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How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 3: Tangible Timers

Posted on: April 21st, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

So far in this series on using timers, we’ve focused on the “thinky” aspects.

In How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 1, we looked at the the why of using timers and all of the situations in which they can boost productivity.
Then, in How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 2: Picking a Good Timer we identified the general characteristics of a good timer and the specific, customizable aspects supporting individuals in their unique tasks and projects.

That was wordy stuff. Today, we get to start looking at the actual timers that can work their magic in helping you maintain focus, remember to take breaks, and avoid hyper-focusing. Today’s post is what I consider a “feast your eyes” post; read it in its entirety or just scroll through until you see a timer that appeals, and then explore all the salient details.

As we discussed previously, the timers you select should feel like they’re on your team, not like they’re monitoring you for a productivity parole board. They need to support all your functional, as well as aesthetic and emotional, needs. You don’t want — at least under most circumstances — to feel like you accidentally launched a countdown to self-destruction instead of a 25-minute Pomodoro focus session. Embrace a platform that works for you.

A timer should support your functional, as well as your aesthetic and emotional, needs. You don't want to feel like you accidentally launched a countdown to self-destruction instead of a 25-minute Pomodoro focus session. Embrace what… Share on X

Today, we’ll focus on physical (primarily analog) timers; next week, we’ll examine digital and hybrid timers. But to begin, we’ll delve into the product line that has done the most to improve the understanding of the passage of time in schools, within the ADHD community, and among anyone seeking productivity support.

DISK-Y BEHAVIOR: TIME TIMER, THE BIG KAHUNA OF PRODUCTIVITY TIMERS

If you read Paper Doll or any productivity or organizing blogs, you probably already know quite a bit about Time Timer. The basics of this beloved product invented by Jan Rogers in 1994 are told in this video.

The key is that Time Timer was the first solution to the problem of time blindness, an undeveloped sense of the passage of time. As explained in ADHD Minds Are Trapped in Now (& Other Time Management Truths) in ADDitude Magazine, those experiencing time blindness are so ensconced in the present moment, in the “now” of things, that recall of the past and anticipation (and planning for) the future are difficult. Understandably, time blindness creates trouble in estimating how long a task will take.

My professional organizing business started in 2002, when Time Timer was still getting to be well known, so I feel as though we’ve “grown up” together. While almost every professional organizer has familiarity with Time Timer, I knew they’d made the “Big Time” when I walked into a Diabetes Sisters support group meeting. The moderator was almost giddy as she showed off the “cool timer” for making sure we’d hit all the planned activities on time.

Seeing Time

Over the years, I’ve been impressed with how this simple innovation has helped children and adults “see” the passage of time in ways they’d never been able to before.

In part, it’s because younger millennials and Gen Z have experienced digital clocks almost entirely to the exclusion of analog clocks. It’s no wonder that young people don’t know what “half past” or “a quarter ’til” mean!

Digital clocks are on their devices and computers, in their classrooms, and on electronic signs as they drive down the street. If you blink, you miss the minutes changing on a digital clock, and there’s no second hand “sweeping away” the seconds, as my kindergarten teacher explained it.

For many others, whether because of ADHD, executive function disorders, or just the complexities of living in the 21st century, they’ve never quite gotten the hang of how time “feels,” so they underestimate or overestimate how long a minute (or twenty) might take. If you don’t know how long a minute is, how can you envision how many you need for any given task?

The basic element of all of the physical Time Timers is two-fold:

they display time in an analog manner
a colored disk is set to the starting point of the timed period, and the visible area of the colored disk disappears (behind the face of the timer — it’s mechanical, not actually magic!) as time is “used up.”

It seems almost too simple, but users soon see that making time visible in this way calms the nerves and soothes the senses. Whether you’re doing a timed practice test or trying to finish a presentation for your client, you need only flick your eyes to the Time Timer to know how much time you have left.

There’s no need to calculate the math in your head as with a digital clock, and even from a distance (and even if you’re extremely nearsighted!), the flash of color slowly moving in a clockwise pattern is enough to signal if you have a lot or a little time left.

In this way, Time Timer delivers on its mission: it “fosters focus and provides clarity to individuals who struggle with visualizing time.”

Original Time Timers

The Original 8″ and Original 12″ versions with the crisp white background, black type, and red disk are for purists (and anyone who wants a variation on the old joke, “What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?”).

Both sizes are 60-minute timers, good for keeping a typical work or community meeting running without unraveling. Its operations are silent; with no ticking, the Originals are ideal for classrooms, open-plan offices, and for sound-sensitive users or spaces. The alert ding at the end of the set time is optional.

The no-nonsense style makes it appropriate for classrooms or office work, and it has both a magnetic backing and foldable feet, so you can choose the optimum display style for your needs. You’ll need two AA batteries to keep your Original Time Timers in lock-step with you, but it comes with a dry erase activity card to keep you on-task.

Teachers and homeschooling parents may want to opt for the Time Timer® Original 8” Learning Center Classroom Sets, with sets of three Original 8″ timers in either primary or secondary colors.

With all the same features as the other Originals, they add a pop of color, so if the minimalistic look and magnetic backing or table-top options appeal to you for your workplace, but you need to make your stylistic mark, this might be a good alternative.

The colored Learning Center versions also prevent you from feeling like you’ve fallen into a creepy, crooked-clock episode of Severance.

You can also amplify the Original 8″ with a Time Timer® Original 8” Visual Scheduler. Encircling the timer is a dry-erase board where you can add calendar/daypart information or time progress details.

Actual minutes are hidden. In addition to the drawn-on markings you can add, there are clips that mark where you have reached in the time allotted.

In the reverse portion, there are pockets for holding the clips, dry erase markers and other timer accessories.

The Original Time Timers include access to the Time Timer apps, which we’ll review next time.

Time Timer Plus

In 2013, the line expanded to include Time Timer Plus, all of which stand upon their own and have handles to make them portable — as more than one client’s child has noticed, somewhat like a purse, or as my GenX clients have said, like a little boombox.

There are two versions of the 7.09″ x 1.7″ x 5.51″ Time Timer Plus 60-minute timers, with relatively serious faces (white backing/black type/red disk) like the Originals; the bodies come in either white or charcoal.

As with the originals, there’s no distracting ticking to interfere with focus, and there’s volume control for the alert, to assure that those who hyper-focus aren’t jarred into anxiety.

These were the first Time Timers I ever owned and used with clients. In addition to the features of the Original version, the timers in the Plus line are the only analog visual timer with a pause button (in the upper right).

The official rules of the Pomodoro Technique say that if your 25-minute Pomodoro is interrupted, you have to start counting from the beginning, but you’re a grownup and can make rules for yourself! If the interruption is worthy — your boss has a question, the school has a fire drill, etc. — hit that pause button, but do get back to what you were doing when you are able.

Over time, the company realized that different users might need different iterations. An hour is fairly long; five or ten minutes barely makes a dent. Thus, the colored part of the disk measuring just a handful of minutes would be hard to discern, especially for children or even someone learning to appreciate smaller increments of time, like while meditating or holding yoga positions. For them, 5-minute and 20-minute versions were created.

Conversely, sometimes an hour isn’t enough; if you’re taking timed practice tests or holding a multi-hour group workshop, a longer visual display of time is needed, so the Plus line added a 120-minute timer. All three additions to the Time Timer Plus family have more colorful disks.

