Paper Doll
Organizing the Shape of Notebooks to Come: Panobook, Triangle, and Sidekick
Notebooks. Bullet Journals. Diaries. Sketchbooks. Whatever you use, notebooks are essential to capturing words, feelings, designs, and brilliant ideas so they don’t fade away into oblivion.
We’ve talked a lot of notebooks here at Paper Doll HQ, everything from waterproof notebooks to notebooks for left-handers. We’ve discussed various types of hybrid paper/digital notebooks, like Ampad’s Shot Notes and Versa Crossover, TOPS’ Focus Notes, and Evernote’s Smart Notebook by Moleskine. We’ve dug into magnetic notebooks, dry-erase notebooks, and customizable notebooks.
The blog has also looked at the 5 Key Points for Organizing with Notebooks, and in Notions on Notebooks: Organize Your Paper Picks, we delved into all of the considerations to take into account when choosing a notebook solution, including: price, branding, portability, binding, paper quality, lines, and color.
We’ve even looked at the shape of notebooks before when we presented Paper Doll Surveys the (Paper) Landscape. Because, sometimes, you just want something a little different. Today, we’re going to embrace three very different notebook styles.
PANOBOOK
Most notebooks have a portrait orientation. It’s rare, other than with sketchbooks, to see a notebook with a landscape orientation. Panobook, however, takes landscape one step further and delivers a panoramic (landscape-orientation, but wider) notebook designed to sit on your desk (in that bit of space between your abdomen and your keyboard), and eventually, on your bookshelf.
Created by Texas-based Studio Neat, known for a variety of innovative products, from wooden charging docks to cocktail-making tools to video-related apps, Panobook began life as a Kickstarter and quickly gathered community support.
It’s easy to understand why. Depending on the width of your desk, you may or may not have space to the left or right of your body. But your monitor is generally straight in front of you, and so is your keyboard, so unless you have an L-shaped desk, the real estate in front of you is pretty tightly packed.
If you want to take notes, maybe you can scroll (I mean, slide) your body to the left or right, or you may have to swivel in your seat to use the left side of the desk (or the right side, if you’re left-handed) to take notes. Unless your arms are long (and your eyesight so pristine that your monitor is very far away), there’s just not that much writing space in front of you. (And I’m pretty sure you don’t want a notebook poking into your tummy.)
Panobook was created to solve this problem of limited space. The panoramic format, measuring 160 mm x 288 mm (6.53″ x 11.34″) is designed to sit squarely in front of, or if you prefer, behind, your keyboard. (Turned vertically, of course, it can sit to the left or right, if you have that much space. But then you’d probably be using a traditional notebook or legal pad, right?)
Panobook is made of high-quality (Finch Fine Soft White Ultra Smooth 70 lb text-quality) paper and designed to perform with a variety of writing instruments and inks without causing bleed-through or smudging. Both the front and back of Panobook are rigid, made of Neenah LaCrema 617 Charcoal-colored 50 pt black chipboard. It’s all bound with sturdy black Wire-O (12.7 mm (0.5″) diameter), so Panobook will sit flat when opened on your desk. (For some of us, this is a huge deal!)
Each notebook contains 50 sheets (100 pages). Instead of being lined or blank, Panobook has a subtle dot pattern with grid spacing at 5 mm (0.20″). And there’s a quirky little twist. There are guide markers on each page that make it easy to quickly draw three rectangles on the page, sized ideally for web designers doing smartphone user interface design or creative types for doing storyboarding. There are also edge guides to divide each page and provide cues for layout. They’re subtle, so if you don’t need them, you might not even notice them.
So what do you do when you finish the notebook? Panobook is designed to let you archive your creations and comes with a slip case in a French Paper Kraft-Tone Standard White 100 lb Cover (for people who know about such things). Write on the spines to catalog your notebooks and keep your collection together on a shelf.
See the Panobook in action:
You can buy Panobook directly from Studio Neat for $20/notebook for one or two; they’re discounted to $19/notebook when you purchase three or more.
TRIANGLE NOTEBOOK
When I first saw the Triangle Notebook last summer, it seemed vaguely familiar. Back in 2012, there were quite a few posts on the design blogs about this product and it was selling at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shop. However, by the time I planned to write about it, the Triangle Notebook had already sold out and been withdrawn from the marketplace. Now it’s back in an improved form.
The Triangle Notebooks (both the original and improved versions) were created by Tan Mavitan, a creator based in Istanbul, Turkey and best known for his sculptures. As you can imagine, artists need someplace to collect designs and thoughts, so who better to imagine innovatively designed notebooks?
The Triangle Notebook appears to be just that: When closed, it’s a triangle. Flipped open, the notebook is square. The hard front and back covers and spine are encased in fabric, and the 160 interior (90 gr acid-free paper) sheets are narrowly ruled.
The Triangle Notebook comes in 13 solid colors, including Black, (light) Blue, Dark Green, “Green” (which looks more like chartreuse), Navy Blue, Pink, Purple, Red, Yellow, Dark Amber, Ghost White, and Mustard. There are also three Special Edition Triangle Notebooks: Triangle Thoughts (white with black avante garde style, and Yachtsman Blue (pictured below) and Yachtsman Red. All notebooks are 21 cm x 21 cm (8.26″ x 8.26″).
Personally, I find $33 to be a steep price, even for an admittedly lovely hardcover notebook, but my larger concern is that the pages may not lay flat when the notebook is open. Of course, at about 8 1/4″ square, you could place a small book weight in the center without obscuring too much of your content.
