sibling makes a better recovery contact than your friend with a three-week-old baby.
Other Considerations for a Recovery Contact
- Pick a person who respects your boundaries — They should understand that they aren’t being given access to your account, and you can trust that they won’t waste time snooping around or attempting a recovery when you haven’t actually asked for one. So, nobody named Gladys Kravitz.
- Identify someone who is comfortable with basic technology — Your contact doesn’t need to be a web developer, but they need to know how to handle links, codes, and authentication steps. In other words, not someone who needs daily assistance to check their texts, avoid clicking on spam links, or keep themselves from getting locked out of their phones.
- Pick someone who is stable and likely to be in your life for five or ten years — So, not your hinge date from last weekend. Not your friend who flakes on half the meet-ups you plan. Not the boyfriend you’re considering breaking up with. (And not just because you’re afraid he’ll log into your account. But because you have no idea when the two of you might go “no contact” and you’ll have to decide whether to break that status or just give up on the last 20 years of your digital real estate.)
Finally, ask if they’re OK with being your recovery contact so they won’t be startled by a sudden, “Apple [or Google] is contacting you” message. Surprises are for gifts and birthdays, not account security. Capisce?
A legacy contact needs discretion and emotional steadiness. A recovery contact needs availability, clarity, and a cool head when you’re locked out, pacing the floor, and cursing Steve Jobs.
A legacy contact needs discretion and emotional steadiness. A recovery contact needs availability, clarity, and a cool head when you're locked out, pacing the floor, and cursing Steve Jobs. Share on XYour recovery contact may be, but need not be, your spouse, adult child, or next of kin. Pick the person who dependably answers your calls and texts. In the words of Grey’s Anatomy, select the one to whom you could honestly say, “You’re my person.”
If you found your way here because someone asked you to be a recovery contact
Maybe you’re wondering if it’s safe to be someone’s account recovery contact. Yes, because you’re not granting access to anything of your own.
If you agree to the position, they’re no pay, no reward (except undying gratitude), and you won’t be gaining access to their goodies. Rather, the only superpower you’ll get is the ability to furnish them with a recovery code upon their request.
Obviously, you should only give that code directly to the person who trusted you to do so (like by phone or video call); if someone claiming to be the police, a hotel concierge, or a hospital worker requests the code, that’s a scam. Duh. (But you knew that, right?)
HOW TO SET UP YOUR APPLE RECOVERY CONTACT
To set up your Apple Recovery Contact, you’re going to need the following:
- All of your devices set to at least iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, or macOS Monterey or later. Apple may prompt you to update any devices, or remove devices you aren’t using. (I have an iPad from 2013; Apple let me know I had to update the iOS, which I can’t, or remove it from the recoverable device options.)
- Two-factor authentication to already be enabled
- A trusted person (aged 13 or older) who already has an Apple ID
Follow these steps:
1) Go to Settings.
2) Tap your name (Apple ID) at the top.
3) Select Sign-In & Security. (Depending on your iOS version, it might say Password & Security.)
4) Tap Account Recovery. (Depending on your iOS version, it might say Recovery Contacts, as mine does, below).
5) Tap Add Recovery Contact. — At this point, you’ll likely be asked to and authenticate, so be prepared to use Face ID or Touch ID, as applicable.
6) Choose a trusted person from among your contacts.
7) Apple will then send them an invitation to accept.
How to Delete Your Apple Recovery Contact
If you ever need or want to change your Apple Recovery Account, follow the same steps as above, but after once you get to Account Recovery, tap the person’s name and then tap Remove. Your contact will see a message that you’re no longer their account recovery contact.
For more on the Apple Recovery Contact process, check out these Apple pages:
Set up an account recovery contact — This page explains much of what I’ve written above but with additional details.
How to use account recovery when you can’t reset your Apple Account password — This page explains how to request an account recovery when everything has gone kaflooie. (Yes, that is the technical term. Thanks for asking.) You can either do this from your device or on the web at https://iforgot.apple.com in your browser.
Help a friend or family member as their account recovery contact — This explains how to be a good Apple Recovery Contact, including what such an individual does, how they can assist with recovery, and how to remove themselves as a recovery contact.
HOW TO ADD A GOOGLE RECOVERY CONTACT
You may have found Google account recovery to be problematic in the past. Happily, in October 2025, Google upgraded their systems to allow for improved Google Recovery Contact.