Time Timer Mod

The Original and Plus editions always served their purposes, but (especially early on) had a decidedly academic/industrial look about them. Some people felt that it gave off either a juvenile or sterile vibe; some of my adult clients said they feared it branded them as someone who needed help with time. (But c’mon, we all need help with time.)

As I noted last week, aesthetics can matter, and while most people wouldn’t consider timers as bearing a stigma, both the Original and the Plus line are rather “in your face” about their purpose. The Time Timer Mod line was the perfect response.

These 3.47″ square timers are just two inches deep, so you can use them anywhere: at home, in an office, working from a coffee house or library, even at the beach. They are small enough to throw into a backpack or purse, and to the uninitiated, they just look like little clocks. And a Time Timer Mod only requires one AA battery.

The standard Time Timer Mod – Home Edition Timers can measure up to 60 minutes and come in six designer colors accent colors coordinating with the timer disks: Lakeday Blue, Fern Green, Dreamsicle Orange, Pale Shale Gray, Peony Pink, and Cottonball White (with a burgundy disk). (Value packs of coordinating silicone “skins” are optional.)

As some people (teenagers? college dudes? macho men in the workplace?) may want or need a timer with a harder-edged aesthetic to stay committed, Time Timer has a new Mod Home Metallic Edition in four different colors/styles that remind me of the eye shadow palettes popular in the 1980s:

Metallic Midnight (midnight blue timer with gold disks)
Metallic Indigo (dark purple-blue timer with a light purple disk)
Metallic Forest (dark green timer with a metallic brown disk)
Metallic Storm (dark blue timer with a pink frosted disk, the color of an eye shadow I suspect I currently own!)

(These are more sparkly in person than they appear on screen.)

And for parents of kids needing something a little more generous with time measurement, the cheery Time Timer® MOD Home Edition Rainbow Wheel colorfully communicates time segmentation to children in five minute increments.

While the Home Editions are equally useful at home or work, the 60-minute Time Timer Mod Education Editions has more specific uses. They come in charcoal with the classic, highly visible red disks and optional silicone skins. However, when Time Timer spoke with educators and therapists, they learned of needs for shorter-duration and longer-timed options, so they created 10-minute (white with a yellow disk), 30-minute (white with an orange disk), and 120-minute (white with a purple disk) versions.

Time Timer RETRO Eco Edition

For those seeking a combination of productivity and sustainability, Timer Timer developed the RETRO Eco Edition. These 7.5″ square timers are smaller than the Original line and come in two styles, Green Land and Blue Water. They take one AA battery, like the MOD line, and come only in 60-minute versions. Their key appeal is how they are manufactured.

By combining a rice husk byproduct with their plastic, they’ve eliminated any unnecessary plastic pieces, reducing the overall plastic usage these timers by nearly half compared to similar timers. Additionally, 1% of the Time Timer RETRO Eco Edition sales go to their Time Timer® Making Time for Trees Initiative, a program committed to planting more trees and offsetting Time Timer’s carbon footprint. This version also eliminates the plastic lens, making it easier to repair a disk and yield a longer product life cycle.

Time Timer BRAILLE 8”

Closing out the physical Time Timers is the newest and most intriguing, the Time Timer Braille 8″, the first tactile, high-contrast, visual timer!

This innovative, empowering design allows both users with vision impairment and fully sighted users to use the same device simultaneously to monitor time use, stay productive, and support focus without hyper-focus. It’s suitable for classroom use, students taking tests or working on their own or in groups, and adult work or household projects. Like the MOD and RETRO lines, this 8-inch square timer takes one AA battery.

This timer combines their traditional disappearing disk with a tactile-set bar and Braille writing, so that vision-impaired users can set and track time themselves, by touch. The audible alert is optional.

While this is not the only Braille timer I’ve seen, Time Timer’s version offers the advantage of the high-contrast color differences (of the disk against the white background) for low-vision and fully-sighted users with Braille for vision-impaired users, something I’ve not found in other options.

[For current prices of Time Timer, please see the individual product pages linked.]

Time Timer has other products, ones which I would identify as hybrid, offering both an analog and digital approach to timers, and we’ll examine them in the next post.

Again, Time Timer is not the only timer manufacturere, but their wide variety of options make them the first line of productivity support for children and adults, at home, work, and play.

If, based on what I explained in the first two parts of this series, you to believe that you, your child, or someone with whom you work might benefit from a timer that unites the features of a tangible, visual, and analog timer with an optional, gentle (but non-customizable) alert, Time Timer should be your first stop.

OTHER PHYSICAL TIMERS

Lest this post feel like a commercial for Time Timer, there are a variety of other tangible timers worth considering, especially for those individuals most needing both:

a timer with aesthetic appeal
a physical timer, something that approximates a fidget toy

but not necessarily one with a visual approach to the passage of time.

Focus Timer® Visual Timer

You may recall that last week, I noted a primary problem with using an hourglass timer: it requires the user to “gauge what those collective grains of sand mean.” With a real hourglass, you must judge the ratio of sand above to what already passed down. A modernized version eliminates that problem.

The Focus Timer® Visual Timer has an adjustable hourglass design allowing you to set customized time measurements from one to 100 minutes.

Made of what the manufacturers call a “magic touch material,” this 3.75″ x 2″ timer has some appealing features:

a “soothing” chime alert with three volume settings and a mute option (I put “soothing” in quotation marks because, as the video below shows, it’s a little high-pitched for my timer tastes.)
ability to recharge via an included USB-C charging cable
10 hours of use before requiring charging
100 days of standby time
a visual display such that horizontal blue rings are one minute each and yellow rings are 10 minutes each

It works by turning and “twisting” your fingers along the surface, much as you can operate your phone with drags, drops, taps, and pinches. Watch this video to appreciate how it works:

For the right user, this might be ideal for timing quiet reading and working stints, meditating, exercising, or other “gentle” activities, but not for large group meetings.

The Focus Timer® Visual Timer comes recommended by Gretchen Rubin, Cal Newport, Dan Ariely, and others in the productivity realm. It provides a beautiful visual display, making it (fairly) easy to judge the passage of time before the alert.

Note, compared to other timers, it’s a hefty $99 at Amazon or $89 at Focus Timer.

Moaas Timers

I’ve explored a number timers, and for those who don’t need a visual display of time passing but love that tactile, fidgety goodness of a timer they can hold and manipulate, Moaas has a variety of options.

The most basic are the Moaas Cube Timers, requiring two AA batteries. For about $15 at Amazon, these 2.6″ cubes come in violet, coral, mint green, white, and yellow.

Facets of the violet, white, and yellow cubes can be set for 5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes; the mint green version may be set for 1, 3, 5, and 10 minutes, while the coral’s settings are for 10, 30, 50, and 60 minutes.

To operate, just turn the timer so that the side with the number faces up and the timer starts counting immediately.

A red light blinks while the timer is in use, which can either be comforting or annoying, depending on how blinking lights impact your focus. Adjust the alarm volume between low and high with a switch; another flicked switch turns off the timer completely.

