Paper Doll
Presto, Change-o! NAPO Expo 2013 Shape-shifting Organizing Product #1: Staples Better Binder
In science fiction, some of the scariest bad guys are the ones who can change shape or appearance with the wave of a hand. It’s been a while since the good guys embraced that skill — Samantha Stephens’ little tinka-tinka-tink could change her from suburban housewife to femme fatale with one little nose twitch. (Man, I wish I could do that!) However, at the 2013 National Association of Professional Organizers’ Conference and Expo (about which I wrote last week), a few new organizing-related products used their shapeshifting superpowers for good and not evil.
Bound For Glory
Ringed binders hold a great deal of appeal in the world of organizing and productivity. Unlike hanging and manila tabbed file folders, binders are sturdy and stand upright of their own accord on desks and shelves. Binders are perfect for categorizing by chronological periods, as we see with brokerage and other financial statements, and are ideal for keeping large chunks of related information (such as one might use for attending lots and lots of committee and board meetings at a NAPO conference) easily accessible. If you drop a folder, the contents may fly everywhere; with binders, you’ll merely break a toe. (Painful, but certainly more organized, from a purely paper perspective.) 😎
However, binders have some downsides. A collection of binders can take up excessive desk and shelf space. That’s fine when you’re grabbing the materials on a regular or frequent basis, but once the contents of a binder have moved from active and essential use to reference status, you don’t really want to use your prime desktop real estate for bulky binders you won’t need to touch. And, though you wouldn’t value a binder above rubies and pearls, even standard, quotidian binders can be pricey, so using them for one or two projects over the course of a binder’s lifetime, and never switching out the contents, is a waste.
Sure, once a binder’s contents go from hot to lukewarm to ice-cold, you can take the papers out of the binder, create file folders, label them and pop them away into cold storage (i.e., reference file drawers or boxes). But file folders aren’t built to handle the bulk that’s usually stored in binders, so you’ll need to label multiple file folders and divide the contents into constituent sub-categories. It’s not a big deal, but sometimes you might hope for a more convenient solution.
Another problem with most binders is that they’re poorly made. Binders are generally manufactured with two pieces of thick cardboard for covers, a narrower piece of cardboard for the spine, all enclosed in latex and plastic-coated sheaths, while the metal interior spine and circular rings (which are often clunky and imperfectly aligned) are permanently attached. If the coating frays or peels away from the stiff boards, or if the cardboard bends, the ring housing becomes useless.
Staples Better Binder
Staples has come up with something surprisingly new and charmingly improved. The Staples Better Binder is made of latex-free solid plastic for the covers and spine, attached not with easily-torn plastic, but reinforced at solid, flexible rubber joints to make it heartier.
The D-rings are strong, easily-opened with a touch of a button, and fit back together neatly, not with jagged teeth, but a male/female paired closure.
The binder offers some nice labeling options. The front cover has a clear, heavy-duty transparent pocket for large-scale labeling — select a decorative page, a phone list, even “Diary! Keep Out! This Means You!” on a full-size piece of paper, and just slide it in. Instead of applying a label to the outside spine, the plastic spine has a clear label window into which you can insert a replaceable tab on the interior, allowing you to update the binder title and keep it protected, without dealing with peeling labels or sticky adhesives.
Through hundreds or thousands of openings and closings — to review homework assignments on the Industrial Revolution, company meeting briefings (that make modern staffers feel like they’re indentured servants, albeit with free WiFi), or employee handbooks covering everything from open-toed-shoe policies to records retention schedules — the binders stay snappy-looking and flexible. The interior front and rear covers also have curved, easily-accessed, clear plastic pockets, allowing you to keep track of handouts even when you don’t have a three-hole punch at the ready.
Yes, these advances make this a better binder, per se, but what makes the Staples Better Binder truly a BETTER BINDER, worthy of capital letters, is the shape-shifting capabilities. The metal spine and D-rings of the Staples Better Binder are removable! These Removable FileRings are held firm with a tongue-and-groove alignment, so a simple sliding mechanism keeps them in place or releases them, at your pleasure.