All versions of the Triangle Notebook are available from Amazon or from the Tan Mavitan Studio shop. The price in both venues is $33. The Studio often has discount codes listed at the top of the page; as of this writing, WELCOME2019 yields a 20% discount. However, there’s no shipping rate information on the site, and the notebooks do qualify for Amazon Prime two-day shipping, so check both options to see what works best for you.
SIDEKICK NOTEBOOK
Remember what I was saying about real estate on your desk being at a premium? Panobook isn’t the only option for handling this problem creatively. The Sidekick Notebook appears to be a mostly normal (if narrow) portrait-oriented notebook with a bottom margin cut strangely on the diagonal.
When closed, the Sidekick Notebook measures 21.5 cm x 8.5 cm (8.46″ x 3.34″). But once it’s flipped open, the Sidekick is actually an L-shaped notebook designed to hug the corners of keyboards, iPads/tablets, mousepads, books, and other square-ish items.
Instead of a portrait or landscape orientation, the Sidekick delivers both options simultaneously
The Sidekick, which comes 160 sheets (of 90 gr acid-free paper) per notebook, has a hard fabric-encased cover and comes in four colors: Red, Black, Navy Blue, and Light Gray. The layout is dot- grid style.
I suspect that the Sidekick won’t serve well for sketching large designs, but with both landscape and portrait writing areas, it’s good for taking notes and creating fiddly, small-detail designs.
The Sidekick is available for $24 per notebook from Amazon and from the Tan Mavitan Studio store, with the same discount and shipping caveats as noted above for the Triangle Notebook.
As always, the content you create and capture in your notebook is more important than the size, shape, color, or design. Sometimes, if a notebook is too spiffy (or expensive), we are reluctant to put anything but our “best” notions in them, which may mean procrastinating on doing anything at all.
If a unique design inspires you, embrace an unusual landscape or angle. Just give yourself permission to create first, and judge your work later.
Paper Doll Post:
Is Your Junk Drawer a Drunk Drawer? 3 Steps to An Organized Junk Drawer
[This post originally appeared on January 8, 2019, and has been updated with additional material as of October 4, 2021.]
One of my clients refers to her kitchen junk drawer the “Drunk Drawer.”
I don’t drink, so I thought I was missing a pop culture reference. She said that now that we’ve been working together to help her get her life back in order after a few tumultuous years, most of her life is planned out to the nearest detail — organized, categorized, contained. But, on the rare occasion that someone puts a margarita in her hand, especially after a stressful time at work, and she has the opportunity to let her hair down, everything flows freely.
My client notes that with a margarita (or a few) in hand, she says what she wants, she dances to her own drummer, and she gives herself permission to accept that not everything makes sense. Similarly, my client sees that her junk drawer is the one area in her house where she lets the wackiness take over, categories intermingle, and nothing makes sense.
I was reminded of my client’s story when I was approached by Katina Hazimihalis of Dumpsters.com for the Start Fresh: Take the 30-day Decluttering Challenge. (Definitely check it out!) They asked for my advice for Day 7, earmarked as the day of their challenge to “Declutter the Kitchen Junk Drawer.”
Longtime readers of Paper Doll know that I can never give only a little bit of advice, so there’s a lot that didn’t make it into that post. So, now it’s all here for you!
WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE JUNK DRAWER?
Most of the things in a junk drawer aren’t junk. They just tend to be far from their friends in similar categories — the loose change that never makes it to the wallet, the tools that haven’t found their way back to the toolbox, all those random things we want to keep, but we don’t want to take the time to think about where they belong.
Seth Godin says, “The junk drawer is the enemy of understanding.” I have to agree. If you can’t name it, you can’t fathom it.
With paper, “miscellaneous” is the enemy. Is it financial, legal, medical, household, or personal? Is it action paper or reference paper?
With clothing, it’s either underwear, outerwear, or what you wear! You can subdivide into shirts, pants, dresses, etc., and onward to sleeve length or color or season, but there’s still a basic way to start breaking things down.
Categorically, things need to belong somewhere — is it fish or fowl? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Ginger or Mary Ann? If you can name it, you can put it into place.
Something has to belong somewhere — is it fish or fowl? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? Ginger or Mary Ann? If you can name it, you can put it into place. Share on XBut unlike paper or clothing, not everything has just one home. Some things have a main home and a vacation home — that’s the junk drawer. Yes, you should have a home first aid kit, but it’s helpful to keep a few Band-aids in the kitchen. Yes, most of your office supplies belong in your home office or at your desk, but sometimes you need to grab a highlighter to make sense of the recipe you’re making.
At its best, the household junk drawer can be a miniature subset of categories found around the house. At its worse, however, it’s drunk. It’s sloppy, it makes no sense, and it leads you down a path of regret. Let’s fix that!
WHAT’S THE FIRST STEP TO ORGANIZING A JUNK DRAWER?
Empty that junk drawer. Dump the whole thing out.
It’s rare to hear a professional organizer advise emptying everything out of any space. Usually, we focus on handling one shelf or one category at a time. That’s because the last thing you want to do is get ninety minutes into a closet overhaul and have to pick up your children from school, leaving you with an unusable bedroom and a huge headache.
However, there are two reasons why a complete dump-out makes sense with a drunk junk drawer. First, junk drawers are small. Other than a wallet, purse, or glove compartment, I’d be hard-pressed to find a smaller space that requires concerted attention.
Second, approaching a junk drawer too delicately usually means nothing ever gets completed. People pull out one item at a time and make a few decisions, put a few things back when they decide to keep them, and never quite get around to making decisions about everything. Instead, the best thing to do is to remove everything from the drawer.