These very basic timers will suffice for timing exercising, studying, cooking or taking a nap, but I suspect they may be a little “low-rent.” While I don’t have a Mooas cube timer, I do own a fairly ancient, battery-operated, 2.25″ Datexx Time Cube that appears to be much the same. The interior weight that identifies which timer specification has been turned upright (and similar to what Mooas uses) rattles and the whole mechanism lacks the “fun” I expected from a fiddly version.

That said, Mooas has a variety of timer upgrades that may appeal to those who want a timer that looks cute and is fun to handle. The Multi-Cube Timer Clock combines a digital clock readout with pre-set timed facets on the cube. These 2.56″ square cubes come in two versions:

5, 15, 30, and 60 minutes in white for $18.90 at Amazon
1, 3, 5, and 10 minutes in mint green for about $17 at Amazon

While the Mooas shows them as also coming in yellow, coral, and grey, those do not seem to be sold currently.

Mooas’ Multi-Hexagon Clock Timers are cool to look at and offer similar fidget-worthy features in a hexagonal style, but Amazon has marked as a “frequently returned item,” which is somewhat concerning. As always, function should be a higher priority than aesthetics, even when aesthetic appeal is needed to encourage commitment to timer use.

Happily, there’s no such warning on the 2.24″D x 1.84″W x 2.24″H Mooas Dodecagon Time Ball Rechargeable Mini Timers, which come with eleven different pre-sets: 1, 3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 45, 60, and 90-minute timers and three colors: sand peach, blue, and white. Charge the timers with an included USB-C charger.

There are three alarm modes: sound, vibration, and silent, and it sells for about $25 on Amazon.

I suspect that this small, fiddly timer may appeal best to teenagers and gamers.

Similarly styled cube, hexagonal, and multi-sided timers can be found all over Amazon and in Big Box stores and dollar stores. This $38 TickTime Pomorodo Cube, which is not a cube at all but a hexagon, comes in blue, black, or white; has pause and resume modes, and the adjustable sound can be silenced or replaced with only vibration.

Mechanical Timers

Finally, remember that the simpler your physical timer is — if it requires no fiddling, no batteries, and no instruction manuals — the more likely you will be to use it.

If you don’t struggle with time blindness and don’t need to see the passage of time, and if you can accept (and won’t be startled by) a ding, a mechanical timer may be your best, first, and least expensive option.

If that’s a traditional pomodoro tomato timer, so be it.

But it just as easily may be a not-so-traditional dinosaur timer.

As always, the best solution for any productivity strategy is the one you’ll actually use.

This is just a sampling of tangible timers.

Their main advantages are that they look cool or cute, so you are more likely to remember to use them, and they satisfy a desire for a physical manipulation of time. However, the downfall of tangible timers is that they are rarely customizable beyond volume and time settings.

If you’re less concerned about being able to fiddle with your timers, and your delight is more likely to come from the ability to customize features (or just have your timer built into the devices you already use), next week’s post with digital and hybrid timers may be more to your liking.

Until then, do you have a tangible timer you love? Did one in this post tickle your fancy? Please let me know in the comments.

Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links above are affiliate links, and I may get a small remuneration (at no additional cost to you) if you make a purchase after clicking through to the resulting pages. The opinions, as always, are my own. (Seriously, who else would claim them?)

How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 2: Pick the Right Timer

Posted on: April 14th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

Future, noun. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured.

~ Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Bierce’s satire aside, the future is unpredictable, and no matter how speedily we attempt to get there, by the time we arrive where the future was, it has moved off again, always out of our grasp. Time is slippery that way, and the only control we have over time is how and what we choose to do with it.

Last week, in How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 1, we looked at a variety of ways to use timers to help us be more focused and productive at home and at work, for ourselves on our own or with our work teams or families.

Today, we’ll look at the qualities of what makes a “good” timer, in general and for you, specifically. A lot more goes into your choice than just being able to keep track of time as it keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the future.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TIMER?

You could use an hourglass for noting the passage of time: two (attached) transparent glass bulbs, voluminous grains of sand, and gravity. Hourglasses have existed since the 16th century BCE and offer an somewhat accurate way of time keeping, whether to decorate your mantle or play a mean game of Boggle.

Unfortunately, an hourglass requires you to stop what you are doing, look over at it, and be able to gauge what those collective grains of sand mean.

It’s not very helpful for those who hyper-focus (as they’d never remember to look at the hourglass in the first place) in order to pace themselves. Worse, for those who are prone to easy distraction, hourglasses are silent; by the time you discern the ratio of sand on the top to sand on the bottom and calculate how much time you have left, you’ll have forgotten what you were writing or doing in the first place!

Hourglasses also lack the precision you’ll need if you want to make a soufflé.

So, let’s first look at the basic characteristics of a good timer.

A Good Timer Must Be Simple

It doesn’t matter whether you use a digital timer (or app) or an analog clock timer, though there are features of each style that will make you more likely to enjoy the experience and therefore stick to it.

The first essential principle is that a timer must be easy — preferably intuitive — to operate. You shouldn’t need a thirty-page manual or a YouTube video to figure out how it works.

A Good Timer Should Offer A Bonus

If a timer doesn’t offer something more than or different from what you’ve already got, why are you looking for something new?

Why buy a physical timer that’s not materially different from the kitchen timer on your stove?

If a turn of a dial and a loud, angry buzz will suffice for you, if you only need one timer set at a time, if all your work is done in proximity to the kitchen — why look further?

Similarly, why download an app that does what your phone’s countdown timer can already do?

We professional organizers caution clients that buying more and different bins and storage items won’t solve problems if you don’t purge excess and sort what remains. Similarly, if you’re not using the various timer apps you’ve already downloaded, and there’s nothing materially different about the ones you’re coveting in the app store, back away from the screen!

If a timer can’t do anything but replicate the features you already have available to you, it’s not a benefit; it’s clutter. So, either identify what’s not already satisfying about the timers you have at your disposal, or investigate what else is prompting you to keep shopping for a solution.

A Good Timer Integrates with What You Already Have

A timer should have the capacity to work with your calendar or to-do list, if necessary. You shouldn’t have to learn an entirely new app’s system for scheduling, time blocking, or task completion. If you’re using your timer in conjunction with a virtual meeting, it should integrate with the meeting software (as we discussed last week).

Does the timer you’re considering play nicely with whatever you’re already doing, or does it force you to jump through hoops.

Got a physical timer that fits in with your desk vibe, so it doesn’t look like a leftover from your 7th-grade math class? Stellar! But if your tangible timer topples off your shelf or is too big to fit in your school or work bag, you’re going to leave it behind.
Do you need a timer app that syncs with your calendar or to-do list, or at least fits with your digital-only life?

There’s no best timer solution because we all need and want different things. The key to your timer helping you succeed is if it helps reinforce routines and habits you already love (or at least are learning to try to love).

The key to your timer helping you succeed is if it helps reinforce routines and habits you already love (or at least are learning to try to love). Share on X

A Good Timer Shows You the Shape of Time

Time is measured in hours, minutes, seconds, even milliseconds, and yet it can seem amorphous. With the exception (as we’ll discuss later) of those who feel anxious working against a visible countdown clock, the prospect of using a timer delivers a great advantage: helping you see the progress of time at a glance.

You want a visual cue that says, “Look! Time is passing… but don’t panic,” — not one that leaves you feeling like Indiana Jones watching the stone door close.