Simply grasp and pull the rubber ends of the ring housing to release the metal from the interior plastic spine of the binder.
Lift it up and away from the binder, flip it over, and the ring housing serves similar duties as a file folder, keeping all of the material together, while the rubber ends work like metal arms of a hanging folder. You can even label the back of the ring housing so you can read the contents from above and access the contents you want as easily, if not more so, than you might have from a series of file folders. Nifty, eh?
But what of the binders? Now what good are they, without rings? Additional FileRings are sold separately, so you can actually reuse the reinforced binder shells over and over, moving the rings to your filing cabinet to store whatever documents must be saved — without muss, fuss or waste. (Of course, you Paper Doll readers know to evaluate whether you actually need to maintain papers and don’t file things willy nilly, right?)
For the official word on how the Staples Better Binder fits into your paperwork organizing protocols, check out the official video:
My fabulous colleague Deb Lee also made a video with Staples rep Margaret right in the noisy NAPO 2013 Expo hall, illustrating exactly how the removable FileRings work. (Deb makes great organizing videos, so be sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel.)
The reusable reinforced binder shells, suitable for 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper, come in multiple sizes (1″, 1 1/2″, 2″ and 3″), accommodating paper capacities ranging from 275 to 600 sheets, and in 14 colors (black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, olive, blue, teal, dark teal, pink, fuchsia, plum and purple).
Prices range from $8.49 to $14.49, and the Staples Better Binders are, not surprisingly, available only at Staples. As they are a little pricier than standard binders, I’d advise saving these for when you’re schlepping your binders from home to work (or school) to committee meetings. You’ll want to use these when you’re mobile and your binders are more in danger of getting bumped around; use the traditional binders when they’re just sitting on your shelves, getting treated more tenderly.
All Staples Better Binders are guaranteed. For life.
[Note: The Better Binder Mini has the same exterior attributes — latex-free plastic covers with rubberized reinforced spine and edges — but no removable rings. The 1″ capacity Mini is designed for 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ paper.]
If you think you’d like to give the Staples Better Binder a try, now is the perfect time. Staples is offering a 50% off coupon at the web site. (Just scroll down to the second row and print for your in-store coupon.) Act soon, as the discount is only good through this Saturday, May 11, 2013.
The Staples Better Binder wasn’t the only organizing-related super shapeshifter at the NAPO Expo. Watch this space for other reviews of neato organizing products and services.
[Disclaimer: A Staples Better Binder was included in every NAPO 2013 attendee’s conference bag, including Paper Doll‘s, without any inducement to comment. All opinions are my own. Who else would claim them?]
NAPO 2013: Loud, Proud and Ridiculously Organized
A little over a week ago, I left Paper Doll HQ bound for New Orleans, Louisiana, land of bayous and beignets, for my annual pilgrimage to the National Association of Professional Organizers Annual Conference and Expo. It’s like a university semester crossed with a high school reunion, with a liberal dash of food tours and luggage envy. More than 630 attendees, hailing from nine nations, helped make this event a thrill yet another year. (This was my twelfth consecutive NAPO conference. I can’t wait until next year to make it a baker’s dozen!)
In coming posts, I’ll be sharing the intriguing products and services I spotted at the expo, but for now, know that your trusty reporter worked so hard (ahem) and spoke so much (no surprise!) that she completely lost her voice. By the time Saturday dawned, six full days after I arrived in NOLA, I was communicating with raised eyebrows, flapping jazz hands, and squeaks that must have confused the native Gulf Coast fauna.
To that point, a big shout-out goes to colleague Liz Jenkins, CPO® of A Fresh Space in Franklin, TN, who played virtual assistant and returned telephone calls to prospects on my behalf when I was unable to squeakingly do so.