Because most junk drawers are in kitchens, what often works is to put a large towel down on the countertop or kitchen table (to prevent scratches). Plop everything down together. Slowly move things to the outer edges of the towel, as if you were searching for a Canadian penny amid all the coins you’ve shaken out of your piggy bank.
Grab the low-hanging fruit first. Remove gum, candy, soy sauce or hot sauce packets, or really anything edible and move to a “snack” box or food storage container on one of the shelves of your kitchen or pantry. Keep sticky, melty, or bug-friendly edibles out of the junk drawer.
Select one item at a time and ask yourself a few questions:
- Is it broken, expired, dried out (like pens or old wipes), or icky? Toss it out!
- Do you ever really use it? If not, you might toss it or donate it.
- Do you find yourself using it often enough that it really needs to be in the kitchen (or whatever room you keep your junk drawer)? If not, move it to a part of the house where it better fits with a category of items already kept elsewhere, like tools or office supplies.
- Do you need this many of whatever it is? Keep your favorite, keep the best, keep the one you’d grab if you needed it. Set the excess free (from the drawer) and either donate or move to a more appropriate place in your home.
Remember, if you don’t use it often, don’t let it take up the valuable prime real estate in your drawer!
NEXT, MAKE SENSE OUT OF THE CATEGORIES
At first glance, it may seem like everything in the junk drawer belongs to the miscellaneous category, but with patience, you’ll start seeing patterns.
Categorize the items into little areas/zones on the counter or table so you get a sense of how many of each thing you have. If you have duplicates, triplicates, or more, you may want to keep one version handy in the drawer, but move the remainder elsewhere, in your own mini-mall of “when I need them” supplies.
Ask yourself, what does the item DO? What is it for? Some category examples:
Batteries — Keep a small supply of the most commonly (and urgently) needed (like AA and AAA). Move the rest, plus whatever other sizes (9 volt, C and D, and smaller batteries for hearing aids, watches, and medical devices) to one divided container (like a tackle box) elsewhere in the house, like in a cabinet or on a shelf in the laundry room, utility room, or basement.
Duplicate keys — Use key cap tags/covers or labels to identify what the keys fit and keep all keys in one container.
Eyeglass Supplies — like spare reading glasses, mini bottles of eyeglass cleaner, a microfiber cloth, tiny magnetic screwdrivers for repairing glasses
Electronics — like chargers, plugs, adapters, power banks, or any electrical doo-dads that you need to get your hands on regularly. If you’ve got a charger you only use with your old video camera, store it with the camera case, not taking up space in your new-to-sobriety junk drawer.
Loose change — Store your change in a small-to-medium-sized lidded jar, and whenever you come across any loose change in the house, drop it in. When it’s full, take to your bank or donate it to charity. Hate rolling your coins? Hand it off to a responsible ten-year-old, or consider Coinstar.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay
Many grocery stores and retail lobbies have Coinstar kiosks; you just dump your coins in, and (for a hefty 11.9% fee) the machine will count your money and give you four great alternatives. You can:
- Get back cash in the form of paper money.
- Add cash to your Amazon balance (and learn more about how it works on the Amazon side, if you’d like to shop without using a debit or credit card)
- Buy an eGift card (and bypass the coin-counting fee) — Current retail gift card options include Amazon, Apple, Cabela’s, GameStop, The Gap, Hotels.com, iHop, Krispy Kreme (whoohoo!), Outback, Sephora, Starbucks, and many other retail and dining locations.
- Donate to charity (including the American Red Cross, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Feeding America, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Make-a-Wish, NAACP, the Humane Society, UNICEF, United Way, and the World Wildlife Federation. (See? By organizing, you can do well for yourself and do good for others!)
Apparently you can also purchase Bitcoin through Coinstar, but it’s Paper Doll‘s policy never to recommend options that I can’t explain.
Office supplies — Subdivide this larger category into smaller office supply categories by function:
- things that put stuff together (stapler, tape, binder clips)
- things that pull things apart (scissors, staple remover, X-Acto knife or box cutter), assuming the drawer is safe from the hands of curious little ones
- things with which to write (pens, pencils, highlighters)
- things on which to write (sticky note pads, notepads) — but, in general, try to keep documents and loose papers out of the junk drawer. If you’re keeping takeout menus, coupons, contact info, etc., in that general area, use a file riser and keep a few file folders for the purpose. Paper should live upright, not squished in a tiny drawer.
If you have a home office or homework zone elsewhere in the house, keep these supplies to a minimum in the junk drawer. If you have a kitchen desk (built-in or otherwise), move the office supplies to the desk drawer.
Move any papers out of the drawer and into a desktop file box or a few three-ring binders designated for take-out menus, house-of-worship or homeowner’s association directories, and school reference papers.
Things that burn or light — birthday candles, matches/lighters, flashlights (but, as with sharp doo-dads, do consider whether these need to be kept elsewhere if you have tiny humans in the house)
Tools — People have a habit of getting a tool out of the toolkit for a task and never putting that tool away, tossing it in the junk drawer instead. Homes are much more efficient if you maintain a real toolkit with everything you need to run your house smoothly. (If you have an actual house or do a lot of DIY, get one pre-made; most Grandpas would recommend something by Craftsman. Or assemble one that fits your needs from recommendations online, like this Pioneer Woman post on building a starter tool kit.)
Then, just keep a small section of your junk drawer for a multi-tool (like a Leatherman), a few short-handled Phillips-head and flat-head screwdrivers (and a Robertson* screwdriver, if you’re in Canada), measuring tape, and a small hammer. Because, come on, is your house SO big that walking to the toolkit is going to exhaust you?
