Best Results Organizing

“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”

We lost an hour this past weekend. Actually, if you’re like most people, you lost more than an hour. First, there was the change to Daylight Savings Time, which thanks to a relatively recent Congressional mandate via the Energy Policy Act of 2005, came a month earlier than we’ve experienced in the past.

Then, you walked around your house, noticing you needed to re-set clocks that don’t automatically update, checking clocks that do automatically update (such as on your cell phone and caller ID) and then bemoaning that because of Congress’s change, all the devices that used to update automatically (computers, VCRs) no longer do so if they were produced before the new regulations.

Then, if you had not yet followed Paper Doll‘s advice here, you may have spent more time searching for the instruction manuals to re-set the clocks in the house, only to realize when you got in your car on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning that you needed to dig the auto manual out of the glove compartment to change that clock, too.

Indeed, just thinking about this may have made you stop in the middle of reprogramming the time on your computer to Google (as I did) about DST, pop over to Amazon to check out Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time by Michael Dowling, or read the fascinating blog post inspired by Downling’s book at The Dilettante’s Dilemma about how this inconvenience could be a huge conspiracy by the Golfing, Grilling and Candy-making Industrial Complex.

Then, amused enough to proceed with your weekend, if you followed the advice of wise people everywhere, you took this opportunity to remind yourself of the other things you should be doing on a twice-yearly schedule. Did you test the batteries in your smoke detector? Test your carbon monoxide detector? Run a household fire drill with your family?

Perhaps the next thing you knew, it was dinner time, and you’d failed to read and recycle your Sunday newspaper (which sits on your kitchen table, still), sort your papers (see, you knew Paper Doll would bring this around to her bailiwick), open your tickler file, pay your bills or do anything remotely productive.

At least I’m guessing that was the case at your house, too.  Paper Doll bought a new shredder this weekend, and spent all that lost time reviewing and then shredding old bank statements, credit card statements and other no-longer necessary financial and personal papers. (Paper Doll is not yet self-actualized enough to shred old love letters.)  Hopefully, you know the importance of shredding documents, but you may wonder why I chose a weekend already foreshortened to do it.

Well, Paper Doll has a birthday this week (not a big one, at least in terms of significance, though grocery baggers insist on calling me ma’am), and the end of a year always seems like a good time to shred, I mean shed, the insignificant items of the past and move forward.

Which brings us to today’s lesson, if there is one. We have to declutter the past from the present in order to make room for the future.

I’m not sure what Marcel Proust would think of today’s self-indulgent post (assuming he could even read idiomatic 21st century English), but as he’s the reigning (non-X-Files) expert on lost time, I hope he and the less retrospective (but far crankier) Robertson Davies don’t mind my taking their names in vain as I eat my cake and close out another year.

Here’s to another cycle around the sun (whether we “save” our daylight or not) and to reducing paper (and other) clutter!

I really hope you took my advice (and my confessed addiction to Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Eggs) to heart and are on the way to internalizing the notion that merely possessing (but not using) dust-covered magazines (or exercise videos, or language tapes) will not actually make us more knowledgeable (or slender and ripped, or fluent in French). Thus, I really hope you’ve pared down your collections to the clippings or full issues that represent the bare minimum of what you already use or (being realistic with yourself) will use.

As a professional organizer, I find organizing inspiration and advice in just about all of those seventeen magazines (with the possible exception of Entertainment Weekly, which merely keeps me charming and sane). If I shlepped a whole magazine collection around in my trunk every time a client wanted help visualizing what a solution might look like, my car might bottom out. Instead, one lovely three-ring binder includes a wide variety of residential organizing categories/sections, including:

• Organizing tools
• Offices/Desks/Filing
• Bedrooms
• Living areas
• Kitchens
• Closets
• Pantries
• Utility rooms/Mudrooms
• Garages/Basements
• Organizing papers (yes, this category is often the inspiration for Paper Doll posts)

Other three-ring binders include web site URLs, articles and references for time management, life balance, identity theft, stress-relief, and a whole host of non-residential/non-business categories.

What kinds of categories of your clippings might you sort? How about gardening plans (sectioned by plant type or season), home remodeling dreams/plans (categorized by room), family health advice (sectioned by illness/wellness type, with grouped articles on topics such as nutrition, exercise, first aid, colds/flu, chronic illnesses specific to yourself/your family) or finances (with sections for articles on savings, investments, retirement, college-planning, etc.).