Functionally, a Google Account Recover Contact works much the same as an Apple Recovery Contact. (Note if you have Android devices (e.g., phones, tablets), be sure to set up a Google Account Recovery Phone for Android access protection.)
To set up your Google Trusted Account, you’re going to need:
- Access to your Google account (duh!)
- A trusted person with a reachable phone or email. (Google doesn’t specify that the trusted person must be a specific age, but Google’s minimum account-holder age is 13 in the United States; it varies by country. If your contact is old enough to have a Google account, you’re good.)
Follow these steps:
1) Go to your Google Account — If you’re on the web, that’s myaccount.google.com)
2) Click Security.
3) Find the “How you sign in to Google” section.
4) Click Recovery contacts. You may have to scroll down below the listed options (like 2-step verification, password, recovery phone, recovery email, etc.) to find this option in a “more sign-in options” bubble.
5) Click Add recovery contact.
Note: If you’re prompted to sign in, do so. If you’re setting this up in a browser, Google will likely show you a number code, direct you to open the Google app on your phone, and ask you to confirm the right number from multiple choices. If it doesn’t work the first time, hit “resend” to get the code again. (You have my permission to sigh.)
6) Enter the email address of your trusted contact. Assuming you already have that person among your contacts, their name, face, and email address will pop up, assuring you that you’ve selected the right person. Tap their name/face/email to accept your selection.
7) Click Continue.
8) Click Send Request when Google asks, “Send a recovery contact request? Your request will be sent via email, and [trusted contact’s name] will be able to see your name, email address, and profile photo.”
You’ll now see a list of your open request(s) for Google Recovery Account(s), with the person’s name, email, and photo (if they’ve created a photo for the account), so you’ll know you did it right.
Your contact will receive an email to accept the request, and they’ll have seven days in which to confirm their willingness. After 7 days, the request expires. Once they accept the request, you have to wait seven more days before you can actually use them as a Google Recovery Contact, so don’t go spelunking around your settings and accidentally blitz your access. Step away from the keyboard for a week and stop experimenting!
How to Delete your Google Recovery Account
Maybe you’ve broken up with your Google Recovery Account trusted contact, or perhaps you just know their lives have gotten too busy with babies or work. Just use the same steps as above to navigate to your Google Account’s Security & Sign-in page, then tap Recovery contacts, and find the trash can icon next to the account you want to delete. Tap the trash can and hit Confirm.
To Use your Google Account Recovery
If you encounter difficulties logging into your Google account, go to g.co/recover and enter your Gmail address. Try to answer the identifying questions the best you can and follow the suggestions for regaining access.
If you do need to recover your account, you’ll either 1) select your Google Recovery Contact from the list of recovery options, or 2) follow a pop-up prompt to reach out to them and select Get Number to get a short code.
Google will then send your Google Recovery Contact an email with three different numbers from which to choose, and you’ll have 15 minutes to tell them the number you got so they can select it, too. (This is why you may need to call or text to be clear on what’s going on.)
For more information, read Google’s Add, Manage & Use Recovery Contacts page.
Of course, protecting against from losing access to your essential accounts is always better than having to try to recover access after the fact. This is your reminder that the best ways to organize access to your tech life are to:
- use strong passwords
- don’t repeat passwords across accounts
- change/revise your passwords with frequency
- make use of passkeys, which are device specific and don’t require you to remember anything
- record your passwords somewhere safe, preferably a digital password manager
- use two-factor authentication
- don’t share your passwords with anyone (but if you must grant access, check your digital password manager for ways to share and/or rescind access with greater control)
- keep your devices updated to the latest operating systems and software versions
- set up your account recovery options before you need them
Have you set up recovery contacts? (Did you ever get around to setting up legacy contacts?) What else do you do to keep from getting locked out of your essential accounts? Please share in the comments.
26 Ways to Celebrate GO Month to Get More Organized and Productive
Happy New Year! Happy GO Month!
Each January is Get Organized & Be Productive (GO) Month. Back in 2005, NAPO (then called the National Association of Professional Organizers) proclaimed the first Get Organized Month, as a national public awareness campaign about organizing and our profession.
A decade later, the month was expanded to incorporate productivity, just two years before we officially became the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals. Our purpose remains the same. All of us — professional organizers, productivity specialists, declutterers, coaches, etc. — celebrate how we improve the lives of our clients by creating environments and developing skills to support productivity, health, and well-being.