Note: If you find yourself doing a lot of tiny repairs, keep all of your tools in your main toolkit, but get any inexpensive hammer with lots of tiny screwdrivers nesting inside.
NOW, CONTAIN YOUR CATEGORIES
Once you divide everything into sub (and sub-sub) categories as described above, you’ll have a sense of what you own, and how much of it you’ve been trying to keep. Now it’s time to get creative and figure out how you are going to make it all fit together.
Divide, contain, and conquer!
But before you start moving things into their new, more organized homes, wipe down the interior of your drawer with a damp cloth.
If more than about one-quarter of the drawer is filled with just one category, then it’s time to move that category out of the junk drawer. Find that category its own dedicated home, in a box or bin that contains all of that category, whether on a shelf in the pantry, laundry room, or wherever is closest to where you use it most often.
Next, use padded, non-slip counter or shelf liners with a bit of rubbery “grip” to cover the bottom of the drawer. This will keep items from sliding around when the drawer opens and closes, and also prevent squeaking.
Use drawer dividers and/or small containers to corral each individual category. There are a variety of options depending on how many items you have in each category, how large they are, and how large the interior of your drawer is (in terms of height and depth). Consider the following options:
Inexpensive, plastic, flat-bottom baskets in multiple lengths/widths. You can arrange them as if you were playing a game of Tetris! (You can use lidded containers, like snap-closed pencil cases designed for elementary school students, but just the tiny added labor of having to open and close lids to retrieve and later put things away might dissuade you from staying organized and lead you to leaving things out on the counter or just tossed in the drawer.)
For example, Mainstays’ line of plastic storage baskets can be found at Walmart, various dollar stores, and online. I particularly like the narrow ones for writing implements, screwdrivers, and scissors.
Wider rectangular Mainstay baskets are better for notepads, batteries, and anything where you’re keeping quite a few things grouped together.
There are similar options if you prefer brighter colored baskets, and local or teaching supply stores tend to have cheerier baskets.
Ice cube trays work well for corralling very small items; mini-muffin trays can be great for keeping magnets from getting loose.
Sectioned drawer dividers can be found in a variety of styles in home goods stores. For example:
KD Organizers Deep Drawer Organizing Trays
Container Store Linus 4-Section Drawer Organizer
Mesh desk drawer organizers from office supply stores are usually inexpensive, low-key attractive, and work well when you want to buy just one thing. This Rolodex Deep Desk Drawer Organizer is simple, but gets the job done.
Expandable cutlery drawer inserts are also good alternatives; you may already even have extras in the house. Just be sure to use the ones that with rectangular compartments, and not those that are shaped like spoons or forks. Otherwise, most things won’t fit properly.
THE FINAL WORD
An occasional margarita on the beach can be fun, but you wouldn’t want to replace your morning coffee with it. Similarly, you don’t want your junk drawer to get too wild. Make time periodically to maintain your more orderly junk drawer and keep it from becoming a drunk drawer.
*Thanks to my fabulous former professional organizing colleague, Jackie Hollywood Brown (blogger at Canadian Army Wife and virtual assistant extraordinaire at Productively Organized), for introducing me to the concept of those nifty, square Robertson screwdrivers. They rank with Tim Horton’s, poutine, and Kim’s Convenience as just a few of the fabulous things our neighbors to the north enjoy under the radar. Please note that Jackie, herself, serves clients in the U.S. as well, so if you’re in the market for a VA, she’s the bee’s knees!
Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, and I may get a small remuneration (at no additional cost to you) if you make a purchase after clicking through to the resulting pages. The opinions, as always, are my own. (Seriously, who else would claim them?) For more information regarding how Best Results Organizing handles affiliate links, please see the affiliate section of the site’s Privacy Policy.
Paper Doll Post:
Organize Your Life: The Truth About Resolutions, Goals, Habits, and Words of the Year
A new year begins and we give ourselves absolution for everything that has happened previously: our diets, our habits, our clutter. We have this vision that the true version of us isn’t reflected by everything we’ve ever been, but who we could become. Whether that mindset is more a matter of naiveté or positivity doesn’t matter as much as figuring out how we can transform this vision of who we want to be into a reality where we can say, this is who we truly are. So how do we get there?
RESOLUTIONS
New Year’s resolutions tend to come in two flavors. We promise ourselves we will change some behavior or personal trait (quit smoking, swear less, be nicer to our mothers, etc.) or accomplish some personal goal (run a 5K, learn Italian, knit a sweater). Making resolutions dates back ancient times. For example, the Babylonians apparently promised the gods they would return borrowed objects and repay debts. (Perhaps that resolution came from having achieved the prior year’s resolution to declutter, during which they found all the things they’d borrowed?)
In the United States, the ritual of making resolutions has actually increased over time, from about 25% of the population to over 40%. The biggest advantage I see in making resolutions is that it allows us to start the new year in a motivated, positive way – generally, at a time when the weather, our weights, our checking accounts, and our moods are fairly frightful. The disadvantage, however, is that most of us abandon our resolutions somewhere between February and June.
Resolutions tend to fizzle because of a few reasons: the real world (that is, the same things that kept us from maintaining our resolve last year) gets in the way, we haven’t identified working strategies for achieving our resolutions, or we have resolved to do something because we think we should rather than because we really want to do it.