The less cognitive effort and physical attention it takes to check in, the more you stay in flow. And the more you stay in the flow, focused on your goals, the more productive you will be. The timer is there to help you be motivated to start working, and then to prompt you step away when it’s time to rest.

When you look away to see if here’s any time left on the timer, you should be able to quickly refocus on your work. That means your time remaining needs to be displayed clearly and cause no confusion so you can slip seamless back into task mode.

Conversely, if you’ve been resting (or goofing off) and need to get back to work on the next Pomodoro, or must keep the roast from turning into a charcoal briquette, you’ll want a loud (enough) yoo-hoo to help you transition to the next stage!

A Good Timer Should Be Frictionless

If a timer is annoying or awkward to use, you’re going to find reasons to avoid using it. Setting a timer should be as easy as turning a dial or scrolling to the correct time and pushing a button or toggling it to ON.

A tangible timer should either be mechanical and battery-free, or the batteries should be easy to replace with the kinds of batteries you already tend to have on hand, usually AA or AAA. (A client of mine recently bought a large number of small flashlights to keep around her house in case of a power outage; she didn’t realize that they required 3.7 volt lithium ion batteries, so she had to purchase special batteries and a charger. Always check what kind of batteries a gadget requires!)

The annoying truth is that humans are willing to go to ridiculous levels of effort to avoid easy solutions to their problems.

Look at the number of children (and adult significant others who act like children) who won’t lift the lid off the laundry hamper in order to put dirty clothes inside. They’ll pile laundry up on top or just drop things on the floor rather than taking that teeny bit of one-second, lift-the-lid effort to use the hamper.

Thus, anything that creates friction — batteries that die quickly, an app that requires you to log in every time you want to use it — is going to slow you down or prompt you to avoid using it altogether.

When you're looking for a timer to help you be more productive, anything that creates friction — batteries that die quickly, and app that requires you to log in every time — is going to slow you down or prompt you to avoid using it… Share on X

A Good Timer Is Process-Agnostic

No, this has nothing to do with timing a Sunday morning or Friday night sermon. Rather, whatever timer you choose should let you develop your own personal system. Francesco Cirillo, the inventor of the Pomodoro Technique, used a process of trial and error to develop the idea of working in no more than four 25-minute sessions with a five-minute break between each.

It’s a popular strategy and definitely helps conquer procrastination. But as convenient as 25/5 Pomodoros are for students struggling to hunker down and study or work on problem sets, these are not magic productivity numbers.

If I wrote this blog in 25-minute chunks, I’d likely be interrupting myself just as I started to get my creative mojo flowing. Instead, I tend to use modified Pomodoros or the 52/17 Method when I’m writing because I can get into more of a flow. However, for boring admin work like accounting or filing, I’ll often opt for 15-minute time blocks because I know I will try to “beat the clock” to get as many tasks as possible done in an hour.

As we’ll see, a timer needs to fit the way you want to use it for you to achieve maximum productivity.

HOW TO IDENTIFY THE BEST TIMER FOR YOUR NEEDS AND PERSONALITY

Beyond the basics of a good timer, what makes a timer fit your path to productivity depends largely on your style and the kind of work you’re trying to accomplish. As we discussed last week, this could involve anything from a team brainstorming meeting at work to getting the laundry folded before company comes, preventing hyper-focus when dealing with email or just getting out the door on time.

Even with all of the basics in play, there are a variety of customizations that will make-or-break your timer experience.

Aesthetics of a Timer

A timer, whether for strict Pomodoros or just to make sure you don’t let the pasta water boil over, needs to invite you to use it.

If you’re a no-nonsense type of person, you may want a digital timer that lets you pick the work and break durations quickly, with no fuss, and that’s all!

If your aesthetic tastes tend toward the cozy and traditional, you might prefer something nostalgic like the traditional tomato-shaped timer; if you have a cute and twee aesthetic, your ideal timer may look like this:

Nuoswek Mechanical kitchen timer

If you’re opting for a digital timer, you might want to be able to adjust the brightness and color. Some people can’t abide the standard screen for a digital app and immediately opt for dark mode; others want a timer set to their personal color aesthetic.

For example, when I’m in the Time Timer app, even though I almost always prefer to use light mode on my screens for writing and surfing, I like dark mode for timers. For me, that makes the timer blend into the background and I can quickly regain my focus after checking the timer.

Similarly, I usually select pink or purple timers, but I have clients who color-code timers for specific tasks: red timers for high-impact work, blue timers for meditation, green for exercise, and so on.

Perhaps the visual aspects of a timer are less important to you than the auditory ones. Maybe you prefer your timer to have an alarm or musical alert that won’t be jarring.

In the comments on last week’s post, my colleague Sabrina Quairoli noted that using timers can make people anxious. That anxiety can come from the concept of a timer itself, or from the sound the timer makes. If it’s the sound, it’s a matter of selecting a timer with customizable auditory options.

If the concept of a timer with the time ticking down quickly makes you antsy, you’re going to want to avoid a digital timer showing the seconds slipping away as if you’re trying to make your Oscar acceptance speech before the orchestra plays you off the stage.

Instead, opt for a timer with a soothing visual approach, one that doesn’t show the second-by-second passage of time. Rather, select one that indicates the overarching passage of time (the minutes or chunks of time) without the more granular metrics.

For example, all of Time Timer‘s analog timers that use a colored disk would be appropriate for a more gentle approach to illustrating the passage of time.

Note: The TimerTimer Twists, have both an analog and digital countdown; if seeing those seconds disappear stresses you out, skip those versions.

Customizability without complexity

You want a timer that will adjust to your rhythm, whether you’re a 25-minute Pomodoro purist for blogging or a “give me 43 minutes because that’s how long (without commercials) it took Columbo to solve a crime” computer code bug tracker.

Consider whether you just want your timer to just block time and alert you when your scheduled time is up, or if you prefer it to automatically set alternating work and rest intervals. Some timers will let you set any increments you want, at least up to 99 minutes. Others are fixed, and will only let you set the timer in five minute increments.

If you’re hoping to use the timer to for cooking, exercising, or for medical purposes (like the seconds after self-administering an injection before you can remove the needle, or the number of seconds to do breathing exercises), you’ll want to be as granular as possible, so seconds and minutes will be key.

Teachers and parents may prefer short-format timers to help kids see and feel the duration of time: of five minutes in time-out, ten minutes of quiet reading, fifteen minutes until bedtime. Meanwhile, knowledge workers will likely need larger chunks of measurable time, from 25 minutes to two hours.

Affective Design Customization

Affective design is an approach that focuses on creating products, services, and experiences that evoke emotions (or, for some purposes, avoid evoking the wrong emotions) in users.

In other words, you want to pick a timer (or selection of timers) with emotionally-supportive vibes (as the kids say). Think about the reason you’re setting up your timer, and how you want to feel while you’re working and, in particular, how you want to feel when the timer goes off and you’re being alerted to the need to transition.

Some people want Mister Rogers with a gentle ding or buzz to remind them that, “Hey, friend, you’re doing great, and you deserve the reward of a five minute break.” (Bonus material: Mr. Rogers Neighborhood episode: Waiting for Time to Pass.)

Others want Judge Judy slamming the gavel to say, “Time’s up, sweetie!” in so harsh a manner that there’s no chance you’ll go back to TikTok or forget to use the restroom if you’ve been hyper-focusing way too long.