Practitioners like Paper Doll are here to help you create systems and skills, improve your homes, workspaces, and attitudes, and live your best, most productive life.
For more great organizing and productivity tips during GO Month, you can also follow NAPO’s Social Media Accounts:
Today’s post offers some 26 ice cream samples of organizing and productivity tactics to make 2026 a little easier.
ORGANIZE YOUR PAPER IN 2026
1) Create a Tax Prep Folder
April 15th will be here before you know it. From now through February, you’ll receive tax documents (1099s, 1098s, W2s) in the mail. You may also get emails reminding you to log in to brokerage and other accounts to download your important tax documents.
Don’t wait until the last minute to gather these items. It’s not just good organizing advice, but helpful financial advice, too, because the sooner you get your important tax documents together, the faster you (or your accountant) can get you your refund, or at worst, let you prepare for the size of your tax bite.
Your tax prep folder doesn’t have to be fancy; a plain tabbed folder kept at the front of your financial files section should suffice. However, if you’re dealing with a lot of documents, you might prefer a dedicated accordion-style folder like the Smead All-in-One Income Tax Organizer.
Organize now so you won’t lose deductions, pay more taxes, or get in trouble with the IRS!
2) Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your VIPs
Make 2026 the year that you get your affairs in order. Estate documents and other essential paperwork must be created, obviously, but also reviewed and updated on a periodic basis.
As I’ve said before, this aspect of organizing may be boring (if you aren’t a professional organizer), but boring is good! If your VIPs are boring, it means that you and your family won’t ever experience any ugly surprises during difficult times, like when someone is in the hospital, when there’s been a death in the family, or even when dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Start by reading these from-the-vault posts to figure out your next steps.
- How to Replace and Organize 7 Essential Government Documents
- How to Create, Organize, and Safeguard 5 Essential Legal and Estate Documents
- The Professor and Mary Ann: 8 Other Essential Documents You Need To Create
- Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Organizing Yourself to Get a REAL ID
- Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Getting a Document Notarized
- Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Legally Changing Your Name
- A New VIP: A Form You Didn’t Know You Needed
Then list documents you already have (and their locations) and identify what you need to create, and then plan meetings with your family and a trusted advisor to set things in motion.
3) Declutter and Preserve Your Family Photos and Memorabilia
Two years ago, a beloved client passed away, and I’ve been working with his son to go through more than a century of photos, from passed-down black-and-white picures of ancestors on both sides of the family to lighthearted snapshots and travelogues from the gentleman’s young military years. We review prints and slides, as well as delicate (and crumbling) correspondence.
Do you have print photos that would be lost in case of a fire or flood because you don’t have the negatives (or store them with the photos)? Would digital photos on your phone be lost if your phone got smushed or stolen? You need backup!
I’m not suggesting you do this every day in January, but make a plan. What if you spent an hour every Sunday morning sorting through photos? Could you invite a family member or friend to help you consider what to keep and what categories to use?
Contact a NAPO member who specializes in organizing photos, or visit The Photo Managers to find experts who can help you safeguard your photo history.
While I’m on the subject, I absolutely have to recommend, yet again, my colleague Hazel Thornton‘s What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
5) Clean Off Your Desk
Next Monday, January 12, 2026 is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. Celebrate it by making a clean sweep of everything piled up on your desk, de-germify it, and think carefully about what belongs on it.
Read last year’s Paper Doll Celebrates National Clean Off Your Desk Day for step-by-step for making your desk a space for productivity instead of mystery crumbs and mountains of papers.
Then refresh your space with ideas from Organize Your Desktop with Your Perfect Desk Pad: 2025 Update and Paper Doll Explores the Best of Desktop File Boxes.
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.
There's no permanent state of inbox zero, any more than finishing all of the laundry today will create laundry basket zero unless your family plans on becoming very tidy nudists. Share on XProcessing 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.
9) Know What You Don’t Know About Your Tech
In Digital Disaster Prep: How to Organize Your Tech Info Before You Need It earlier this year, I walked readers through all sorts of information you need to know before something goes wrong with your tech. Do you know where to find your:
- IP Address
- Network and router information
- ISP contact information
- Device Identifiers
- Operating system license keys
- Software and game activation codes
Your household probably added some hardware and software goodies this holiday season. This is the perfect time for you to read the post and start logging all of your essential tech information.
