Best Results Organizing

You can peg the children of Sesame Street and The Electric Company by their responses when you say something like “phenomena” (MahnahMahna…do doot de doo doo) or “You got soup?” (That’s Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman’s Menu Song!)  Similarly, people of a certain age, like Paper Doll, get a particular thought when they hear the Z and M sound, such as when the wide-eyed, vaguely European boy in the Mazda commercials intones “Zoom Zoom”.  In fact, we get an uncontrollable urge to shout “Boston, Mass oh-two-one-three-four.  Send it to Zoom!”

There’s some new zzmm buzz on the web these days, with a green twist that should appeal.  Have you heard about Zumbox?

Right now, the site only serves the U.S., but has an intriguing business model to save the trees and eliminate the piles of bills, letters, investment prospectuses and junk mail letters that show up in our home or office mailboxes. 

It’s not that you’ll get less mail, per se, but if the idea catches on, you’ll get less paper mail, and you’ll be able to control who can send you mail (Yes! to the shy but environmentally-conscious new neighbor who doesn’t know your email address; No! to the marketers trying to scam you about foreclosure protection).  

Your street address is a matter of public record; even if you’ve opted out of receiving catalogs and other mail, paper mail keeps coming your way.  But if green is your favorite color, here’s an option to limit the paper you do receive from people who have your physical address, without having to share your email address with anyone who don’t already trust to not send you the latest hoax or chain letter.

Zumbox posits itself as an alternative postal system, and they’ve created a virtual mailbox platform to match up with (they claim) every mailing address in the United States…including mine, yours and, one assumes, George Clooney’s.  The point is that any business or person can send an electronic message to any who has a physical address, and the person who resides or works at that address can receive the message without a single tree cut down or paper cut received.  You need not give out your email address, but you can still access the message electronically instead of having a mailbox full of paper.

The idea is that businesses, the folks that send the bulk (no pun intended) of the paper mail, will eventually need to switch over to a digital platform, but given that most internal records and mail systems are based on geography, it makes sense to have a digital platform that depends on getting mail to someone at a geographically-specific address.

It took Paper Doll some time to get a handle on exactly what Zumbox could realistically offer, so I walked myself through the steps on your behalf:

1) Go to Zumbox.com and register.
2) Provide your name and mailing address.
3) Agree to the boilerplate terms of service and privacy policy.
4) Confirm that it’s really your address.

It takes about 10 seconds unless you’re a really slow typist.  You’ll immediately see one new Zumbox welcome “mail” in your account (similar to a web mail account).

You’ll also be notified that you’ll be getting an actual U.S. letter within a matter of days, at your home/office address, with your PIN number.  This is the only time they’ll send paper mail, and one assumes it’s to make certain you haven’t pretended to be your neighbor to purloin an account.  I registered on a Sunday, the envelope was postmarked Monday and I received it (three time zones away) on Thursday.

5) Return to Zumbox to type in your PIN (this one time only) and complete your account registration (with just a few additional pieces of info and a repeat confirmation that the address in question really is yours).  From then on, you’ll log in with your selected username and password.

From there, you have multiple options:

• View mail you’ve received–It’s a nifty visual wherein you see what appears to be the “outside” of an envelope or the “front” of a post card. It seems it’s been designed to have the feel that you’ve just come from your mailbox and have spread the mail out on the counter to see what’s worth opening first. One imagines that as time goes on, there will be an option for a more typical, less graphical, inbox setup.

(Note:  My attempt to quickly learn iPhoto to blur my address is imperfect…It’ll actually be crystal clear when you’re looking at your own account online.) Click to view and any envelope/card icon “opens”, letting you view what the actual mailing would look like if you’d received it on paper.