As we’ve alluded, may want to adjust your sound options to create the best vibe. Do you want to be be shaken to attention to make sure you’ll stop doomscrolling and get out the door to pick your kid up from ballet? Or might you prefer a soothing trill of music to signal the end of a writing session (without a din) so that you won’t forget that brilliant turn of phrase you were just starting to write?

One-and-done or loop-de-loop?

Just as you may need to consider how in-your-face a timer should be to help you be as productive as possible, you also should think about how attentive a timer you want.

If you’re cooking something and are afraid either your body or your mind will stray, a one-and-done timer will suffice.

Conversely, there are a number of reasons you might want to set repeated or looping cycles, such as if:

you’re training yourself to tidy up your work area for five minutes every hour
you want to take breaks between sessions, whether you’re doing a 25/5 Pomodoro, following the 52/17 Method, or considering any of the other productivity techniques in Frogs, Tomatoes, and Bees: Time Techniques to Get Things Done.
you’re following the advice in Take a Break — How Breaks Improve Health and Productivity and following the 20-20-20 Rule for your vision. (Every 20 minutes, look 20 feet away for 20 seconds to prevent eye strain!)

A looping function is especially nice if you tend to overstay your planned breaks between tasks. Setting a repeated work/break timer prevents “I’ll take a five-minute break” from becoming a Netflix bender.

You may not always want to create repetitive cycles, but a timer that can repeat or remind you to reset will help automate your habits. (Generally, you’ll need a digital timer if you want cycles to loop automatically.)

Discretion is the better part of timing

In addition to considering what’s the best timer for your own situation, you may need to seek one with discreet modes for the benefit of not disturbing the people around you. For example:

Sleeping baby by Ivone De Melo

sleeping babies (or easily startled pets)
roommates or housemates (particularly those on different sleep, class, or work schedules)
co-workers in cubicles or open-format offices
fellow library or coffee house patrons

In such situations, you’ll want a timer with the stealth of a Mission: Impossible agent (not the drama of a WWE competitor making a grand entrance.

If you often find yourself working (or otherwise needing to focus) while in the company of others with different focus agendas, consider whether it might be to your advantage to find a timer with alternatives to an audible “time’s up” alert. A gentle blink or color shift can be just as effective as a sound.

Picking a timer for someone else

We all want the timer equivalent of Mary Poppins — practically perfect in every way — but the truth is that we will always have to consider the task involved and personality of the user. Additionally, you may need to identify timer solutions for people with special auditory or visual challenges (like the Time Timer BRAILLE 8”) or medical needs.

In other words, the timer your seven-year-old needs to focus while doing math homework may be very different from what your fifteen-year-old needs to get up from an hour of gaming and leave for band rehearsal.

And both of them may need something very different from what you need from a timer at work or that Grandpa needs to remember to take his medication after dinner.

None of this means you have to spent a fortune on timers; just knowing the advantages of particular features will allow you to discern what will work best. In the next post in this series, we’ll examine traditional and novel timers for improving productivity and yielding the just right amount of focus.

What timer features are the most important to you? How does do these change depending on your work or life contexts?

Paper Doll Explores the Best of Desktop File Boxes

Posted on: September 23rd, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

September always gets me thinking about school supplies, and office supplies are really just school supplies for grownups (and for all of us pretending to be grownups).

So, when an editor friend (now at Yahoo! Life), contacted me for a few organizing-related pieces, and asked me what my favorite under-$20 organizing item was, I immediately knew that I was going to pick something related to paper. (I mean, come on, I’m Paper Doll!)

Of course, longtime readers know my absolute favorite tool for organizing action-oriented paper is a tickler file (like the Smead Desk Filer/Sorter, above) but if you’re going to buy one (instead of making one on your own with 31 folders for the days of the month and 12 more for each day of the year), that’s going to be just a bit outside of the $20 range.

Thus, the answer I gave my editor pal for her piece, which came out last week as The Under-$20 Products Professional Organizers Tell Every Client to Buy, was a desktop file box. In turn, this got me thinking about whether I’d ever really talked about this tool in depth.

I went back to my series from early this year on the basics of paper organizing:

Part 1 of the Reference Files Master Class really dug into the mechanics of filing — cabinets, bins, Bankers Boxes, hanging files, interior files, and yes, tickler files. But because I primarily recommend desktop file boxes for action files rather than reference files (with a few notable exceptions, discussed below), I realized hadn’t mentioned desktop file boxes in years!

So, today’s post explores the benefits and use cases of desktop file boxes and looks at the different types you might consider, depending on your aesthetic tastes.

THE BENEFITS OF DESKTOP FILE BOXES

Most of the file solutions we look at are vertical.

Whether you’re using a filing cabinet or file drawer, tub or milk crate, you get to corral a lot of paper, categorize it, and store it vertically. Those solutions are fine for most of your reference material, but action paperwork requires a format from which you can deftly pluck what you need, quickly and, if necessary, often.

Desktop file boxes are a versatile paper organizing tool with a wide variety of benefits.

Small Footprint for Maximized Space Efficiency

A desktop file box is letter-sized and has rails for hanging folders (into which you can placed tabbed interior folders) but isn’t as deep (front to back) as a file crate. The typical letter-sized file box or crate is about 14″ or greater deep (from front-to-back). This allows you to keep a hefty number of papers and categories on your desk, but uses far too much desktop real estate for action items or quick reference.

Conversely, a desktop file box works as a miniaturized version of your typical file drawer or crate and rarely measures more than six inches deep (front-to-back).

Ease of Accessibility

A desktop file box ensures that you can keep a small, curated number of important documents and information within arm’s reach, eliminating the need to search through drawers or filing cabinets for frequently used items.

Improved Organization

Unlike with a full-sized file crate, a smaller footprint means you’ll be less inclined to pile papers on top of a desktop file box. (They’d fall off.)

And again, this solution allows you to provide a dedicated space for everything you need close at hand — though you must employ a reality check to ensure you continually edit and keep from overstuffing the box. Because there’s limited space, it encourages you to sort items in an orderly fashion, whether by date, category, project, or whatever other system makes sense to you.

Customizable

You can still use the same standard hanging files, tabbed interior folders, and labels you use for your regular reference filing system, making it easy to add or switch contents.

However, because this is a smaller profile tool, you can choose a completely different set of folder colors and styles (like these Japanese watercolor themed folders) making it easy to tailor your desktop resources to your personal organization style.

So, your general reference system may make use of traditional Army-green hanging folders and manilla tabbed folders, but your desktop file box could use purple hanging folders with matching interior folders, or any other combinations to express your style.

Portability

Related to the whole point of a smaller footprint is that a desktop file box can be portable. You can easily carry it to the conference room at the office, the dining room, or your back deck if you want to work on tasks or categories somewhere other than where the desktop box lives. Stay organized while going (somewhat) mobile.

Visual Clarity

A small container means that you can quickly see whatever files are stored. In a full filing cabinet drawer, you’ll need to let your fingers do the walking and hope that you haven’t accidentally misfiled a folder. The smaller profile means you’ll see what you need immediately, saving time and effort.

Versatility

As I’ll illustrate further on in this post, desktop file boxes come in a variety of styles to adapt to your decor.