ORGANIZE YOUR TIME IN 2026
10) Track Your Time to Figure Out Where Your Time Is Going
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
I’m a big believer in the concept that whatever isn’t a “Hell, yeah!” is a “Heck, no!” at least in terms of what you can control. (Unlike Marie Kondo, who encourages people to get rid of tangible items that don’t bring joy, I know that you can’t just toss your old tax returns.
Similarly, you can’t strike everything that isn’t joyous off of your calendar. You still have get a dental cleaning at least twice a year, whether you like it or not.
But why not make 2026 the year you step back from volunteer positions that take your time and energy, but don’t give you delight?
How about taking that book club (for which you never like the selected books) off your schedule? You can always agree to meet the people one-on-one without the obligation to read the newest oversized dystopian novel.
Set yourself, and your calendar, free.
14) Pick a Problem-Solving Day
Theming your days can make you more productive because you don’t have to keep switching tasks. Marketing Mondays or Financial Fridays let you schedule a block of similarly-themed tasks so you can focus and get into “flow.”
I encourage clients to pick one day of the week for problem-solving. Block a few hours on a specific day for sitting on the phone and asking, repeatedly, for someone to escalate your call. This is the day you set aside for time to get help on whatever is making your computer do THAT THING.
Knowing that you have a slot firmly in place will allow you to worry less about getting problematic or frustrating things accomplished, and because there’s one place in your schedule for solving problems, you will be able to focus when that day arrives.
ORGANIZE YOUR FINANCES IN 2026
15) Stop Singing “I Owe, I Owe, It’s Off To Work I Go”
Debt creates mental clutter. Knowing is always better than not knowing, so make 2026 the year that you know what you owe and figure out what’s going on with your money and where it’s going.
- Make a list of every credit card, loan, and any other kind of debt you have. Note the creditor, the amount, and the interest rate.
- Next, make a list of every fixed expense you have.
Seeing it all in black and white (and red) may be sobering, but it’s the first step toward figuring what you can do about it.
Maybe you can refinance a car loan or mortgage to lower your monthly costs?
Perhaps you can call your credit card companies and request a reduction in your interest rates. (Nerd Wallet has a great article on How to Get a Lower APR on Your Credit Card.)
Maybe you can cut expenses for things you’re not even using.
16) Go Spelunking for Lost Money
Start with your couch cushions. Whether your loose change is in a jar in the laundry room or at the bottom of your purse, it’s (literally) weighing you down wasting your financial potential. Put on some music and start rolling coins (or bribe your kids to do it) and take the money to the bank. Alternatively, dump it all in a canister and take it to a Coinstar machine or any credit union that accepts and counts coins for free.
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
17) Re-Shop Your Auto Insurance
When was the last time you actually shopped for car insurance? If you’ve kept the same insurance for years, you’re almost assuredly overpaying. As with the cable company, this is one of those instances where newer customers are rewarded with the best deals, and loyal customers are not rewarded for loyalty.
It doesn’t cost anything to shop around. Even if you find a better rate, you may be able to return to your agent and say, “Hey, the guys across the street quoted me quite a bit less. Can you match it?”
Note: if you use online pricing comparisons, you’ll be bombarded with emails, so consider creating a new Gmail account just for these replies.
Before you make any calls, though, familiarize yourself with the basics of car insurance with Organize for an Accident: Don’t Crash Your Car Insurance Paperwork [UPDATED]
RECITE THESE ORGANIZING AND PRODUCTIVITY MOTTOS
When you’re having a hard time tackling the clutter or focusing on the work, pick one of these mantras to help point you in the right direction.
18) Don’t put things down; put them away.
19) Declutter first, then contain it. (Don’t acquire clutter to contain your clutter!)
20) Everything should have a home, but not everything has to live with you.
21) Someday is not a day on the calendar.
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!
2025 Wrapped: Do An Annual Review To Design Your Best Life
The unexamined life is not worth living.
~ Socrates
WRAPPING UP PAPER DOLL’S 2025
There’s no getting away from your annual review.
It all started with an email from Spotify Wrapped. Spotify was one of the first online platforms to sum up a user’s habits and achievements for the past year, and people seem to love sharing this bit of self-knowledge. Mine tells me that my top artist was The Floating Men, a group I first saw in concert in 1993, in what we used to quaintly call record stores. I need no app rewind to know this music is the soundtrack to my life, but as a whole, it’s left to me to interpret that I haven’t listened to much new music lately (unless it’s in the background of a TikTok).