• View and read national, regional or local newspapers to which you’ve subscribed.  (Of course, this is dependent upon publications making their materials available digitally, but that’s already happening more and more often.)
• View mail you’ve sent–In this section, mail is organized exactly as it would be in a typical webmail inbox, indicating various elements like date, mail type (postcard, letter, other), number of views, etc. No cutesie graphics here.
• Send postcards to any street address for a Zumbox user (or someone you, and Zumbox, expect to become a user).  I sent one to myself as a test, and my inbox shows a cute picture postcard, the message for which I can see with one click.
• Send a letter to any street address for an actual or potential Zumbox user.
• Send invitations, birth announcements, church bulletins or anything else you might send in an envelope or on a postcard.  Zumbox provides a mail wizard to send marketing campaigns for your business on a geographically-targeted basis.  This means sending to any one of 150+ million U.S. street addresses you might have in your own address book or database.  If you’re running a business or non-profit, you can select a specific geographic region–pick a city, state, county, zip code, street, specific building or even a mileage radius from a specific address.

Multiple formats are supported…you can send a Microsoft Word document or a PDF, raw data from a customer relationship management system like ACT, accounting software output, graphics, video, audio, HTML and oodles of formats, discussion of which is more suited for a technical blog than one on paper-decluttering.  There’s generally no need for scanning, because most of what is sent in the mail starts out in digital form.  If you like the marketing/business applications, you can check out the tech-y page here, or better yet, contact Zumbox directly.  (Paper Doll found out about them on Twitter.)

Other options including maintaining an address book and/or blocking senders from getting their messages to you, and you can set a daily alert to remind you to check your Zumbox account. But the greenest aspect of Zumbox is that you can set your options to stop receiving paper mail altogether from any given sender.

I like the accountability.  With email, spammers can fake an email address and take a stab at guessing your email address to send you email at no cost to them. (Grrrrrr.)  With this system, marketers can’t be anonymous (because they have to use their REAL addresses from which to send Zumbox mail), plus you can stop unwanted mail from any sender.

Basically, Zumbox acts as your email address so that any/all the people and companies who send you mail at your physical address (and who don’t have–or whom you don’t want to provide–your email address) can get a message to you…without you having  to divulge your email address or further harm coming to the environment.

Receiving mail via Zumbox is free for everyone.  Sending mail may be free if you qualify for Zumbox’s free postage system for individuals and some non-profits, government agencies and businesses, but involves a nominal charge (five cents per mailing address) for others, such as greedy, evil, corporate types (kidding!). But even if your small company or organization doesn’t qualify for free sending, with the U.S. Postal Service raising rates yet again on May 11th, these charges are distinctly less than the cost of postage.

Of course, the efficacy of Zumbox depends on two huge “ifs”.  First, will senders learn about Zumbox, trust it and will decide to use the service?  The pizza parlor around the corner might eagerly do so if they find they’ll get a better response to their marketing efforts if they don’t ask customers for email addresses. 

Aside from companies whose central non-revenue tenet is already environmental concern, will banks, utility companies and marketers play ball? Yes, this format is cheaper for junk-mailers to send that stuff you don’t want in the first place, but it’s also easier (and better for the planet) for you to dispose of the message without ever clicking, let alone shredding and carrying it to the recycling…and the senders will never get access to your actual email box. 

But will companies buy into the idea?  It seems Canada Post is already on the same wavelength with ePost, currently just for electronic delivery of bills, wherein companies send electronic messages to your ePost account, rather than to your email address.  For those who change email addresses often and don’t always remember to notify corporate correspondents, this might work.  Or not.

Second, will recipients set up accounts to receive digital versions of their mail at Zumbox?  Certainly, if/when tha occurs, paper mail can be canceled and environmental joy shall abound!  But none of this, if it happens at all, is going to happen overnight.  Zumbox will have to communicate with potential users to make sure they understand that this isn’t a twist on something like Earth Class Mail, a company that charges receive your  mail, open it, scan it and email it to you.

Paper Doll is no corporate trend prognosticator.  I didn’t think people would create queues of DVDs they might want to watch, someday, and agree to pay a monthly fee for the privilege, because I considered movie viewing as a spontaneous, instant-gratification, pick-up/put-down/pick-up/carry-around experience. But that business model, technological advances, and Netflix killed the radio star (oops, I mean video store).

As I get on the road to the National Association of Professional Organizers annual conference to see what’s new and great in other organizing-related products and services, I turn to you to talk amongst yourselves about Zumbox.  Great idea?  Overly ambitious business model?  What do you think?