If you’d like some inspiration for developing new or different resolutions, the Daring to Live Fully blog offers 29 New Year’s Resolution Ideas that go beyond the typical, with some motivational notions for volunteering, being more conscientious, and bringing more peace into your life. Lifehack has 50 New Year’s Resolution Ideas and How To Achieve Each of Them to help get you started. From adopting a pet to getting over an ex, there are enough choices to help you make this next year a little more interesting.
GOALS AND HABITS
Goals are the less shiny versions of resolutions. Nobody announces “New Year’s Goals” with a flourish or breathlessly asks celebrities about their “New Year’s Habits.” But goals provide a big-picture framework, and habits develop the muscles to accomplish those goals.
SMART goals are popular because they identify where resolutions and plans have might otherwise fail without precautions. SMART goals are supposed to be:
- Specific (What are you going to do? Use action verbs!)
- Measurable (What metrics will you use to show you’ve done what you said you’d do?)
- Achievable (Is this a practical goal? Is it realistic?)
- Relevant (Does this goal make sense for your life, family, or business?)
- Time-based (When will you start? When will you do the action? When will you repeat it? When will you finish? Remember, “Someday” is not a day on the calendar!)
You may want to lose weight, pay off debt, find a significant other, or grow your business, but the way to get there can’t be vague. Make sure your goals spell out what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, and how you’re going to measure your success.
Goals set the rules and create the game plan, but habits are how you get to the finish line. The reason you lose your keys all the time is because you don’t have a habit of always putting your keys in the same place every time you come home. (Or, I guess, you’ve got a hole in your pocket.)
Habits are settled or repeated tendencies. Bad habits become like second nature (which makes them hard to break). Luckily, good habits are hard to break, too! That means that if you can get in the habit, so to speak, repeating positive, healthy tasks, you stand a much better chance of achieving your goals.
Two superior resources for understanding how habits work, and how you can put them to use in your life, are:
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – This eminently readable modern classic walks you through the research and the practical ways you can use habits to strengthen the chance you’ll achieve your goals. The essence is that every habit has a cue-routine-reward loop, and if you can modify or enhance your routine based on a cue (depending on whether you want to cut out the bad stuff or do more of the good stuff), you can make an improvement.
Duhigg also talks about keystone habits, a notion that if we start or modify a habit and regularly participate, there’s a halo effect. Families who have a habit of eating together, for example, find that their kids do better in school and have more confidence. Making your bed every day allegedly correlates with being more productive, getting better at sticking to a budget, and having a greater sense of well-being.
WORDS, WORDS, WORDS
Like New Year’s Eve parties themselves, resolutions are formal, fizzy, and soon forgotten. Goals and habits are the workhorses of achievement. But what if you’re looking to change your life in a more flexible, unrestricted way?
In the past decade, a different approach to organizing the year began to take hold. The concept? The Word of the Year! Ta Da!
The idea is that rather than defining in advance what you will accomplish or envisioning the specifics of how you will change your life, the word of the year is more fluid. You identify a word that encapsulates the emotional heft of what you want your year to look and feel like, and you use the word to help you focus your efforts. This word can be serious or lighthearted, as long as it focuses on what you want to do, have, or be. In this regard, I suspect Steve Martin’s grandmother was ahead of the curve.
If your word is “delight” and you have to make a decision regarding which of two options to choose, you could ask yourself, will this delight me? If you select the word “contribute” and you recognize yourself spending a little too much time on social media, always having your focus word in the back of your mind (or on the front of your fridge) may prompt you to see how you can better use your time (or your mind) to contribute in a way that resonates for you.
There are a few ways to identify your word of the year. You could ask yourself, “What was I missing last year? What would have given me strength or self-confidence or a better grip on my emotional well-being?”
Alternatively, you could start with your goal in mind and think of words that resonate based on that. Let’s say you want to earn more money and keep within your budget. For some people, that straightforward goal yields the desired structure; for others (those who find the word “structure” to be a bit depressing or at least constricting), selecting a word that encapsulates those goals, like “abundance,” might be just the ticket.
Of course, you don’t have to come up with your word on your own, as there are many bloggers who have created lists from which to choose:
Word of the Year Ideas for 2019 – The Goal Chaser site offers up 300+ enticing word options, and blogger Gem even shares How to Make Your “Word of the Year” Really Stick.
Word of the Year Discovery Tool from superstar coach Christine Kane isn’t merely a list of words (though there’s a healthy bounty of those). The downloadable PDF also explains how intention is the key to using these kinds of focus words and warns about the pitfalls that can sink the success of your word of the year. The tool also includes some worksheets for developing your own way of identifying the right word.
Inc. Magazine has 5 Tips for Choosing Your Word of the Year, while Boston lifestyle blogger Elisabeth McKnight shares her own experiences with selecting words of the years and suggests 100 words from which you might choose.
But Paper Doll, you ask, what if one word isn’t enough?!
We’ve got you covered.
Mike Vardy, The Productivityist, picks three words rather than one and in doing so has motivated many people to expand their approach to focus words. Here are his 2018, 2017, and 2016 posts about his trio of words. (Mike also has theme-word months, so he’s the king of motivational focus words!)
As a result of Mike’s encouragement, I selected “Love, Learn, Launch” as my three words back in 2017, and it struck some interesting chords throughout that year.
Media guru Chris Brogan has been selecting three words for more than a decade and details his process in 3 Words 2018. Meanwhile, Gem of the Goal Chaser site mentioned above has actually picked four words for 2019. (Eventually, someone’s going to pick an entire dictionary!)
MANTRAS
Finally, there’s a plan for people who fall in the middle, those for whom resolutions or goals are too structured for what they want to achieve, but single words (or even trios) are too abstract. For them, a Mantra of the Year may be ideal.