Liz is president of the NAPO-Nashville chapter as well as chair of our 2016 conference in Los Angeles. Yes, we organizers plan far in advance. See Liz here, pictured with Help A Reporter Out founder Peter Shankman, who spoke with the Golden Circle veteran NAPO organizers early the final day of conference about How The New PR is Spelled “Customer Service.”
Peter then closed out our conference with his stirring keynote on Reinventing the Art of Networking, focusing in part on how (in my words, not his) being a mensch is good for business. Peter’s hefty new book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over — And Collaboration Is In, was likely responsible for more than a few “excess weight” luggage fees! (OK, it would have been, except professional organizers are clever and probably just wore extra layers of clothing while flying in order to make room in their suitcases.)
Of course, there were other big names in attendance at our New Orleans festival of productivity.
Our opening keynote speaker, hoarding specialist and psychologist Dr. David Tolin, presented Unmask the Potential in Your Clients: Helping Mainstream Clients Get Unstuck – Lessons Learned from Clinical Psychology. The loud (but tidy) throng of organizers settled down just enough to hear the practical essentials that dovetail with encouraging motivation, including developing a sense of client autonomy, challenging thinking errors, and problem-solving training. Later in the conference, Dr. Kelly McGonigal presented The Willpower Instinct, based on her book of the same name, with cutting-edge research and practical applications for promoting the development and nurturance of willpower.
The brilliance didn’t stop there. The always-entertaining Dr. Ari Tuckman taught two breakout sessions of incredible material for professional organizers to use with their clients and their own occasionally overwrought selves. One, Motivation to Climb the Mountains, had attendees buzzing, and I’m already putting the lessons from How To Remember to Remember into practice…even in the writing of this post!
And be assured that the multi-year love-fest between NAPO members and Maine’s own Rich Brooks of Flyte Media (seen here with your swooning reporter) continued apace:
Rich presented sessions on Mobile Marketing for Professional Organizers and Turning Likes Into Paying Clients.
Of course, fellow NAPO fellow members taught compelling pre-conference and conference sessions that had tweeters and Facebookers thumb-wrestling themselves to share the genius. To even make it to the conference, Monica Ricci‘s partner-in-crime for Speak Up!: Crafting and Delivering Killer Presentations, Lisa Montanaro, had to battle planes, pains and automobiles, showing her commitment to the subject, and to us.
Other sessions ranged from the purely practical, like Tackling an Estate Clearance and Organizing: Eyes Towards Re-Design, to the technological, like Technology Solutions for Happier Clients, Digital Filing Systems: Smart Organizing, and Google: Tools to Organize.
Yours truly even got to share the stage with the outgoing and incoming Board of Certification for Professional Organizers presidents, Audrey Lavine and Helene Segura, respectively, for our presentation on BCPO Certification: You’ve Got Questions? We’ve Got Answers!
It’s a little fuzzy, but at this juncture, we were either exploring the finer points of Continuing Education Units Arithmetic 101 or debating whether payment in chickens counts as remuneration. (We were slated at 7:45 in the morning. Can you imagine the entertainment factor if we’d been in Prime Time?)
For a complete sense of all the things that kept your favorite professional organizers busy, from Maximizing Productivity for Business Clients to Understanding a Student’s Organizing Style, just take a gander at the chock-a-block program schedule.
Yes, we were busy learning, but be assured we were playing, too. Look at the fun my NAPO-Georgia chapter had, just trying to organize a lunchtime photo shoot when the official photographer didn’t show up!
In case you want to see us looking a little classier, the official photo, and all of my other shots of conference and the expo hall can be seen here:
NAPO 2013: Pre-Conference Photos (taken during joint NAPO and Board of Certification for Professional Organizers board events)
For more perspectives on NAPO 2013, I refer you to the brilliant Deb Lee of SoHo Tech Training, who created a page for Live Virtual Coverage of the events. (Deb’s also responsible for ensuring that this post didn’t look like an addled fourth grader was set loose in WordPress Land! Thanks, Deb! It takes a village, and you’re my Mayor of Technology.) And to keep it all in the family, check out what The Clutter Princess, Janice Simon, said in her guest post on Deb’s Organize to Revitalize blog — it’s called 630 Organizers Walk Into a Hotel.