 

 

The third week in April is designated “Organize Your Files” Week.  Professional organizers like Paper Doll are all beside themselves with joy and celebratory glee for this paperific observance.  What about you, are you all aflutter over this holiday week?

No?  But organizing your files with lift your spirit.  And there’s ice cream at the end of this post!

I understand how overwhelming it is to face a clock ticking to zero minutes, zero seconds, and the need to find an essential piece of paper.  In fact, many of you probably experienced exactly that stress-inducing situation last week, striving to prepare your tax returns while searching your home for files or papers you knew you’d just seen days (or moments?) ago.  (Our Canadian friends, who have nine more days to file their own tax returns, maybe going through this same anxiety now. Eh?)

The pandemonium of tax week is almost assuredly why the third week of April became “Organize Your Files” week.  After all, aren’t you more likely to take better care of your health in the aftermath of an illness?  Don’t you pamper your car a bit more after you’ve had expensive repairs?  It’s human nature to give greater attention to something after a crisis.  With tax return chaos in your active memory, don’t you want to avoid that kind of pain and anguish?

So, whether your files are practically tip-top, look like a tornado hit, or are non-existent, here are some basic strategies for getting in order.

Finish your taxes.
You thought you were done, just because you filed with the government?  Filing your return just puts you in Big Brother’s good graces, but aren’t your own needs more important?  Gather up your copy of your tax return and all your supporting material, and put them in a new folder labeled “Taxes-2008”.  (If you did your taxes online using TurboTax or a similar program, burn the PDF version of your taxes to disc or copy to a flash drive and keep them in a safe place.)

Repeat with each year’s return and supporting material, and put the folders in reverse chronological order.  If you have oodles of space (and slender files), keep them in the financial section of your Family Files.  If you have 30+ years of returns, own a home-based business, or your tax files yield phonebook-thick folders, gather all but the most recent return, and store them in a banker’s box or (better yet) a fireproof safe, accessible, but not taking up your prime real estate.  If you’ll need frequent access to the old returns over the coming years (e.g., you’re carrying a loss forward over multiple years), affix tape flags as page markers to make it easier to find the information you’ll need at tax time.

Don’t tax yourself. 
Seriously, after the exhaustion you’ve forced upon yourself in getting your tax returns together, don’t penalize yourself by keeping your tax-related paperwork in a shambles.  Create a brand new tax prep folder or folders for the current year. If your financial life is simple, one “Tax Prep-2009” folder should suffice.  If complexity is the name of your financial game, have a hanging folder with interior folders for Charitable Donations (e.g., confirmation letters, canceled checks), Medical Expenses/Health Savings Account Expenses (e.g., paid bills, pharmacy receipts…but remember you can always get a tax-year summary print-out of expenses from your pharmacy), Childcare Expenses and any other category for which you or your family tends to have lots of supporting material.

(If you run your own business, on any scale, you’ll need careful records for each deduction category.  We’ll be talking about small business records in an upcoming blog series.)

If Your Files Are All Piles…
If you don’t already have a filing system and your papers are all over the place, you’re probably depending on your memory to know when and where you saw any particular document.  To keep that straight in your brain, you’re blocking off space you could be using for conjugating naughty verbs in Italian or remembering the name of that person walking towards you right now whose name you always forget (gulp) just as you need to be introducing her.  Save the brain strain…and turn the piles into files.

Remember that all of your papers belong in one of five categories:

• Financial
• Legal
• Medical
• Household
• Personal

This means creating five simple categories of files will keep you out of bankruptcy, prison, or (possibly) the hospital, and will help make your home, professional and person life easier and more enjoyable.  So, if you’ve never created a filing system, or yours is so old that your paper weights are naturally-occurring igneous rock formations, begin by reading Paper Doll‘s classic blog series on Family Files:

• Family Filing–As Easy As (Eating) Pie–This intro will help you figure out what supplies you need, and explains a bit more about your basic categories.
• Financial Filing–Scrapbooking Snapshots of Your Money’s Life–If you have a sense of what kind of financial records you should have…once you unearth them from the piles, you’ll know what to keep and where to keep them.
• Mom, Why Is There a Receipt Stuffed In The Turkey?–This post continues talking about the flimsiest, tiniest financial records and how to deal with them.
• I Fought the Law…And the Paperwork Won–Your legal paperwork keeps you out of jail, prevents someone from being able to make decisions for you (unless that’s what you want) and proves ownership of the things for which you’ve labored.  Treat your legal records with respect and you’ll win most of your legal battles without further effort.  (What, you’ve never watched Judge Judy?)
• Patient: Doctor, It Hurts When I Do This! Doctor:  Then Don’t DO That!–This is a basic overview of keeping your medical files in order.  For an advanced lesson, read my recent Vital Signs blog series on medical paperwork.
• Paper Dolls Live In Paper Households–This gives you the basics for keeping your household documents in order.  For an extended look at the user’s and owner’s manuals, visit our mini-series from the last two weeks, starting here.
• I Hope Nobody Ever Writes A Nasty Tell-All Called “Paper Doll Dearest”–It’s easy to get your personal papers, everything from reviews of tourist attractions you’d like to visit someday to your third grade report card, mixed into a wacky mess.  This article will help you delineate personal (academic and professional) history and personal interests.

If you’ve got a desk or even a room of mismatched papers, grab a stack and clear enough floor space for yourself and five piles (financial, legal, medical, household and personal).  Just sort, and trash/shred anything that’s no longer of use to you.  Once you’ve got your five stacks, it’ll be much easier to break the piles down by accounts (banks, brokerage) or categories (transcripts, rsums, certifications) and create the labeled folders you’ll need.

Once you’ve read through these posts, if you still have questions about how to organize your filing system, add a comment or send an email.  Organizing truths aren’t secrets…Paper Doll wants to share with everyone!

Halt Backsliding and Evict Squatters!
Two banes of any filer’s existence are backlogged piles that never to made it into the fabulous filing system, and squatters, files that no longer contribute any value but take up prime real estate.

Stop the backsliding by using this week to do a mini-version of the file set-up described in the last section.  If you haven’t filed since the last time you read one of my posts about filing, don’t worry–at least you have a system in place, a home for each document.  Just sort the files into one of five categories, then start playing the matching game (though instead of duckies or bunnies, you’re going to match all the cable bills or insurance renewals), category by category, until you can easily plunk each sheaf of papers in the front of the right folder.  (That’s the beauty of reverse-chronological filing.)

As for the squatters, start with the records retention schedule of your choice and your own good common sense.  Move from the front of your system to the back, and take just 10 minutes each day to shuffle through the folders and toss what’s no longer of value.  Just as you should discard the spoiled items from the fridge when you’re identifying what you need at the grocery store, the process of evicting these squatters will help keep your filing system “sanitary” and allow you the chance to review file contents.

Extra tips to make filing fun:
For those of you who (somehow) fail to find organizing as luminously fascinating as I, there are ways to make it easier:

• Treat yourself to good supplies.  I’m not saying expensive supplies, but good ones.  Three-times-recycled file folders, with wrinkled tabs and torn edges, are the paper equivalent of underwear with elastic that’s lost its zing.  You (and your files) deserve better.  You don’t have to buy fancy new supplies (though, in two weeks, I will be reporting back from the National Association of Professional Organizers’ annual conference on all that’s new and zippy in office and filing supplies), but you do need to have some standards.
• Label clearly.  My research is anecdotal, but I find that people are more likely to file often and according to their own defined rules if their files are labeled with a label maker rather than handwritten. Perhaps typeface is authoritative?
• Opt for color if you’re colorful.  If manila is too vanilla, keep your berry important papers from heading down a rocky road.  (Sorry, today–4/21/09–is Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s, and Baskin Robbins is selling cones for 31 cents on Wednesday, April 29th.  Is it any wonder I’m thinking of filing in terms of ice cream?)  What was I saying?  Oh, yes, if you’ll be more tempted to stick with your filing routine, opt for colorful or patterned interior or hanging folders.  I’m a big fan of anything with an Anne Taintor design , or perhaps you’d like something a little more communicative, like these Knock-Knock folders sold at Office Candy and elsewhere.
• Schedule a filing ritual.  People often fail to file because there’s no time built into their schedules to do it.  However, although we don’t have “brush teeth” listed in our Blackberries, we remember to adhere to our dental hygiene because we’ve developed rituals.  Build filing into your schedule, preferably for two minutes prior to having lunch and three minutes before finishing up for the day, using an on-screen reminder or cell-phone alarm, if necessary, and within a matter of days or weeks, you’ll file without needing to be told.
• Enhance the atmosphere.  Filing isn’t brain surgery–it doesn’t take every bit of your concentration.  Play music–even make yourself a playlist or mix DVD–for getting your filing done to a syncopated beat.  Moderately peppy music makes every task, from laundry to emptying the dishwasher to matching account numbers just a little more fun.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that “Organize Your Files” Week applies to electronic files, too.  Make time to review each digital folder until you’ve trashed the duplicates and digital squatters and made a back-up of everything (photos? financial records? system preferences?) you’d be sad to see disappear in the event of a computer crash.