With a mantra, a repeated statement or slogan of a more spiritual (or at least inspirational) bent, you can self-soothe, motivate, and have a clearer sense of the vision you want your actions to reflect.
12 Mantras for the New Year from Mantra Jewelry’s blog has quite a few that provide a breath of fresh air, and I quite like, “I trust in new beginnings” and “I breathe in calmness, I breathe out stress.”
Positive Mantras to Live By For a “New Year, New You” from Cloud 9 Living has a variety of mantras at the end of the article, but “Appreciate More, Complain Less” seems like a worthy and inspirational focus that echoes the attitude of gratitude so often recommended for good mental health.
15 Self-Care Mantras for 2019 That Will Help You Be Kinder To Yourself from Bustle Magazine looks at the new year mantra as a way to combat the negativity that seems to permeate everything from politics to social media to the line at the coffee shop. In some ways, mantras like “I am free to be myself” and “I know who I am and I am enough” seem to be the opposite of the resolutions and goals designed to change who we are. Meanwhile, “With this breath, I release anything that no longer serves me” might be the perfect mantra to pair with all those resolutions and goals helping to break bad habits.
So, what approach appeals to you? Do you make resolutions? Do you have a word or mantra? (To be honest, I’m still working on mine for 2019.)
Dear readers, whether you choose a resolution, a goal (with habits), a word, many words, or a mantra, or you decide that you are nifty just the way you are, I wish you a happy and healthy year!
Paper Doll Post:
Project Management Tools To Get It Done in 2019
With a new year approaching, you’re probably looking at all you want to accomplish, professionally and personally. While there may be a variety of tiny tasks, most things (particularly at work) involve projects, and for better or worse, this means project management.
If you’re anything like Paper Doll, memories of dreaded group projects in middle school make the words “project management” set your teeth on edge. So, to look at some of the tools that make project management less stressful, I’m pleased to share this rare guest post. The 6 Best Project Management Tools for Small Business by Grace Miller originally appeared at MyEmma.com, a company that specializes in productively building customer relationships through email communications.
While Grace focuses on the collaborative approach to project management in companies, most of these tools are appropriate for a wide variety of efforts: a group of friends planning a baby shower, a writer corralling her “street team” to launch a new book, a volunteer group working through the steps to develop outreach, far-flung family members planning a family reunion, and more. The keys are always figuring out who will be doing what, and when, where, and how they’ll accomplish it. Let’s see what Grace has to say.
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If you’re involved in the management of a small business, then you know that project management is a task often shared by staff and company owners alike.
Regardless of job title, many small business employees end up handling some project management tasks as they work through their assigned duties.
That means having tools to streamline and organize project management processes, particularly if they’re shared across departments or staff levels, can be invaluable.
To help you increase productivity and boost revenue, we’ve curated some of the best project management tools for small businesses currently available.
The best project management tools for small businesses to increase productivity right now
Marketing and the strategy behind it are the lifeblood of your business, ensuring that revenue flow is healthy and consistent.
While many aspects of small business management can benefit from better project management tools, your marketing staff will definitely get a boost from tools that make their job easier.
In fact, many of our recommended tools can encourage better internal communication amongst staff and between separate departments to aid in developing targeted campaigns and stay on top of metrics and goals with greater accuracy.
Some of the largest start-ups in the world, like Dribble, Uber, CNET, and Kickstarter rely on these technical helpers to keep their staff on target, so using them puts you in good company.
In researching our list, we made sure our picks were heavy on features that are important to small businesses, such as:
- Functionality and ease of use
- Free or sensible pricing options
- Ability to integrate with other systems
- Ability to be accessed remotely
Without further ado, let’s start our tour with one of the most recognizable names on the list: Evernote.
1. Evernote
Image: Evernote
Evernote is a fantastic app that functions as a clearinghouse for ideas, documents, and workflows.
Not only can you grab and save ideas from online sites in clearly organized folders to prompt creativity and idea generation, but you can also design and store templates within the app to further streamline your process.
Best of all, their premium subscription offers team storage, where any member that has access can save and retrieve all aspects of a particular project.
Anything new that’s added to your team’s space is automatically shown front and center, in what they describe as a “virtual bulletin-board for your team.”
Image: Evernote
And companies like Swiss conglomerate Migros know the value of this simple, but incredibly useful, tool. As the largest supermarket and retailer in Switzerland, Migros needed a team to keep their marketing on trend with the food and restaurant industry.
Using Evernote’s apps that spanned web, desktop, and smartphone, the team was able to easily manage and coordinate interviews and data from German, French, and Italian-speaking sources.
Each team member could keep their own photos, sketches, audio recordings, and diagrams shareable with other members for fast access and accurate real-time data, making it easy for Migros’ marketing to stay fresh.
2. Basecamp
Image: Basecamp
Basecamp works hard to bring everything small businesses need into one neatly-designed package with tons of useful features.
Image: Basecamp
You can store and retrieve documents with a simple drag-and-drop, manage schedules, conduct real-time group chats, and even invite clients to be a part of the process without dealing with learning-curve aggravation.
Plus, with features like check-in that allow you to ask your team members basic questions at a specific time each week, you can pare down meeting times.
Image: Basecamp
Some businesses that use Basecamp to keep their teams in-the-know include Groupon and Harvest, but the software boasts thousands of devotees.
3. Trello
Image: Trello
Trello is a wonderful tool for marketing teams, as its visually-oriented “card” system lets team members track each part of a project as it flows through to completion.