Minimal expense, minimal style–If you want to store the current month’s magazines tidily, check your local Dollar Store (or regional alternative) for shallow, lightweight baskets, sans handles, for storage. The advantage of such shallow baskets is that you won’t be inclined to try to overstuff them. Of course, the disadvantage is that the titles will not be immediately viewable, as you’ll only be able to see the magazine on top.

Pretty…and just in time for Spring!

Last week, we talked about the pile-up of magazine renewal cards. I promised I wouldn’t clutter up that talk with discussion of another kind of pileup – the piles of magazines and the even messier piles of things we’ve clipped from those magazines. But this is a new week, and there’s no special renewal offer on that promise.

So what’s our deal with magazines and clippings?

It’s a universal truth that knowledge is power, which might explain why so many of us feel such anguish about letting go of magazines, newspapers and the clippings taken from them. Subconsciously, we feel like if we hold onto the material, we’ll automatically possess the knowledge inside of them.

Unfortunately, our logic is flawed. Buying and storing piles of exercise videos (that we never look at, let alone actually use) will not give us six-pack abs. Our refrigerators may be filled with nutritious food, but if we only snack on drive-through fare and Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Eggs, the perishable food will grow stale and moldy, and our hearts and waistlines will show no improvement.

If your office, kitchen, desk, or car is littered with clipped articles and scraps torn from the newspaper, you are clutter-rich but information-poor. After all, what does it benefit us to possess useful information–or for that matter, useful gadgets, supplies…or anything, really– if we can’t find it when we need it or put it to use on our own timetable, rather than when it happens to flutter to the floor or cause us to trip over it? A newspaper blurb about how to get rid of aphids or glossy article about how to avoid identity theft is merely clutter unless it is immediately retrievable when we want it.

Concentrate on these keys to gaining power from bound and clipped information:

1) Know what to keep (vs. what to toss out); and
2) Know where to keep it.

The approach is similar whether you are dealing with individual bits of information or entire issues of newspapers, magazines, and professional journals. Today, we’ll talk about what to keep (and toss) from your piles of information; next week, we’ll tackle WHERE we should corral the info-goodies we deem worthy of keeping.

LOOSE SCRAPS

To decide what to keep, in terms of loose scraps of information, ask yourself the magic questions:

• In what circumstances (when, where, why, and how) would I use this?

• If your need is not immediate, are you likely to need or want this information in the next 6-12 months?

If the likely need won’t arise for over a year (such as wedding planning articles when your eldest child is barely in junior high), wait until the need exists and then get more appropriate and up-to-date information. Investment and travel information, in particular, is incredibly perishable.

If you will not be in the market for a new car, camera or computer in the next few years, holding onto unread articles about today’s models is a waste of space and effort. By the time you’re ready to shop, there will be up-to-date articles with information about the pricing and features you really need.

• Can this information be retrieved in other ways?

• Could you access this same information via the telephone book, the Internet or by calling an expert?

If so, using the prime real estate of your desk, kitchen counter or bedside table to maintain piles of fluttery magazine clippings is counterproductive.

• Do I already possess similar or better information on this subject?

If you subscribe to a specialty magazine on A.D.D., finances or travel, chances are good that a very general article from the newspaper won’t yield superior information. Not all information is equally valid, equally valuable or equally well-presented. Save the best and discard the rest.

• For whom am I saving this?

So often, we clip articles for friends or family members but forget to pass them along. If you must share the informaton, call your friends and read the blurbs aloud to them (or their answering machines) and be done with it!

We often take undue responsibility for making sure others in our lives stay informed on topics ostensibly of interest to them. It’s fine to occasionally clip an article if you have access to a resource your friend does not, but the codependency clutter you’ve amassed on someone else’s behalf isn’t good for anyone. Stop being the curator of museum of your friends’ minds!

BOUND READING MATERIAL

If you have piles of magazines, newspapers, or professional journals, ask:

Have I read this cover-to-cover at least three times out of the past five issues?

If the answer is no, you probably lack either the sustaining interest or the time to devote to the material. After all, a 6-week-old newspaper or last month’s Newsweek no longer reflects current events, but history. The summer gardening tips in last Spring’s Southern Living issues might very well be interesting, but if you haven’t gotten around to reading them by the following winter, it’s time to let them go.