USE CASES FOR DESKTOP FILE BOXES

Any kind of file box or plastic crate with rails can hold hanging folders and organize your papers in lieu of investing in a filing cabinet or a desk with file drawers. But a desktop file box helps you organize a smaller sub-set of papers and takes up less real estate.

Thus, a desktop file box helps reduce desk clutter while making good use of limited space through compact vertical storage. You’ll use a familiar, categorized hanging file and tabbed interior file system, but only for the papers you really need. In this case, that’s either going to be:

Action-Oriented Task Paperwork — These are the same kinds of things you might put in your tickler file, if you were going to use them, but organized by category (like To Pay, To Read, To Call, etc.).

While my preference is to recommend organizing action paperwork by date assigned (in a tickler file), some of my clients find that very few of their action items are deadline driven. While deadlines are key for students, office workers, or parents, if you find that your tasks are less driven by due dates and more easily categorized by type of labor, categorized files may suffice.

And, of course, you could use a desktop file box as a tickler file, either with a DIY set of 43 folders or by storing your actual tickler file vertically, numbered tabs upward so that the individual slots act like folders.

Time/Event-Specific Information — If you’re going to meet with your contractor about your kitchen remodel or need notes to help you through a Zoom or telephone call, you’ll want them close at hand on the day you need them. In lieu of a tickler file, putting these notes in your desktop file box for the upcoming week when you’ll need them means you can plan ahead without having to keep the papers or file flat on your desk, cluttering it up; neither will you rush to your filing cabinet right before your meeting.

Red-Hot Reference Paperwork — It’s been a baker’s dozen of years since I wrote Paper Doll Gives You the Business (Files) — Part 1, the first in a short series on organizing paper in small business offices. At the time, I raised the concept of Red-Hot Reference documents. At the time, I wrote, in part:

Red-Hot Reference is the term I use with clients to differentiate between super-important reference materials and run-of-the-mill general reference information. These are the documents that need to have prime real estate on or near your desk so that data can be gleaned with minimal effort and maximum speed. Red Hot Reference includes:

Vital Contacts — Even if you have a computer database or a pre-programmed phone, there are going to be phone numbers, extensions, hot lines, email addresses, and shipping information for customers, vendors, and support team members that you’ll need to grab quickly. …

[t]here’s a difference between having information somewhere and having it at your fingertips. After all, telephone books (remember them?) have practically every number one might need, but nobody leaves the telephone book for the baby sitter. Instead, wise parents create an essential list of emergency numbers — parents’ cells, grandparents, pediatrician, Poison Control, etc. For your business, only you know which numbers (major vendors, labs, clients/customers, etc.) that you need to reach on a frequent or emergency basis. Those are the numbers that should go on your Red Hot Reference emergency contact list.

I went on to talk about other business-specific issues one might need to keep on hand: contract-related deal points, emergency procedures, etc. The key is that no matter how digital our world may be, keeping some items in analog form offers a great safety net.

For what other use cases can we envision using a desktop file box?

In your family communication center (perhaps in the kitchen, home office, or family room) use a desktop file box as a mail station. Sure, your kids are going to text you (maybe even from upstairs) to say they need a permission slip signed, but they have to find some place safe to put the permission slip.

If everyone in the family has a folder in the desktop file box to use as their in-house mailbox, there’s one safe place to leave mail, important papers to sign, and notes of encouragement (or maybe apology notes).

If your kids’ schools don’t use portals for sending absence, early dismissal, and tardy excuses, you may be expected to send notes the traditional way. Paper Mommy used to scribble a note on a piece of scratch pad: “Please excuse Julie at 1:15 p.m. today. She has an orthodontist appointment.” (The unspoken remainder? “And I don’t want to bring her back afterward for the last half-hour when she just has gym class and we could be home watching General Hospital. Tracy Quartermaine is withholding her father’s heart medicine, and what is climbing a rope compared to that?!)

If your school expects you to fend for yourself for these kinds of excuses, draft an excuse template with blanks to fill in for the date, time, reason for the absence/early departure/tardy, and a signature line. Print of a short stack of the forms and keep them in one of the folders so you and your co-parent can quickly fill in and sign one to make mornings a little less hectic.

In the kitchen, keep folders of clipped recipes (faves or ones to try), take-out menus, coupons, and those little manuals for kitchen appliances for when your brand-new air fryer just keeps beeping at you and you haven’t quite mastered the instructions (at least not enough to keep the manual in your regular household reference system).

In your children’s rooms or the family communication center, or wherever you handle kids’ paperwork, collect school calendars, lunchroom schedules, activity calendars, etc., create a training system.

When your kids are little, show them how you file items away. As they get older, your middle-school and older students can use a desktop file box to keep track of returned homework, tests, and essays so their lockers and backpacks aren’t overflowing with materials they might need later in the semester (but don’t need to keep schlepping back and forth). These skills will be advantageous to them in college, when they have to handle all of their own papers.

On your home office desk, think about the papers that cause you the most consternation when you forget them. Maybe you’re always forgetting to bring your action-item papers (like the paper forms you need to fill out for the doctor’s office or the financial records to show your accountant). Still, put a reminder in your phone to take the folder with you on the right day.

When creating a mobile workstation — If your desktop file box has handles, it makes it easy to move work files between all the different locations where you need to get things done. That might be the guest room, a co-working space outside of the home, or anywhere else you need some alternate file support. (For more detailed mobile office suggestions, read On the Road Again: Organize Your Mobile Office.)

Gathering critical documents for special projects — Envision the various projects in your personal life when you might want a smaller file space than a drawer, but more than a folder. For example, documentation for a complex tax year, supporting documents for an adoption, or notes and intermediate legal paperwork related to a legal separation or divorce.

Near the entertainment center for complex electronics — In most households, I recommend having a separate section of the family files system for all the different appliances in the house. However, if you’ve got a home entertainment center with a big TV, a stereo, an audio bar and multiple room speakers, plus plug-in doodads like Firesticks or home assistance devices, your digital world may be overwhelming. Keeping a small, unobtrusive desktop file box on the family room bookshelves will help keep all the flimsy little manuals accessible.

A BEVY OF DESKTOP FILE BOX SOLUTION STYLES

Desktop file boxes come in a variety of colors, styles, and materials. This is just an ice cream taste of what you might find for your home or office.

Metal Mesh

Metal mesh desktop file boxes are heavier than plastic, but lighter than acrylic. Although you’ll mainly find black versions in office supply stores, there are other color options online. However, consider that a neutral color like black or white will likely look better with a wider variety of hanging folder colors.

Below, find a GoldOrcle Hanging File Organizer from Amazon. Running from $17.99 to $19.99, depending on which color you choose, the metal mesh comes in black, pink, or white (each with five grey hanging folders), or black with seven assorted rainbow-colored folders.

This mesh file box measures 12.2 wide x 9.45″ high x 5.45″ deep, making it closest in capacity to the plastic file boxes, below. The handle is built into the top of the box frame.

Most mesh boxes are similarly built, though if you want a handle built more into the body of the box and not connected to the frame, Staples has a True Red Wire Mesh File Organizer in black or silver, measuring 12.4″ wide x 5.79″ deep x 10.16″ high for $16.99.