And finally, lest you think (even after looking at the above photo) that we professional organizers were dull girls (and a few boys) with all work and no play, you should know that we had plenty of fun socializing on Bourbon Street and dining (and sometimes, dancing) into the wee hours. For example, here (with my conference roomie, financial organizer Nanette Duffey, PDMM, and UK-bound, Professional Organizers of Canada immediate past-president Jackie Hollywood Brown), we prepared for a lovely dinner at Muriel’s off Jackson Square:
before attending to the reason for the whole evening:
delicious beignets at New Orleans’ famed Café du Monde. A good time was had by all.
Next time, we’ll begin exploring all the fascinating and fun organizing tools and services presented at the NAPO expo. (And yes, there were some absolutely fabulous paper-related productivity solutions that I already covet.) I can hardly wait!
Going Back to the Beginning: “Maintenance, or How Eyeliner Is Like the Phone Bill”
[In October, 2007, I embarked on the original Paper Doll blog with a post setting out what I planned to do. It seemed sensible to go back to the beginning to get a sense of where we’ve been, and where the blog will be heading. Ms. Ephron may be gone, but she’s definitely not forgotten.]
I’m reading I Feel Bad About My Neck by the brilliant Nora Ephron, famed wit and screenwriter of my favorite movie, When Harry Met Sally. Ephron writes:
Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won’t have to hide behind a stack of canned food. I don’t mean to be too literal about this. There are a couple of old boyfriends whom I always worry about bumping into, but there’s no chance–if I ever did–that I would recognize either of them…But the point is that I still think about them every time I’m tempted to leave the house without eyeliner.
Organizing your papers is basic life maintenance — very much like the kind of beauty maintenance Ephron is talking about, and every bit as important as looking FABULOUS to the former romantic partner who once foolishly cast you aside. Think of maintaining your papers on a regular basis as an insurance policy against losing money, time, productivity, serenity and self-esteem. Ephron imagines the ensuing result of skipping maintenance; to her, going out sans eyeliner is the 21st century variation on your mother’s warning to wear clean underwear in case you are in an accident.
So paper maintenance is an insurance policy, only instead of spending money betting against yourself in hopes you’ll never have to collect, you invest your time and effort in creating a workable system for handling incoming papers, archiving reference items, acting on the urgent or important tasks the papers represent and purging whatever is unnecessary. It sounds like a lot of work, but once your system is in place, paper maintenance is easier than applying eyeliner.
A big part of paper maintenance is knowing what papers you have and giving them permanent homes. First, there are your essential legal, medical and financial VIPs (Very Important Papers) like birth certificates, car titles or immunization records. Failing to keep these in a safe place from which they can be quickly and easily accessed will detract from your security and life satisfaction in much the same way running into an old beau while dressed in too-tight, tomato-sauce-spotted sweats can shrink your self-esteem to the size of a dust particle.
Perhaps you imagine that if you ever lose your passport in the sedimentary rock-like layers of your desk, it’s no big deal, because you can always get a new one. However, due to new regulations requiring that American citizens have passports even to visit Canada, the Department of State has been overwhelmed. It used to take weeks to get a new passport or renew one; now, it’s taking two and a half months or more. And lest you think you won’t mind paying the cost to expedite delivery, it’s no longer a small fee. To get your passport expedited (that is, to get it in the amount of time it used to take without a rush job) will cost you $60, plus the cost of expedited delivery service to send it to the passport office and then to receive your passport once it’s processed. This is on top of the $97 in fees you’re already paying to get the passport. Do you want to spend weeks worried that your family vacation or vital business trip is in jeopardy just because you’ve let your papers think they’re allowed to play Hide and Seek?