Boards can be set up with trigger events in any way you need them. Here’s an example of this in action:
Image: Trello
You can see how easy it is for teams to set up individual project flows and for managers to get a quick overview of project statuses from any department.
Cards are moved using drag-and-drop, making keeping things up-to-date supremely easy, while multi-tiered pricing means you don’t pay for what you don’t need.
Best of all, Trello integrates seamlessly with Evernote, Slack, Jira, Google Drive, and other software. Companies that use Trello include National Geographic, Adobe, the British Red Cross, and others.
4. Slack
Image: Slack
Slack has wonderful workflow possibilities for every business, but marketers will love its user-friendly integrations.
Email marketing, in particular, gets a boost from the Slack workspace, as Slack seamlessly allows you to manage email campaigns directly from your Slack command center using minimal keyboard commands.
With integrations for most common marketing apps and tools, Slack can give marketing professionals real control and sharing options with their team, including performance metrics.
Besides fostering collaboration, Slack offers savvy marketing teams a great way to keep on top of changes in direction.
Conversations are automatically archived and indexed, so information is available when you need to reference it. Having a cohesive space for team collaboration and cooperation is a wonderful way to nip problems in the bud or share successes!
Image: Slack
Slack’s clean, easily-integrated format makes it a winner among the best project management tools for small business.
Companies that use Slack include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, Zapier, Emma, Benefit Cosmetics, Autodesk, and more.
5. Flow
Image: Flow
Flow is project management software that offers a simple, beautiful user experience (UX), and powerful tracking and integration.
Kanban boards allow managers to track entire projects, team tasks, manage resources, collaborate with teams, and integrate with other purpose-driven software, like Slack.
Marketing teams will love the way Flow allows them to share project milestones for feedback, as in the example above. In this way, an entire campaign can be vetted, edited, and even changed on-the-fly for faster production.
Here’s an example of a marketing team’s roadmap for several goals as seen through the Flow workflow model:
Image: Flow
Companies that rely on Flow to help them stay on track include Shopify, Bumble, and TED.
6. Asana
Image: Asana
Asana gives project managers several ways to visualize their workflow, from Kanban-style boards to other bright visuals that keep marketers and other teams on track.
Image: Asana
The example, above, shows the status of several projects at-a-glance, showing which are on target, how close to completion each is, and assigning each a priority level.
Having these metrics at your fingertips allows for quick re-assignment when necessary to avoid missed deadlines.
Asana’s pricing is flexible, but at a minimum of $9.99 per user per month, it might be a bit steep for smaller businesses.
They do offer a free trial, however, so you can explore the product for 30 days to see if it’s worth the splurge for your business.
Asana is used by the New York Times, Deloitte, Red Bull, the United Way, among others.
Wrap up
Now that you’ve gotten a taste for what these elegant tools can do for your small business, all that remains is to choose the one that is the best fit for your staff and your business goals.
If you’re on a tight budget, check out the tools that have a free option like Slack, Evernote, and Trello. If you decide they’re on target for your needs, you can always upgrade on down the line if you need more features or if your business expands.
Most of our other recommendations have a free trial period that you can use to determine if the tool will provide all the functionality you require. Remember, you’ll be saving money by using a project management tool that helps organize tasks and streamline processes.
Any way you look at it, these project management powerhouses represent some of the best project management tools for small business on the market today.
Why not take a risk-free trial, capture some of that power, and take your small business to the next level of success?
About the Author
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Paper Doll has some familiarity with all but one of these platforms. For example, I use Trello‘s simple card-and-board approach to plan my blog research and marketing, but also to follow up with prospective professional organizing clients. I also have me-only boards like “Be a Grownup” which reminds me to take care of personal and home-related tasks, as well as collaborative boards I share with clients, volunteer committee members, and friends. (Hey, baby showers don’t plan themselves!) I like that Trello has some great video tutorials as well as a cheat-sheet tutorial board.
Of the six tools Grace mentioned, the one I’m most familiar with is Evernote, and I’ve written about Evernote many times on these pages. As an Evernote Certified Consultant, I often find myself evangelizing for all the ways Evernote can be used for capturing and maintaining information, as well as for collaboration (though much more so at the premium and business levels vs. the free level). Features and pricing change over time (as with all software-as-a-service options), but it’s definitely a standard-bearer.
Although I’ve tried both Basecamp and Asana when I’ve been brought on-board to collaborate on other team’s special projects, I lack the familiarity you get from working day-in and day-out with a software tool. And while I am familiar with Slack as a concept, I have never used it. Flow is completely new to me, but I see it has a very Trello-like visual appeal.
Readers, do you use any of these project management tools, either in business or for your own projects? Do you have other tools you love? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
Disclaimer: The above post includes some affiliate links for which I may get some small payment if readers make a purchase via a link I’ve provided; this will have no impact on your costs but will help support the ongoing research and development of this blog.
Paper Doll Post:
Organize Story Time for 21st-Century Families
There’s something special about parents or grandparents reading stories aloud, a tiny human nestled warmly in the lap of a loving grownup as they turn the pages together and delight in a new story. Sometimes, the tales are as soft as the voice of the lady who says hush in Goodnight, Moon. Other times, the laughter is as infectious as this viral sensation of the Scottish grandmother reading The Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith. (Seriously, I dare you to not laugh along.)