Metallic

The U Brands Hanging File Desk Organizer in Copper and Rose Gold (or alternatively in Gold) is extremely lightweight at only one pound, but measuring 12.2″ wide x 6.85″ deep x 9.37″ high, it’s got one of the larger footprints while not being excessively hefty.

This version has a slightly more decor-oriented vibe than most options, and while the almost 6500 Amazon reviews offer high praise — it ranks 4.9 stars — I wonder about the soldering and how easily transported it is. Perhaps it just looks delicate but is actually tough?

At only $17.99, it’s definitely worth a try if this is your style.

Plastic

The Pendaflex/Oxford Portable Desktop File is a great starter option. It’s lightweight at 1.4 pounds and perfect for when you care more about function than aesthetics. It measures 9-1/2″ high x 12-3/16″ wide x 6″ deep, which offers the perfect balance between a full-sized file crate and some of the shallower file boxes, below. It comes with five letter-sized hanging folders with clear tabs and inserts.

Amazon has it for $18, but this one is also the easiest to find in Big Box stores like Walmart or office supply stores.

If you find black a bit dour, it’s also available in blue (with five color Pendaflex hanging folders, tabs and blank inserts) for $28.90 and slate grey (also with the folders, tabs, and inserts) for $27.50.

There’s no explanation for the difference in price between the three colors.

Acrylic or Lucite

Acrylic and Lucite offer a luxurious, faux-crystal/glass look. However, depending on the workmanship, they (like plastic) can squeak on some countertops and desks. Affixing few flat, felt circles to the underside can reduce the squeak.

The Classic Acrylic Slim Desk Organizer is available for $49.99 from Amazon. It measures 12″ wide x 4″ deep x 10″ high. Although it’s fairly hefty at 2.3 pounds, the 4-inch depth makes it less practical than those with greater front-to-back depth. It’s striking to look at, but I’m always puzzled by the choice of putting the built-in handles on the front and rear of the box, as one would be more likely to carry it holding the short sides.

This Luxe Acrylic Desktop File from The Container Store measures 7″ long (deep), 14-1/2″ wide, and 10-1/8″ high. The UV-resistant material is designed to extend the product life and prevent yellowing, even with exposure to sunlight and other elements. The sturdy side handles extend beyond the body of the box for convenient transport. This exclusive Container Store file box is $32.99.

The Russell & Hazel Clear Acrylic Slim Hanging File Box is similar to the first acrylic option above, but with gold-toned hardware. It measures 4.5″ deep x 12-1/4″ wide x 10″ high. You can purchase it directly from Russell & Hazel for $44.

Fabric-covered

This is the “sneaky” category. Fabric-covered desktop file boxes tend to be built of sturdy cardboard with a cloth covering, and are lidded more often than not. When purchasing online, be sure to check that what’s called a file box actually has either internal hanging file rails or a top edge that serves the purpose of a hanging file rail.

When, I initially looked at the $20 Brightroom Canvas File Box at Target, I was focused on the aesthetics. My larger concern was that the lid might serve as friction; just as people tend not to put laundry in a hamper if it has a lid on it, there’s a tendency to avoid filing when a file box has a lid. I was looking so intently at the lid that I didn’t notice that there were no references to file interior hanging file rails. Oops.

Avoid friction. Just as people tend not to put laundry in a hamper if it has a lid on it, there's a tendency to avoid filing when a desktop file box has a lid. Share on X

Then, I had the same problem with the Container Store’s Bigso Stockholm collection. Pretty colors, decent pricing (at $22.99) but while it references that the boxes “can hold” hanging folders, there’s no reference to (or pictures of) hanging file rails. Buyer beware!

Alternatively, this Oterri File Organizer Box with Lid at Amazon is only $18.99, but has all the features the Brightroom and Stockholm lack. It’s 10.6″ wide x 8.26″ deep x 13.38″ high (with largest footprint of the various options here) and uses a linen fabric cover over sturdy board base. It comes in black, dark blue, green, grey, lavender, light grey, pink, and sky blue.

Although it comes collapsed, when put together, it includes a smooth sliding rail for hanging folders. It does have a lid (a plus for portability, but a downside for those disinclined to file), with an extra mesh pocket for supplies! This is also the only option that is collapsible when not in use.

Wood

As I alluded to in The Truth About Celebrity Organizers, Magic Wands, and the Reality of Professional Organizing back in 2020, I’m not comfortable with Marie Kondo pushing her various lines of what are basically pricey boxes.

However, even I have to admit that the Marie Kondo Shoji Bamboo Desktop File is lovely in its simple elegance. Measuring 13-7/8″ wide x 5-1/2″ deep by 9-7/8″ high, this handmade, bamboo file box, another Container Store exclusive, is $39.99.

For those concerned about the environment and inclined to eschew plastic, bamboo (a renewable resource) may be an appealing option.

Leather

When I seek solutions for clients, I always opt for the highest quality low-cost option. You can always upgrade later.

However, if you prefer something that makes a real aesthetic statement, it’s hard to imagine anything with more quietly ritzy “ta da” power than the Levenger Bomber Jacket Desktop File Holder with Lid. At full cost, it’s $219.50, but is currently on sale for $153.65.

It’s not pictured, but there’s a coordinating lid. There’s also an interior slip pocket to store small items and an exterior pocket. (I’d be inclined to tuck a paper calendar in the exterior pocket with just the current month hanging out.)

FINAL THOUGHTS

Aesthetics only matter if the look of a desktop file box will encourage you to file away those loose pieces of paper. I’d like to discourage you from spending outside your budget in hopes that spending more will change your behavior; it won’t.

Just as with a tickler file, if you’re using a desktop file box to get a handle on completing your tasks, you still need to build a behavioral system to organize what you must get done. For more thoughts on that, I recommend my book, Tickle Yourself Organized.

See Your Way Clear: Organize With Transparent Sticky Notes

Posted on: September 16th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

Longtime Paper Doll readers know that I’ve had a complex relationship with sticky notes. On the one hand, in the very first month of this blog, all the way back in 2007, I railed against writing things on random pieces of loose paper in Stay Far From Floozies: Avoiding the Loose Paper Trap.

On the other hand, over the years I’ve broadened my approach. It’s not the sticky notes, per se, personified by 3M’s Post-it® Notes, that left me chagrined, but the act of writing things you want to remember on any visible piece of paper, without rhyme, reason, or organizational process. To that end, I’ve shared a wide variety of pro-sticky note posts, including:

Organizing With Post-it® Notes: Revenge of the Floozies — Three years after coining the expression “floozies” for loose paper and casting aspersions on sticky notes, I praised the ways you could effectively use sticky notes to keep yourself organized in the office, in dorm rooms and when studying, financially, and when planning projects.
Sticky to the Extreme: Organizing Information in Extreme Situations with Post-it® Extreme Notes — These super-powered stickies handle the extreme conditions of heat, cold, humidity while preserving powerful delivery of the message.
Paper Doll Adds a Pop of Color with Bright & Sunny Office Supplies offered up a colorful review of the Post-it’s ten different themed families of note hues for brightening your work day.
Paper Doll Shares 3 Quirky & Cool New Office Supplies looked at the niftiness of lined sticky notes (and devices for neatly making bullets and lines on them)
Emerson, Angelou, Ted Lasso, Tashlich & Zen Monks: Letting Go for a Fresh Start was ostensibly about new perspectives and giving yourself a new beginning, but it also introduced 3M’s super-nifty Super Sticky Big Notes, 11″ x 11″ and 15″ x 15″ sticky notes.