A worst-case scenario for failing to effectively maintain the papers in your life is identity theft. Even with all the hubbub over Internet (in)security, the most popular source of stolen personal information is still dumpster-diving. If you throw out the wrong documents and compound it by failing to shred sensitive data, or even if you just carry your Social Security card in your wallet instead of filing it safely away, you open yourself to being one of the 9.3 million Americans victimized by identity theft each year.
In most cases, thieves just use your credit card number, so keeping organized financial records and quickly alerting the credit card company means minimal financial loss. Maintaining your paper records keeps you solvent and lets you resolve the problem quickly, inexpensively and relatively painlessly. But in the more extreme cases, identity thieves can create an alternative version of you from purloined information and can ruin your credit rating, keep you from getting credit, insurance and jobs, and can even lead to your arrest if someone commits a felony using your forged identity. That certainly puts being seen by an ex while wearing your laundry-day outfit in perspective!
Papers document our lives and give us access to everything we want and deserve. Easily accessed proof of auto registration and insurance may be the difference between that traffic cop being a darling or a devil. Carefully maintained financial records keep the taxman at bay. Quickly-found immunization records mean children can attend school; conversely, lost permission slips don’t just mean your kids miss out on a trip to see how maple sugar gets made – they’ll miss out on the in-jokes that will be a part of in-group history. Not to place a guilt trip, but your paper maintenance skills will impact your children’s permanent record.
There are papers you want and need (legal, financial, medical); papers you want, but don’t need (old letters, school transcripts that prove you once knew why a participle shouldn’t dangle); papers you need but don’t want (bills that need to be paid, reminders for an upcoming dental appointment); and papers you don’t need and don’t want, but haven’t yet tossed (expired coupons, twenty-year-old notes on mitosis or Descartes).
Maintaining the papers of your life may not be fun, and unless you’re a certain breed of professional organizer, it may not be entertaining. But it is essential. That’s why, over the coming blog posts, Paper Doll will be sharing tips to make it easy to keep the unwanted paper away and easier to determine where and how to maintain the rest of the documentary evidence of your time on the planet.
I don’t guarantee I’ll be as witty as Nora Ephron. But like Ephron’s eyeliner, your mother’s clean underwear and your auto insurance policy, paper maintenance means your life will run more smoothly, and whatever catastrophes you encounter will be less catastrophic. And, if I might steal a line from Ephron’s movie, no identity thief will be able to say “I’ll have what she’s having.”
Paper Doll Returns…
After a three month absence, I’m happy to report that the Paper Doll blog is rising from the ashes. I’ll pause while North America unites in an organized cheer!
As many of you have noted in your emails and social media comments, the disappearance was, indeed, abrupt. The company website OnlineOrganizing.com for which I blogged from 2007 through the first week of 2013 unexpectedly went…byebye. Vendors, bloggers and customers were brought up short by the surprise and were given no opportunity to achieve closure or access our data. Your faithful Paper Doll waited impatiently in expectation of a quick and painless resolution. Since the next scheduled post would have appeared on January 8, 2013, I think we can agree resolution was not quick. However, thanks to a brilliant web designer, I have hopes that ramping up the blog in a new way, as well as upgrading the Best Results Organizing web site, will be (mostly) painless.
The platform on which Paper Doll used to live didn’t exactly play nicely with traditional blog platforms. On the plus side, those 5+ years of posts are completely backed up and you’ll get to see them again eventually. On the downside, my backups, though pristinely organized (but, of course!) aren’t easily integrated into the new blog. What does this mean for you readers? At least for a while, fewer background references to classic posts…and a gaping hole in the time-space continuum.