Happy “Organize Your Files” Week!  But please, no presents.  Your loyal readership is enough…though I’d be glad to meet you for a celebratory ice cream cone!

 

Are you running out of space for your printed user’s manuals?

Did you buy a nifty gadget on eBay or at a yard sale, only to find it was missing the manual?  (Was your manual was lost among your paper clutter long before you started reading Paper Doll?)

Perhaps the manufacturer mistakenly packaged your purchase with instructions written in French, Japanese, Spanish and something that looks like a fortune-teller’s tea leaves, but not the one language in which you are (theoretically) conversant?

No matter the situation, it’s relatively simple to find the manual you need:

• Contact the manufacturer to request a replacement manual.

This works fine as long as you know the manufacturer, they have a (preferably toll-free) phone number in your country and they have manuals available.  If you’ve acquired a product in the last few years, and the company is still in business, the only obstacle may be a fee, anywhere from $1 plus shipping to upwards of $30.  If, however, you’re trying to find the instructions for a circa 1930 sewing machine, this method may be problematic.

• Find the official web site.

Start with the site map for the manufacturer’s web site, like Kenmore.com until you find the page for manuals.  As long as the company is still in business, you stand a fair shot of locating an online version.

• Use standard search engines to locate the specific manual.

Usually, you can type in something along the lines of:

and Google (or your preferred search engine) should yield either the online version of your manual or information regarding how to retrieve it.  Please note that this may bring up sites like Manuals Online, which want to charge you for access to a manual. As a last-ditch effort, buying a manual might make sense, but I encourage you to exhaust all possible free options first.

• Bookmark and use any of these nifty, free sites for finding the manual you need.

DiploDocs (AKA Safe-Manuals.com) is a collaborative site.  Once you register (at no cost), you can access any of the manuals in the database by selecting from a list of brands and products, either by using drop-down menus or a search box.  The manuals are all smaller than 60 MB and in PDF form.  Not only can you find, view and print a manual, but you can also save it to your “personal space” so that you can quickly access it the next time something blinks at you with dismay.  You can also participate by uploading and sharing any PDFs of user, owner or instruction manuals that you possess.  Paper Doll likes DiploDocs’ ease of brand search (from Acer to Zyxel), multiple language searches and wide variety of categories and brands.

  ManualsMania.com claims that thanks to its community of users, the site offers more than 700,000 manuals.  It’s easy to be wowed by a claim of such enormity, but size isn’t everything.  Ease of use is paramount, and ManualsMania.com lets you decide whether you want to be associated with a social group of manual-locating pals or just find a manual, grab and go!

Select from brands (ranging from AEG to Zanussi, with lesser-known international brands mingling with Canon, Ford, and Xerox), drill down by product type and select the exact model need.  Before downloading a manual, to make sure you have the right one, ManualsMania provides a full preview via Scribd and Docstoc, two social publishing sites.  For a hard-to-identify item, skip the brand list and use a text search.  If you prefer a more participatory mode, sign up for membership, contribute your own PDF manuals, and chat in forums.  There’s no vault for saving your manuals; it’s assumed you’ll save to your own computer.  Mostly, ManualsMania asserts they are trying to amass the largest collection of user manuals on the web…and they want us to recycle our paper manuals.  Fair enough.