The great thing about the American magazine industry is that topics are cyclical–there will be another article on the same topic, whether it’s “10 Marketing Tips For Your Small Business” or “Best Exercises For A Flatter Tummy” or “How To Organize For Tax Season”, coming up in just a few issues, so you need not fear ridding yourself of a gem amid the clutter. What goes around…comes back around!

A few tips for dealing with the magazine/newspaper backlog:

Throw it all out and start with a clean slate. Starting fresh is liberating, and it makes you less likely to backslide. Donate the magazines to your library’s book sale or local medical clinic (but be sure to remove your address label).

Set a deadline…so that any unread monthly magazine more than two months old gets tossed. Say goodbye to unread weeklies after two weeks, or newspapers from the past week by Sunday night…and consider canceling your subscription. You can always read back issues at the library when you have more time.

Block time to catch up on your reading. Find the best chance for “quiet time” in your schedule. Locate the magazines you want to read in a To Read pile or basket near where it’s convenient for you to read, and actually schedule time, whether for 15 minutes or an hour, into your day or week. Professionals can take advantage of canceled appointments to catch up on reading professional journals. Busy parents can carry a tote bag to read in the car-pool line.

Pan for gold. Instead of reading magazines cover-to-cover, scan the table of contents and go directly to the articles that interest you, bypassing the glossy ads. Tear articles of interest out of 3 to 5 magazines or journals at one sitting and put them all in a manila folder you can carry in your tote or briefcase to read when you are stuck in a ridiculously long line at the Post Office or waiting to see the dentist. Toss finished articles in the trash wherever you are, and feel confident that your brain is certainly a more secure place to store information than the floorboard of your car.

Do team reading. Don’t feel you have to read everything that’s published on a particular subject–share the load. Band together with colleagues with a plan that each of you will cover one major trade journal; meet for lunch or coffee on a weekly or monthly basis to discuss the articles each of you reviewed. You’ll be well versed in your topic of choice and you’ll pay more attention knowing you’ll be accountable for sharing the knowledge with someone else.

Remember, information equals potential knowledge, and therefore potential power. Achieve your potential…attain your power…but get rid of the scraps.

Next week: how to store the magazines and information that’s left over after following the advice in today’s post. (And, of course, if anyone has any ideas how to live a healthy and nutritiously balanced life on a diet subsisting of the aforementioned Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Eggs, be sure to let Paper Doll know. That’s information worth keeping!)

Whenever I get married, I start buying Gourmet Magazine.

She’d stopped reading the kind of women’s magazine that talked about romance and knitting and started reading the kind of women’s magazine that talked about orgasms, but apart from making a mental note to have one if ever the occasion presented itself she dismissed them as only romance and knitting in a new form.

Paper Doll loves magazines. You might expect that a professional organizer specializing in eliminating paper clutter would limit herself to only a few such indulgences. In fact, I subscribe to seventeen publications. Doubt my count? Kiplinger’s, Money, Newsweek, Budget Travel, Cooking Light, Oprah, Real Simple, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, More, Pink, Self, Entrepreneur, 1-to-1, New York Enterprise Report, Organize and Cornell Alumni Magazine.

Let’s leave aside the magazines themselves and how one can be so addicted to the concept that possessing magazines means possessing all the vital knowledge (cough, cough) contained within. We’ll be talking about that next week.

The potential for magazine clutter aside, can you imagine how many of those little subscription cards flutter out onto the living room floor? Sometimes, you can’t even make it from the mailbox to your front door without chasing the feathery flight of these cards. Further, are you despairing, along with me, of all the “reminder” mail, cajoling and importuning us to renew, reminding us that our SUBSCRIPTION HAS ALMOST ENDED.

The truth is, the magazine subscription departments depend on our being disorganized. Last Fall, Hal Morris, in his Grumpy Editor blog, reported:

Example: Money magazine, in the Time Inc. family, sends out renewal reminders to subscribers a half year prior to current expiration dates. But wait. That’s when the “third renewal notice” goes into the mail. With it, a separate form message, identified as coming from the circulation manager, is rather gruff. Its opening line reads:

“This is the 3RD NOTICE we have sent about your MONEY subscription. We have yet to hear from you. It’s important that you take action NOW…”

Those words sound like a warning communication from the Internal Revenue Service.