That said, having the Paper Doll blog live right here on my web site is full of advantages. No more forced blogging schedules; before, posts had to go live by Tuesday mornings at 10:30, and it was almost impossible to deliver a post on the spur of the moment. It feels pretty disorganized when you can’t be nimble and responsive! So, instead of one ridiculously long post once a week, you’ll see more digestible posts, and more often.
More importantly, the new format offers freedom to blog about a wider array of organizing subjects. Paper management is still my first love, but without any constraints or edits from The Man (who was, at various times, different women), I’ll be able to share organizing advice on everything from filing systems to time management apps, organized travel to project management, children’s organizing to helping seniors. Excitingly, we’ll finally be in the 21st century, so there will be keyword tags enabling you to search for more information on your favorite topics.
Of course, all of your favorite Paper Doll guest stars, including Paper Mommy and George Clooney, who will likely be appearing with ridiculous frequency.
Best of all, this launch of Paper Doll 2.0 comes just in time for next week’s foray to New Orleans for the National Association of Professional Organizers’ Conference and Expo.
I’m thrilled to be back and talking to you about organizing again. Please pardon the dust as we work to make this a fabulous experience for you.
Paper Doll Looks At the Big Picture: Wall Calendars, Planners and Reminders
As the days spin down, it’s time to be thinking about how to plan all of your events and activities for 2013. In the past, we’ve talked a lot about finding the right planner to keep your days in order. Just a year ago, in Paper Doll Marks the Calendar for a Successful 2012, I shared my tips for selecting the consummate planner system, whether paper or digital, for your needs.
A daily planner is essential for marking your appointments, tracking your tasks, and being able to make decisions as you move through your life as a mobile juggernaut! But you also need a command center that stays put — something to which everyone in the house or office can refer to avoid conflicts and misunderstandings.
If it’s just your life and there are no tiny humans in the house or fellow staffers in the office, and if you’re entirely content to flip through your planner every time you want to gauge momentum on a project, that’s great. But if you’ve got to blend information about multiple people’s obligations or need to track multiple deadlines and goals in a Big Picture way, you’ll want something highly visible and maybe a little in-your-face. Today’s post presents solutions can do that.
NeuYear‘s Seize the Year 2013 has a novel way of showing you the entire year at a glance. This product, begun on the crowdsource-invention leader, Kickstarter, recognizes that there’s a mental roadblock put up when full year calendars only show you separate months, usually in three rows of four columns each. The problem? When we plan our lives, we tend to think in weeks, not months, so seeing three days of a week on one month’s block and four on another tends to fiddle with our brains.
We see this in monthly planner calendar pages, too, of course. That’s why, when you flip calendar pages from February to March on a Tuesday, you may be shocked to find a major deadline or important appointment happening in the first few days of the new month. Oops! With Seize the Year, you can really see the fingers-do-the-walking distance between start and end dates of projects (whether it means getting into bikini shape for that first beach day or taking your entrepreneurial venture from dream to deliverable).
So, the Seize the Year calendar mixes obviously essential features with some nifty new ones. Yes, the calendar spans a full twelve months from January to December, and it’s laminated so you can use dry-erase markers, or sticky notes if that’s your preference. (And uncoated version is available for those who prefer permanence in their scheduling lives.)
However, the boxes are larger than you see on most full-year calendars, giving you more space to write important information so you can see it from across the office. The full 27″ x 39″ poster-size calendar has a vertical orientation on one side and is horizontally arrayed on the other, to fit your door or wall space, as it works for you. In terms of the finer details, each week is displayed with weekdays grouped together and weekends separately, to give you more clarity about what you’re doing and when. And, as NeuYear points out, dotted vertical lines reduce what they call “chart junk” so you can emphasize your deadlines.
It’s $30 at the NeuYear site, but you can choose to Tweet about it (just once) to get a code for 20% off.
If you don’t want something quite so big, but you’d still like to keep your master calendar in front of you, Mead’s Organizer line has some lovely enhancements for home or office. For instance, the Write ‘N Wipe Monthly calendar, which comes in grey or pink, adds some classy snazziness to your time management plan.