  TheUserManualSite.com, operated by OwnerIQ, lets you search thousands of items by manufacturer, product type and model and download the manuals.  From there, you can create a personalized home page with an inventory of your collected manuals, all available in one customized on-site location.  It’s also a community where you can seek out advice from other members to solve product problems and read blogs and ownership newsletters to learn about product changes and developments. You can even sign up for updates, tips and solutions, personalized by the products you’ve selected.  Your level of involvement can range from stealth mode (for those avoiding Big Brother’s steely glare) to active (not literally) card-carrying member.

 ManageMyHome is a glossy (read: corporate, with advertising) membership site designed to help homeowners with everything from home remodeling projects (way beyond Paper Doll‘s meager skills) to redecorating (ditto) to painting (uh, double-ditto).  However, I was captivated by their home handbooks and homeowner education sections on everything from architectural design structures to bathtub plumbing.  While this all may be overkill for an apartment-dweller, the site really does cater to the needs of a homeowner, right down to the personalized page for saving and accessing manuals, articles and clippings.  To merely find the manual you are seeking, type the brand and model number.  However, don’t expect to find manuals for video games, digital cameras or personal electronics.  ManageMyHome is all about home appliance manuals.

  The UsersManualGuide.com is a real bare-bones approach to finding the manual you need. There’s no membership, no forum, no personalized home page…which suits Paper Doll just fine.  Not everyone wants to sign up for a membership or have to create yet another new password, and the Users Manual Guide serves that audience.  There’s no sense that this was created for building any kind of community…there’s no easy way to even find out more about who put the site together, but there’s a charm to the gruff simplicity.

The main screen offers up an outline similar to what one might create for a 7th grade Social Studies project, absent the Roman numerals.  While the list of manufacturers covered (Panasonic, Motorola, Samsung, Kenwood, Sharp, Casio, Yamaha, Funai, Icom, Philips, and Sanyo) is shorter than at some of the other sites, the array of product categories and manuals is still dizzying.  Even a selection as seemingly obscure as Panasonic’s AV Control Receiver yields 40 model number choices.

Beyond the generalized owner manual search sites listed above, you can also find specialized manual sites, such as:

ReplacementDocs is an archive specifically for game manuals.  So, if you’ve decided to dust off that video game you haven’t used in eons, or you’ve found the perfect game at a garage sale, but can’t figure out the settings sans manual, this site has what you need.  The site is devoted to “electronic documentation in a graphical format” and has a Mom & Pop feel; someone named “sleepy” apparently hand-edits each contribution, and there’s an active forum of gamers contributing to and discussing the manuals.  For those who care, the site does have a teeny bit of advertising, but it doesn’t interfere with readability or search functions.

  Retrevo is all about consumer electronics, from televisions to camcorders, MP3 players to PDAs, telephones to universal remotes.  If you’re frustrated by your wireless router because you can’t efile your taxes (before Midnight) or you can’t bare that drive to Disney Word without assurance that the SUV DVD player will keep you toddlers entertained, Retrevo is a good place to start.  While the site is designed to help you search for actual products, compare prices and then click over to an online store to make a purchase (from which, I assume Retrevo gets an affiliate cut), the site’s user and blog reviews, manufacturer info pages and manuals are all available free of charge.  There’s a MyTrevo personalized account, but access to manuals is not dependent upon joining or purchasing anything.

  Henry’s, a Canadian company that’s celebrating it’s 100th anniversary, has collected a wide selection of downloadable camera manuals.  If you’ve got an older camera passed down through the generations (or from a great yard-sale find), Henry’s may have what you need.

Appliance 411 is another low-tech, high-yield option for locating PDF versions of much-needed appliance manuals.  Rather than warehousing the manuals on their own service, Appliance 411 connects the with the appropriate manufacturer’s website.

Edmond’s.com, best known for helping consumers select the right used or new price for their needs, has a nifty blog post with links to each auto manufacturer’s site for downloading electronic car manuals. Although the post hasn’t been updated in over a year, one may assume each company’s site has been updated as new cars rolled off the lines.