Yeesh! The magazine monsters–pardon, the magazine subscription services people–figure that you won’t recall when you subscribed or renewed, so they’ll keep filling your mailbox, hoping you’ll keep on renewing subscriptions without checking the actual expiration dates. They even count on you not checking to see if your recent subscription payment went through! It would be easy for them to tempt the unprepared and disorganized into purchasing multiple subscriptions and wasting hard-earned money. But, dear reader, that need never happen to you again!

With a tiny bit of effort and even less maintenance, you can turn one rainy/snowy/slushy afternoon into a Magazine Mail Makeover.

1) Gather one copy of each magazine to which you subscribe. (Yes, Paper Doll hopes that you only have one issue of any given title in your house at any one time, but we’re not going to belabor the point this week.) Pile them up in front of you.

If you happen to toss or recycle magazines soon after you read them (good for you!), you may not be able to recall all the magazines to which you subscribe. Check the accounts payable section of your personal life system to see if you’ve kept the subscription confirmations that have been sent to you. (If not, consider creating a file folder now so you’ll be prepared the next time you subscribe or renew a subscription.)

2) Create a master magazine list. I practically live on my computer, so I prefer using a Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet program. As I’ve mentioned previously, you don’t even need to pay for a spreadsheet program, as there are myriad free ones available at:

• Google
• Zoho
• Open Office
• Neo Office (Open Office for Mac users)
• ThinkFree

If you’re not a spreadsheet kind of person and have fairly legible penmanship (or penwomanship, which Paper Doll lacks), you can create a chart with paper and pen.

3) List the names of all the magazines to which you subscribe along the first (vertical) column. Don’t worry alphabetizing them; if you’re eager to do so, remember that you can use the sort function to alphabetize or organize by expiration date or even cost. If you’re handwriting this, you’re probably not the type to worry about alphabetizing anyway. ☺

4) List the following category titles along the top (horizontal) row:

• Magazine Name—That’s easy, as it’s listed right on the cover.
• Expiration Date—Look at your mailing label. The expiration date may be clearly written above your name as JAN 09, or you might have to look at a series of numbers until you recognize something that says 012009 to indicate January 2009. If your magazine came wrapped in cellophane and you’ve already tossed the label and wrapper, just leave this cell on the spreadsheet blank; you’ll be able to fill in the cell when you get your next issue.
• Subscription Phone Number—Flip open your magazine to the masthead –that where the magazines physical address is listed, plus all of the names and titles of founders, directors, editors, publishers and so on. (If the masthead goes on for many pages, you’ll find the phone number at the very end.) Near the bottom of the page, in tiny print, you’re likely to find “For subscription inquiries” with an 800 number.
• Web Address – In most cases, a subscription inquiry phone number will suffice, but for those of you who prefer doing things on the web, most magazine web sites have a menu link for subscriptions listed along with the subscription phone number. It’s my experience, however, that calling gets you immediate gratification and better service.
• Subscription Cost (or, note that it was a gift)—It’s helpful to know what you paid for a subscription, because those reminder cards can be sneaky, offering discounts in vague percentage-off terms that fail to compare apples to apples. If you received a discount rate when you first ordered, make a notation of that. (Sometimes, you can even call the 800 number before your issue is due to renew and ask for a discount that matches the price you previously received. It never hurts to ask, and having this information arms you for negotiations.)

Don’t worry if you can’t find some of this information now, but in anticipation of when/if you re-subscribe, remember to fill in these fields before you renew anything.

As with charitable donations, the mail requests start coming within months of your last payment, but there’s no reason to hold on to those request and let them pile up around you.

5) Make a notation on your calendar or keep this master magazine list in your tickler file for the month before a subscription is set to expire–renew then, and only then. For example, on March 1st, you’ll note that a subscription is up for renewal in April, and can pay at that time.

Armed with this information, you won’t be tempted to respond to every magazine renewal request that comes along. Keep the list on your computer or a printout near your desk and check each renewal “reminder” that pops into your mailbox against your list. Unless you’re within one month of your renewal date, toss the reminder out. You can be assured that future reminders will arrive; you will not be caught short without any precious issues.

Those of you who stockpile issues of National Geographic or Southern Living may be shocked to hear that while I read every issue of every magazine to which I subscribe, I never let more than a day pass when the old and new issue are both in the house at once. (You can boo and hiss now, if you like. I’ll wait.) In coming posts, we’ll talk about some reasonable ways to deal with the magazine pileups that take over our spaces. For now, use the next blast of icky whether to snuggle up with your magazine pile and make a master magazine list to be sure you and your money are not soon parted.