Spotify tells me my top artists and songs, how many minutes I listened, and even my listening age, which they peg at 47, not because I’m almost a dozen years more youthful than my actual age, but because I listened most to songs from the 1990s. (While Spotify didn’t bother to mention it, I’m able to see that I’m geographically diverse, with my most listened to music from the Southeastern United States, Canada, the UK, Sweden, and the Pacific Northwest.)
A few days ago, Goodreads sent me my 2025 Year in Review statistics. Breathlessly, it reported that I’d finished 37 books and 9620 pages this year (though it’s already out of date after a holiday week spending reading) and that I’m a top 10% reviewer. (I doubt that’s a qualitative description. Given the length of my blog posts, I think we can just assume it means I write really long book reviews.)
It also lets me know I’m just a handful of pages short of hitting my 2025 Goodreads Challenge goal, so I’d better finish this blog post and get back to reading!
Duolingo started emailing around Thanksgiving, and I don’t love that my year in review is only actually 11 months of data. It’s true that I faithfully studied Italian and Spanish every day of 2025. Thankfully, Duolingo’s year in review kindly avoids mentioning that I quit learning chess after two weeks because — and this is embarrassing for a professional organizer to admit — my sense of spatial orientation and ability to recall which way some pieces move was woeful.
It also ignores the fact that although I tried to learn Portuguese as well as Spanish in advance of my September travels, I somehow failed to learn that when you say thank you (obrigado or obrigada), the gendered form of the word depends on your gender, not the recipient of your gratitude. No wonder I got some funny looks at the airport when I was just trying to be polite!
Even Jimmy John’s is telling me how many (and which) sandwiches I consumed in 2025!
Entertaining and accurate as they may be, how helpful are these backward glances?
Sure, they let me easily click to brag a bit about my accomplishments, but what goes unmentioned (and without fancy graphics) is at least as important; we need to know where we fall down if we hope to get back up!
After five years of averaging close to 11,000 steps by day, I fell significantly short in 2025. Fitbit tells me when I hit my goals, but stares off into the distance and politely ignores that I’ve been slacking off a bit this year.
WordPress, my blogging platform, doesn’t make an annual review easy, and I am avoiding (and wouldn’t believe) ChatGPT in this regard. So, I had to manually count and scroll. Counting this post, I only wrote 30 completely new (non-refreshed) posts this year, versus 40+ in most years of the past half decade. Some of that was intentional, as I’d decided not to publish on holiday Mondays or while traveling, but it ignores that I also took off the entire month of October after I returned from Europe, polishing older posts but not writing new ones. It’s up to me to figure out what that means in terms of motivation and productivity.
And that’s what an annual review is all about.
THE EXAMINED LIFE: BEYOND THE STATS
What if we look beyond the numbers? Professionally, I can (and do) count how many new clients I worked with this past year, and how many “graduated.” But numbers don’t paint the full picture. When we look at the qualitative vs. the quantitative, we see trends.
When I began blogging in 2017, I was focused almost entirely on paper. Since then, I have expanded my reach each year, covering topics from financial organizing to productivity, motivation to time management. Although I work with residential as well as business clients, I tend to leave blogging about residential organizing to my excellent colleagues.
Each month, Janet Barclay curates the Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival. I’ve been delighted to reach Megastar Blogger status, having had 50+ of my posts in monthly carnivals, and I’m working my way toward Ultimate Star status, but with only 12 months in the year, it’ll take a while to hit 100 posts.
In December, Janet curates the Best of 2025, where each participant explains why, among the posts they’ve written, they consider that one to be their best, and the definitions vary widely.
“Best” posts in the December 2025 Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival covered a wide spectrum of topics: useful concepts about ADHD and kitchen gadget clutter, joyfully embracing change and organizing with spreadsheets, intuition vs. pro/con lists and knowing when to slow down.
Most years, I consider my “best” post based on the quality of writing or how much humor I could pack into one post. However, pressed to describe my best of 2025, I picked a post from late summer, Organize and Lower Your Medical Bills: Spot Errors, Negotiate Costs, and Save Money. Why? Because the impact current events are having on people’s finances and health means this kind of advice is useful and important. While I can count the number of views or comments on a post, I can’t quantify the value of that post vs. others.