This dry-erase calendar has ample space for each day, with an informational column at the left to help you plan your own life, your kids’ activities and even your meals. For those who prefer to focus on one week at a time, there’s a Write ‘N Wipe Weekly version, too — same colors, same boxes, but it limits excess visual stimuli so you can focus on what you need to know.
Get two…one for “this week” and one for “next week” and rotate them on the fridge as necessary.
The Organizher line also includes a Magnetic Monthly Deskpad. Be sure to check out the whole line, which includes storage pockets, a fridge “filer” and a responsibility chart that’s an offshoot of Mead’s sister company’s nifty, self-adhesive, re-positionable At-A-Glance WallMates line, about which I wrote earlier this year.
Organizher products are available exclusively at Target, generally for under $10.
Of course, there are many wonderful options for Big Picture thinking in the calendar realm, including the PlanetSafe Dry Erase Planners I profiled when I recapped the 2010 NAPO Conference and Expo. For those who like a more free-form calendaring system and the easy of being able to move colorful “sticky” task assignments at will, the 7-Column Sticky-Note Task Planner may be ideal.
This eco-friendly planner works with dry- or wet-erase markers, is designed to work equally well with colorful sticky notes (which won’t fall off), and comes in two versions, 19″ wide by 24″ tall, or 24″ wide by 19″ tall, depending on how you roll, for $21.95.
And if you want to combine your task planning with a more traditional calendaring system, PlanetSafe has you covered with the Sticky-Note 30-day 7/5 Column option.
There’s a standard calendar, a place for extra notes, a section for priorities by each day of the week, and a five-section row for each of your special projects…all for $21.95.
And, if part of your plan for the coming year is to be kind to the environment, you’ll be comforted by the fact that PlanetSafe products use no petroleum based products. The entire line is made from 100% (post-consumer waste) recycled paper, organic vegetable inks and a 100% biodegradable plant-based film laminate.
Finally, although it’s not a calendar, per se, Dreamfarm’s Membo is the keenest up-on-the-wall reminder system I’ve seen in a while. Even if you know what you have to do, sometimes you’re not sure — did you do it? You can tell if the dishwasher has been run by inspecting the dishes within, but you can’t tell if someone in your house has fed the kitty by the same method. Did you take your pill? Did someone take the puppy out for a walk? How will you be certain?
Membo is a slightly off-the-wall, on-the-wall solution for knowing whether a repetitive task has been completed. Just watch the video:
The Membo board holds tiles — on the front of each tile, you see the task to be performed. On the back, a check mark or a filled-in version of the task signifies completion. When you complete the task, simply flip the tile and everyone (including you) will be certain it was done as planned.
The Membo comes in nine yummy colors: Bubblegum, Canary Yellow, Charcoal, Dreamfarm Blue, Fire Truck, Granny Smith, Ivory, Lavender and Pumpkin:
and in four main styles: Dog, Cat, Fish and day-of-the-week “Tick” (by which they mean tick marks or check marks, not the Lyme Disease carriers)!
Purchase Membo from the Dreamfarm website for about $20, or search Dreamfarm’s Find A Store page for a location near you. Dreamfarm’s sales venues are eclectic. Here in Chattanooga, home to Paper Doll HQ, my options were the Hunter Museum gift shop or Mia Cuccina, a cookware emporium.
Finally, as the last days of the year tick down, and you start to plan your goals, your appointments and your tasks, you might want to check out Janet Barclay’s December 2012 Professional Organizing Carnival on “Reflection and Planning” at Janet Barclay’s Organized Assistant blog. (And yes, ahem, there’s a piece from Paper Doll included among the contributions.)
I hope you’ll share your favorite wall calendar and planning solutions, and I hope you’re having a lovely time counting down to the end of the year. (Or, y’know, the end of the world, if you’re Mayan.)
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