At the dawn of the computer revolution, we were promised a paperless office, and the implication was we’d eventually achieve a paperless world. Ha!

My clients call me because they have sedimentary-rock-like layers of paper dating back weeks, months, years…covering all of the horizontal surfaces of their offices and homes. Our mailboxes fill up each day with more credit card offers, and our computer desks are covered with printouts upon which we hand-doodle notes and edit changes.

And yet, the official word has arrived that in the war between paper and ourselves, paper is making a strategic retreat. So sayeth the Grey Lady of journalism. This weekend, the New York Times reported that:

Well, I’m thrilled to know I just lost 29 pounds, but I won’t rush out to buy any new outfits yet.

Certainly, it’s true that people are using their computers more, especially for time- and money-saving tasks like online bill-paying. I am somewhat dubious, though, about the suggestion that people are printing fewer pages due to the high cost of ink; an increased cost of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups is unlikely to keep me from grabbing those delights in orange wrappers, and I’m equally unlikely to do all my notes and brainstorming at the computer.

Paper Doll loves organizing paper and eliminating the unnecessary piles. That’s not in doubt. I adore that the Digital Age can help us all eliminate useless paper excess:

Mystery phone numbers – Find a scrap of paper with a phone number that means no more to you than an ISBN code or trigonometry problem? Just type a phone number (including the area code) into the Google search box (like, 212-555-1212) and if the phone number is listed, you’ll not only know whose number you scribbled, chance are good you’ll be provided with a way to map the directions to the phone’s location.

To Do Lists – There are myriad sites to help you log your To-Do lists and even share them with others:

• Blah Blah List
• Orchestrate
• Remember The Milk (with a delightful interface)
• Rough Underbelly (makes getting things done into a came)
• Ta Da List
• To Doist

With these, you can send reminders to your email, voicemail, home/office/personal phone and even, in the case of Monkey On Your Back, to other people to make sure they’re working on the tasks you’ve delegated to them.

If you use a digital system like one of these, you’ll have no worries that you’ll lose the list, and no fears that your lack of motivation will get the better of you. If you don’t visit your list, there are multiple ways to ensure your list will visit (or, if need be, stalk) you.

Work Sharing – Now that more of us are outside the traditional office environment, we may be working (or playing) from home. Instead of passing documents back and forth over the tops of our cubicles, the web allows us to share documents, edit changes and truly collaborate.

Ten years or so ago, we were excited about the “track changes” option in Microsoft Word, but we still had to face problems when Word for Windows and Word for Mac failed to show mutual affection. Now, even though they play nicely with others, we don’t even need to buy software suites; we can create and mutually edit documents stored in cyberspace in our free GoogleDocs or Zoho accounts.

Yes, Paper Doll loves the computer, but aspects of the New York Times article still leave me lukewarm about paper backing off the world’s stage.

I am torn regarding the notion of outsourcing the scanning of our memorabilia and photos. I’m currently reading Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, which does a better job explaining the globalization of economics than anything Paper Doll‘s little math-addled mind has ever encountered. Thanks to Friedman, it doesn’t surprise me that a company like ScanCaf, headquartered in San Francisco but operating in Bangalore, India, will take your Dolce & Gabanna shoeboxes full of old photos, do all the scanning and retouching, and soon return the original mess along with nicely digitized and indexed photos on CD and/or in an online vault. Wow.

Am I nervous about sending the proof of my life’s existence across the globe? (Really, that’s all photos are, tangible evidence we’ve been on the planet.) Well, after reading Friedman’s book, I’m more confident my proof-of-life won’t be lost. And my clients who have been cajoled into feeling guilty for not having scrapbooked every moment of their children’s lives might be persuaded that this could be a guilt-releasing miracle. But even Paper Doll, a Certified Professional Organizer, isn’t eager to square away every nook and cranny’s worth of paper into a digital checkbox.

Can we really appreciate function and tidiness if no area of our lives remains untidy? Can a Kindle or Sony Reader Digital Book ever compete with a winter night shared with a well-worn copy of Pride & Prejudice or a sweltering 70’s summer reading Jaws?

Isn’t there still something romantic about a rainy Sunday afternoon spent wrapped in a fuzzy blanket, noodling through old, dog-eared photos and tear-stained love letters? Will our children’s children feel just as warmhearted if they rifle through digital photos and archived emails?

Paper Doll longs for a world with less paper, but not a paperless world.