Beyond my official “best” post, however, I tried to come up with a Paper Doll 2025 Top 10 List but only got as far as these eight:
- Paper Doll on the Power of a DONE List
- Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time
- Global Day of Unplugging 2025: Phones and Apps to Reduce Phone Use and Improve Your Life
- Digital Disaster Prep: How to Organize Your Tech Info Before You Need It
- How to Track, Lower, or Cancel Your Recurring Subscription-Based Bills
- Paper Doll Celebrates National Clean Off Your Desk Day
- Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Organizing Yourself to Get a REAL ID
- How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity
Why only eight? Not because I didn’t love any of the other posts, but because some were silly, some were time-specific, and mostly, because just as every mother loves her children, my posts are my babies, and when you have twins or triplets or quintuplets, you can’t easily pick among them. Thus, my Paper Doll 2025 Year in Review “best” list is eight posts — plus two series. So sue me!
- 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
and
- Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking (Part 1)
- Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking in Lectures & Presentations (Part 2)
- Take Note: Paper Doll’s Guide to Organized Note-Taking for Learning and Creative Projects (Part 3)
EXAMINING YOUR OWN LIFE
When Socrates spoke of the lack of value of an unexamined life, he wasn’t thinking about Spotify Wrapped or “Best of” lists, of course. He knew that looking at where you’ve been is merely the first step in deciding how you will live going forward.
Find the Treasure
Over the past several years, blogging about reviewing the past year and planning for the next one, I’ve come up with a list of questions I think offer a path to living the examined life. However, once you hit December, it’s hard to recall powerful happenings closer to the beginning of the year, so you may need some assistance in your re-examination.
Start by looking at your calendar. That’s where you put the things you intended to do, so it’s a great starting framework. Most of the events on your calendar actually happened, or you would probably have crossed them off or moved them.
Many of the successes and achievements in life are unplanned, however, so try to find the mini-recaps you did all through the year, even without realizing that’s what they were.
Scroll through emails and texts you sent, and flip through the pages of your diary or journal, if you have one. Rereading messages you shared may offer insight into what mattered (and how you dealt with it) during the year.
Pull up the photo library on your phone and navigate to January 2025. Scroll forward and I bet you’ll be surprised by achievements and delights that seasoned your year.
The key is to remember more of the past year than just cold, hard statistics.
For example, after a quiet December, my initial instinct was to think that my personal year was fairly flat. However, reviewing my personal calendar and photos immediately reminded me that in addition to my big trip to Portugal and Spain, I also:
- saw Hamilton with my friend Chris,
- flew to visit Paper Mommy,
- attended my 40th high school reunion,
- road-tripped to Massachusetts for my friend Phil’s vow renewal,
- and after 15+ years of not having seen The Floating Men perform, I went to three shows!
(Perhaps we’ll need to examine how developing a gratitude practice may be the key to remembering more of the highlights of each year.)
See the Whole Picture
When I looked back at my professional year, I’d only focused on clients and blogging, but my calendar showed me the podcasts I’d appeared on and the speaking engagements I’d done. And when I went back through the emails in my “Success Folder,” I was able to read testimonials for the real change that organizing and productivity coaching made in my clients’ lives. (Don’t have a “Success Folder” of your own? Don’t worry, I’ll have an upcoming blog post on that!)
It’s too easy to erase the good stuff from our brains and focus on the negative. When I started my annual review, my first thoughts were about how two different people hit-and-ran my car 48 hours apart and my disappointment with myself for not doing more and varied marketing this year. But those are just snapshots, not the whole picture.
In a discussion about public reputation, a beloved boss once told me that, “One ‘Aw, <bleep>’ wipes out ten ‘Atta boys’ — but your reputation in your own mind is just as likely to bury the gold under that <bleep>ing manure.
So, answer these in your head, aloud by yourself, or with a yearly review buddy, or try journaling your responses. Give yourself the opportunity to find the truth of your past year.
The Good
- What challenges made me feel smart, empowered, or proud of myself this year?
- What did I create?
- What positive relationships did I begin or nurture?
- Who brought delight to my life?
- Who stepped up or stepped forward for me?
- What was my biggest personal highlight or moment I’d like to relive?
- What was my biggest professional moment I’d want to appear in my bio?
- What’s a good habit I developed this year?
The Neutral
- What did I learn about myself and/or my work this year?
- What did I learn how to do this year?
- What did neglect or avoid doing out of fear or self-doubt?
- What did I take on that didn’t suit my goals or my abilities?
- What was I wrong about?