Reading to and with children is essential for their emotional and cognitive well-being. The bevy of benefits range from imparting a love of learning to developing children’s imaginations to building language skills and empathy, and so much more:
- Reading With Your Child
- The Importance of Reading Aloud
- 10 Benefits That Highlight the Importance of Reading for Young Children
- Why Reading Aloud To Kids Helps Them Thrive
- The Benefits of Reading Aloud To Your Kids
- 10 Reasons To Read With Children
There’s even a podcast devoted to the concept, aptly entitled the Read-Aloud Revival Podcast!
Children love stories, and there’s a comfort in hearing the same stories over and over. Parents bemoan having to read Green Eggs and Ham until their minds are numb, but in a world where so much is beyond their knowledge and understanding, children delight in being able to anticipate what is coming and having their expectations met. Adults may be bored by reruns, but children are soothed by tales twice told.
We’ve talked before about how to reduce book clutter without hampering our love of reading. (It’s hard to believe that Paper Doll‘s 6-part Reducing Book Clutter series, including a post on how to reduce children’s book clutter, was all the way back in 2010. Sadly, many of those children’s book rental options have vanished in our increasingly digital world, so watch for new posts in the coming year on ways to inspire reading without building a library addition onto your house.) However, we’ve never looked at the issue of organizing for reading when the grownup and the tiny human are not in the same place.
In the days before the internet, if tiny humans and their big people were separated at story time, a telephone had to suffice, but it never felt the same. If you’ve ever watched a toddler try to maintain a telephone conversation for more than a few minutes, you understand why.
When parents travel for work or are deployed in the military, when moms or dads no longer live in the same homes as their kids, when grandparents are far away or beloved babysitters go off to college, it's harder to connect over a… Share on XWhen parents travel for work or are deployed in the military, when moms or dads no longer live in the same homes as their kids, when grandparents are far away or beloved babysitters go off to college, it’s harder to connect over a good story.
With the advent of Facetime, Skype, and Facebook video chat, there came all manner of ways to read a story in front of the computer or iPhone camera and show the pages to the little one on the other end. Of course, tinier tots are still less likely to stay engaged, and if you’re not practiced at imitating kindergarten teachers, it’s hard to hold a book so that your mini-audience can see both you and the book clearly, and for you (or Gramps) to see the book and the tot simultaneously. Now, however, there are apps that take this process one step beyond.
READEO
Chicago-based Readeo has created “BookChatting,” which combines a Skype-like video chat with the opportunity to co-read a book. So whether a loved one is deployed in the military or just on a business trip, big people and their tiny humans can see one another’s faces and share a story on the screen. During a BookChat, the pages of the story appear on the computer or device screen. Participants can see, hear, and talk to one another through video chat windows at the bottom of the screen, and either participant in a BookChat can turn the pages of the book, creating an interactive story time experience.
Readeo has a growing library of books, mainly for toddlers and very young readers, selected by a former children’s book reviews editor for Publisher’s Weekly. Personally, I’m intrigued by Does A Camel Cook? and The Ugly Vegetables. (For all Paper Doll knows, camels cook ugly vegetables!) Readeo claims that thanks to this highly interactive experience, its users report that BookChats “last almost 10 minutes longer per session than [on] Skype” and that 9 out of 10 of their users say BookChatting is better at capturing children’s attention than using Skype due to the interactive nature of the storybook combined with video and audio.
Membership is a pricey $9.99/month (or slightly discounted $99.99/year) after a 14-day free trial, but friends and family of Readeo members can use the app as guests at no cost.
CARIBU
Caribu considers itself “Facetime meets Kindle…for kids.” The educational ecosystem provides an “engaging livestream, shared-screen experience – in a carefully designed, curated, and secure platform.”
The in-app library contains hundreds of books, in seven languages, from leading children’s publishers, as well as educational workbooks in which children and adults use together in real time to read and draw. Child profiles in the system allow books to be personalized, and a story guide pointer works in real time to help children follow along in the book. Not only can children (and grownups) read, but they can draw “on” the books (via the screen) in real time as well.
Available for iOS and Android in 148 countries, Caribu offers video calling, but also provides an audio-only fallback for times when a user is in a low-bandwidth location. The app itself is free, but an all-access purchase is $6.99/month. Up to six family members are able to use the app with iOS family sharing enabled. (It’s not clear how many users can be registered for the Android version.
Gift subscriptions are available for 3-, 6-, and 12-month periods (and are currently available at discounted holiday rates. Caribu provides free subscriptions to active duty military personnel.
ROOTZ
For our European readers, there’s Rootz, which combines multiple functions in one app. At its heart, the Dutch-run Rootz is an interactive app designed to connect family and friends so that they can read children’s books “together” while located in different places. There are currently over 100 books in the Rootz app, and the in-app bookstore includes books in English as well as Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian, geared for children from infants to age 12.
Rootz also offers the ability to play educational games – there are currently about 50 available – or share photos during a video conferencing session, and there’s a calendaring function to schedule the sessions (for those busy, overscheduled grandchildren).
Right now, each linked family/group can include up to nine people, whom you can invite via email directly from inside the app. Currently, the video calling sessions can include up to three people, but Rootz anticipates upgrading to allow up to six users concurrently.
The iOS-only app comes with a limited number of built-in books and games, with in-app purchases possible. (There’s a child-lock to ensure that little ones don’t go wild book-and-game spending sprees.) It’s not available for download in the US, and is only available for iPads; although the site mentions plans to make the app available on other tablets, it’s been a few years since the FAQ has been upgraded. Paper Doll advises trying out the free version to see if your child enjoys the experience before further exploring your Rootz.
Whether you read in-person or from a distance, know that reading with the children in your life will help them lead fuller lives, socially, emotionally, and intellectually. What could be more organized?
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