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Whew.  That’s a lot of online advice for finding the right manual, but organizing these manuals takes far less effort than keeping your paper handbooks in order.  In fact, just a few tips can provide you with easy, organized access to what you need:

1. Download a manual (in PDF form) as soon as you acquire a new appliance or gadget.  Waiting until you need the manual to go looking for one will waste time at the very point you’re likely to be stressed and cranky.
2. Don’t print out whole manuals.  Chances are good that your problems involve very specific issues, like needing to know how to install a minuscule battery or set a timer, so printing out a 200 page manual is excessive.  Print what you need and maintain that page with your other print manuals, as described last week.
3. Create a folder on your hard drive for storing manuals.  If you already have a digital home maintenance folder on your hard drive, just create a sub-folder for the manuals.  Just set your preferences so all downloads go directly to your desktop–it will be much easier to drag them, en masse, to the right folder.
4. Revise the file names for easy retrieval. A file named Panasonic3X45X62e.pdf is meaningless.  The same file, named PanasonicVCRGrandma.pdf, lets you know that it’s your direct access to helping your beloved family matriarch cope with changing her VCR clocks for Daylight Savings Time.
5. Back-up your manuals folder to a flash drive (or two).  If your computer isn’t working, having a computer manual available on the hard drive doesn’t help much.  Keeping a back-up on a flash drive lets you borrow a laptop, run to the public library or Kinko’s, or otherwise find quick alternative access without killing a tree to print out the whole manual in the first place (a solution that won’t even work if your computer dies while you’re on the road).

It’s substance, not style, that counts. Why not maintain all the important user information you need digitally, saving space and the environment?

SaveSaveSaveSaveSaveSave

Did you accidentally change the default language on your Caller-ID box, and now your messages are listed in Spanish?  Get the manual!

• Do you have so much trouble with pictograms that you can’t laundry labels, let alone your new digital camera’s icons? Find the manual! 

(Seriously, are we really supposed to know the difference between (Machine Wash Warm) and (Machine Wash Hot, Gentle Cycle) from just looking at the icons?  No wonder there are whole web pages created to explain digital camera icons like and , which Paper Doll thinks should mean “Oooh, Pretty” and “Zip up your zipper”, respectively.  But I digress.)

• When Daylight Savings Time passes into (or out of) vogue in your zip code, do you struggle with resetting the time on your computer, your car’s clock, or your TV, VCR or DVR?  Grab the manual!

(FYI, if your DVR clock is set by your cable company, good luck. Paper Doll‘s sister’s cable company changed her time zone setting and is unable or unwilling to set it back, no matter how many imploring calls she makes.  It’s as if her televisions have been relocated to a time zone of their own.  Indeed, it might be easier for her to just move to Iowa and be done with it!)

Tinkering types who refuse to seek directions, aside, we’ll all need an owner’s manual or user’s manual at some point.  In most houses, those manuals tend to get piled up in a kitchen drawer or at the bottom of a magazine rack, making it hard to find the exact one you need, and making it more likely you’ll hold onto a manual long after you have discarded the item it explains.  In fact, as a professional organizer, I often encounter manuals for phones, electronics and household gadgets that the clients have long-since lost, sent off to college with their children or otherwise tossed away. 

Without a system for managing your manuals, you’ll end up with clutter…you’ll keep things you don’t need and will be unable to put your hands on what you’re seeking.  Maintaining your hard-copy owner’s manuals can be really simple, however, if you create a home where manuals live.  Just follow these steps:

Gather all the owner’s manuals, user’s manuals and instructions you can find.  Make a stack (or multiple stacks) and corral them in a central location so you can quickly review each one.

Eliminate the manuals for items you really know how to use.  While you may, someday, want or need to know how the microwave manufacturer advises poaching eggs, it’s highly likely that if you’re savvy enough to use a computer to read blogs, there are no secrets for you to glean from the manuals for your toaster or hair dryer.  Flip though each manual–if there’s nothing in it that isn’t dictated by common sense…send it to the recycling bin.