The Ugly
- What challenges made me feel weaker or less-than?
- Whom did I dread having to see or speak with this year?
- Who let me down?
- Whom did I let down?
- What did I do this year that embarrassed me (professionally or personally) or made me cringe?
- When did I hide my light under a bushel?
- What am I faking knowing how how do? — Instead of pretending you know how to do something but are choosing a different path, ask for help. Make decision about what to do from a position of strength rather than weakness.
- What’s a bad habit I regret taking up or continuing?
- Where did I spend my time wastefully or unproductively? (It’s social media. For all of us.)
- Where did I spend my money wastefully or unwisely?
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW?
Use What You Learn
If all you did was answer these questions as if they were a series of college essays, it might be instructive, but it wouldn’t be powerful. Instead, use your answers as guideposts for what’s to come (or what you wish will come).
For example, when there are people or activities that make you feel smart, bold, and fierce, look for ways to add more of that in the year to come. Did human connection make you realize you know more than you thought you did? How can you find opportunities to spend more time with people who challenge you (in all the right ways)?
When you see an obstacle, look for a phrase or quote to help stiffen your backbone. For example, in the years when I had too many answers to the question, “When did I hide my light under a bushel,” I stuck a sticky-note on my mirror quoting Nelson Mandela:
“Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?
It’s OK if you were wrong about things, ideas, or people, but how will you secure your chances at figuring out the truth and making better decisions going forward?
Let your answers about last year guide how you approach next year.
Try Year Compass
Obviously, you don’t have to go with my questions. One of the best platforms to review your year is Year Compass. It’s free, available in 63 languages, and you can download it as a printable booklet and fill in by hand on paper or type in a fillable, printable PDF.
The first half of Year Compass involves paging through your calendar, as I’ve suggested, and answering just six essay-style questions:
- What are you most proud of?
- Who are the three people who influenced you the most?
- Who are the three people you influenced the most?
- What were you not able to accomplish?
- What is the best thing you have discovered about yourself?
- What are you most grateful for?
But that’s merely the beginning.
Year Compass nudges you through a discovery of the best moments of your past year so you can analyze your biggest accomplishments and challenges. It also creates space for forgiveness and compassion (towards yourself and others) and for recapping your year in ways that I’ve never seen on any other annual review platform. Year Compass also takes the insights from the first half part of the process to help you design your dreams and actions for the coming year.
“My Secret Plan to Rule the World” Photo by Ann H on Pexels
Value Your Values
Socrates was obviously wise; in addition to his recognition of the importance of examining one’s life, he said, “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.” Only you can decide what defines a “good” life for you, your family, and your inner circle, but centering your future behavior on activities that reflect those values is a pretty good way to organize how your approach.
I encourage clients to take time to spell out exactly what their values are. However, it’s not always easy to define — and prioritize — our values. If you could use a little support in identifying the values that matter most to you, consider these resources:
- Core Values List (50) — Put together by James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits
- The Ultimate List of Core Values (Over 230) — Created by CEOSage coach Scott Jeffrey.
- Dare To Lead List of Values (118) — Shared by Brené Brown, the author of Daring Greatly, as well as Daring to Lead, Rising Strong, and The Gifts of Imperfection
- Ultimate Core Values List: 50 Common Values and Why They Are Important in Our Lives — Collated by Nir Eyal, the author of Indistractible: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
No matter how many quizzes I take or versions of these lists I peruse, my values always come out the same. Can you guess? Paper Doll‘s top three values are knowledge, usefulness, and humor.
Please feel free to share your own key values in the comments, below.
HOW TO WRAP UP LAST YEAR FOR THE BEST SHOT AT THE NEW YEAR
This time of year is about endings and beginnings. If you like to start a year with a clean slate, you may want to read Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Finish Off Your Unfinished Tasks, the final post I wrote in 2025 to help you close those last open loops.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I did not talk in-depth about resolutions, goals, and annual themes. In 2025, I started the year with those concepts, so I will just direct you to How to Use Cathedral Thinking and Intentional Words to Organize Your Year for inspiration to create an intentional life in 2026.
But I will tell you that I’ve very excited about my theme word for the coming year: WHIMSY. Most of us found 2025 to be a pretty “heavy” year, and a little lightness and charm is exactly what I want, and what I hope to continue bringing to you wonderful readers next year.
Until we meet again, I hope you all have a very happy, healthy, organized, and productive New Year!
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