Eliminate the manuals written in languages you don’t speak. It’s become very common for manufacturers to send out packaging with bilingual instructions.  Unless you are intending to resell or auction an item of high value in a locale where English is not the primary language (and the non-English manual is in the prospective buyer group’s primary language)…let it go!  If you can’t bear to toss these manuals, check with the language department at a local middle or high school to see if they might use the foreign-language manuals for class projects.

Keep “like with like”, so that you not only have the manual, but the unpacking display (also know as “What’s In The Box?”), schematics (in case it’s hard to tell which way is up), the replacement parts re-ordering guide and anything that isn’t merely advertising.

Sort the manuals into categories, such as:

• Major household appliances (water heater, refrigerator, washer/dryer, electric garage door)
• Kitchen appliances (food processor, bread maker, microwave)
• Home theater electronics (televisions, stereos, DVRs)
• Computer hardware and software (including peripherals like printers and scanners)
• Communication devices (phones, smart/cell phones, pagers, walkie-talkies)
• Personal electronics (MP3 players, book readers, pedometers, heart rate monitors)
• Specialty manuals (exercise equipment, home medical equipment)

Create an easily-accessed home for the manuals by selecting options according to your style preference:

1)  Maintain a sub-section of the Household division of your Family Files, specifically for manuals. 

If you have multiple thin manuals in a category, one manila folder per category should suffice.  Larger manuals will be more suitable with one to a folder, with one folder per product/item.

*Note 1a:  Using the family file system works great for almost all household and personal appliances.  However, it’s usually best if computer hardware and software manuals are kept close to your your computer/modem/wireless router/printer/scanner set-up.  If your family files are kept in the same general area of your computer (such as in a home office), you’re all set.  If not, option #2 might work better for computer/software manuals.

*Note 1b:  Keep your auto owner’s manual in your glove compartment.  While it’s a minor inconvenience to have to go to your upstairs office to find the fridge manual if the ice maker stops working, it would at least a major inconvenience–possibly even a road hazard–to have to wait until you get home (if you got home) to decipher your dashboard’s emergency lights.

2)  Store manuals in magazine files. 

  (Heals.co.UK) OnlineOrganizing.com

This grants slightly easier, quicker access than having to let your fingers do the walking through your vertical hanging folders.  If you miss the sub-labeling that a file system provides, you can label manila folder tabs and divide the categories–like individual software types (productivity, games, drivers, etc.).  However, this will slightly diminish available space, and you will only be able to use left-side tabs, as middle and right will fall inside the magazine file and will not be visible for reading. 

Alternatively, you can divide manual categories by labeling and affixingwide tape flags to the left binding of each manual, which will allow you to color-code and even alternate the space so all labels can be viewed at a glance.

3)  Maintain manuals in three-ring binders.            

Paper Doll has recommended three-ring binders and plastic sheet protectors as the solution for organizing papers as varied as recipes, maps and school documents.  It can be a great solution for most owner’s manuals and instructions, as it allows each manual to be preserved, clean and separate, and the individual plastic sheet protectors can be easily divided by categories using standard index tabs (or the aforementioned tape flags). 

Binders do need to be sturdy, and shelf space must be maintained (as with the magazine files in option #2), but the biggest problem is that it’s particularly hard to store thick, book-sized manuals (such as you’ll find for computer hardware/software) in a three-ring binder.  If this is an option that appeals to you, consider having at least one magazine file (or adequate bookshelf space next to the binders) to suit storing large manuals.

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All of the above solutions keep your manuals vertical, standing at attention like little soldiers, at the ready to do battle against inexplicably blinking lights, stalled motors or flashing messages.  But they also require maintaining a library of hard-copy paper manuals.  If you’d prefer to skip the paper altogether (or if you already lost the instruction manual before you had a chance to test out your new gadget or appliance), there are myriad digital alternatives to maintaining a system of paper manuals.

Next week, we’ll to explore not only some of the most complete options for finding a digital version of manuals online, but we’ll also discuss how to organize the information for quick and easy digital retrieval (including how to figure out what’s wrong with your computer when your computer (or internet access) is failing you).