Paper Doll Helps You Find Your Ideal Analog Habit Tracker — They may look like they’re just tiny scraps of paper, but both traditional sticky notes and specialty items (mini-lists, planners, and habit-trackers) in the Noted by Post-it® line offer cheery solutions for keeping your life organized. We looked at an expanded view of some of the Noted products in In Search of Lost Time: Productivity, Proust, and the Culture of Availability.

So, let me be perfectly clear: stickies have have a place in organizing — as long as they’re used intentionally, mindfully, and not randomly.

With all this in mind, today’s Paper Doll post explores another intriguing sticky note option reminiscent of the novelty we discussed back in 2012 when I looked a different transparent office supply solution, in Paper Doll Rolls the Highlight Reel: Removable Highlighter Tape.

BENEFITS AND USES OF TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

When it comes to organizing thoughts and information, I want the benefits of transparent sticky notes to crystal clear.

In case you’ve never seen a transparent sticky note, think of it as combining the functions of tracing paper and sticky notes.

Transparent sticky notes — which, to be fair, I generally more translucent or slightly “frosted” than entirely transparent — offer several benefits that distinguish them from traditional opaque ones, especially for organizing and annotating. Additionally, the notes (though not the writing) are waterproof and are generally more durable than traditional sticky notes.

Having trouble envisioning how they work? Take a peek:

Academic Uses

Transparent sticky notes are ideal for students at all levels, but particularly in high school and college, especially when studying texts where annotations are helpful or even necessary but the page or document must not be permanently altered.

Transparent sticky notes allow students to scribble questions, ideas, connections, and thoughts directly over content. The notes can be applied, easily removed or repositioned, and (if carefully stored) applied again later.

Overlay Text or Drawings Without Obscuring What’s Beneath

Transparent sticky notes allow you to place and affix notes directly over text or diagrams without covering the printed content.

This is particularly useful for annotating books and textbooks, source documents, or presentations where you want to preserve visibility of the original material.

Science textbooks often include complex illustrations of plants, processes, or anatomical design. Students can learn a few elements at a time, add explanatory text to the overlaid sticky notes, remove the note to test themselves, and create new ones for different elements.

Highlight and Emphasize Information

By placing a transparent sticky note over a portion of text or an image, you can use a highlighter or writing implement to highlight, annotate, or draw attention to specific details without making permanent marks on the original material.

You can use a highlighter directly on a clear transparent sticky note; tinted translucent notes let you both color code concepts or categories and serve the same accenting purpose as a traditional highlighter.

Teachers can write comments pointing to specific areas of a student’s work while not damaging the masterwork, and tutors can add explanatory guidance to notes and then remove them when coaching students to remember what was on them.

Students using printed textbooks can highlight or annotate content, remove and re-affix the notes for studying and self-testing, and then re-sell the practically pristine textbook to the college bookstore after the final exam! (Yes, I know college students primarily use digital textbooks now, but they still read many novels and auxiliary books and use workbooks in traditional formats.)

Copy content to paste into notes

Remember how I said that transparent sticky notes work like a combination of a traditional sticky note and tracing paper? Trace directly from your text book and then affix what you’ve traced into your handwritten notes.

The hand-brain connection means that students will remember the material much better from the experience of hand-tracing than they might if they only photocopied an illustration or chart.

Organizational Uses

This is an organizing blog, after all, so we should look at the organizing advantages.

Layer for Enhanced Organization

You can layer transparent sticky notes on top of one another or over documents without losing sight of the information underneath. This can be useful in complex planning, when you want to group ideas visually without obscuring the main content.

Again, students can use layering for studying illustrations or maps, adding their notes and layering different types of content on top of the original material, with layer upon layer adding more nuance and detailed information. (I’m reminded of my 9th grade Social Studies class where, when faced with a blank mimeographed map of Africa, we had to learn (and later fill in on subsequent weeks), the country names, then the capitals, then the colonial influences, and the top exported product. I could have really used transparent notes, but regular Post-it® Notes hadn’t made it to our school supplies yet!)

Reorganize Ideas Easily

One of the great benefits of traditional sticky notes is that you can move them around, but again, transparent/translucent sticky notes augment that benefit. They allow for more flexible, real-time organization of thoughts, whether they’re used on a document or handout, the page of a textbook or workbook, or even on a large-format item like a map, poster, or whiteboard.

Improve Every Stage of a Project

When you work (or study) in a creative field, your work often has many iterations. Having an overlay for things that aren’t (yet) perfect gives you flexibility to be creative without fear of losing a creative draft or burst of genius.

Clear the Way for Creative Work

Transparent sticky notes can help for artists, designers, and creators who need to annotate their thoughts without hiding underlying sketches or design elements. Create temporary markups and adjustments without altering the original work.

Musicians might create an overlay with the conductor’s suggestions written on an angle, above or below the measures, bars, and notes.

Collaborate and Brainstorm

In collaborative environments — picture a Mad Men-style creative team or a garage band figuring out how different instruments and vocals might come together — transparent sticky notes enable participants to add thoughts or ideas on top of shared content, whether on a design, blueprint, or lyric sheet.

The ability to make changes without altering the original fosters more flexible brainstorming sessions without fear of losing track of the original document or a sequence or flow of ideas.

Who else might use transparent sticky notes?

The unique properties make transparent sticky notes a versatile option in various context. In addition to traditional students and teachers in an academic setting, who else might use these notes?

Authors — Most authors now edit galley copies of their books digitally, directly in PDF files. However, editing that way isn’t always comfortable. Writers might choose to make notes (on clean copies of their galleys or even printed drafts) and then highlight changes on transparent stickies.
Memoirists — Reading your own handwritten journals to help document the history of your thoughts and actions? You probably don’t want your 2024 handwritten notes directly on the pages of your circa-1981 Snoopy diary, but overlaying transparent sticky notes helps the you in the present engage with the you of the past.
Researchers — When faced with a variety of primary sources that can’t be doodled upon (or when you don’t have access to a copy machine but would prefer to handwrite your notes layered over a document), a transparent note can help you make a deeper connection between your thoughts and the original work than taking notes on a computer or pad of paper.
Book reviewers — Whether you review books professionally or just for Amazon or Goodreads, it’s helpful to have your contemporaneous thoughts while reading and your highlighted quotes at the ready. If you find marking up books to be almost sacrilegious, transparent stickies are a great option.
Cooks — Some people take recipes in cookbooks as gospel; others like to “doctor” things up. If you were experimenting as you went, you might not want each changed variable to be written onto the original recipe, but you’d still want to track the changes you made until (or even after) you achieved delicious perfection. TheKitchn blog post This Mind-Blowing BookTok Trend Will Change the Way You Use Your Cookbooks is a bit hyperbolic but does show the use case in action.
Attorneys — Boilerplate contracts are in computers, and paralegals make the revisions digitally as instructed. But most lawyers can be seen reviewing photocopies of contracts and mocking them up with revisions. Transparent sticky notes would let them see the original contract language, highlight relevant passages, and make revisions; similarly, they might use transparent notes to help them accent points in transcribed depositions and testimony they want to refer to in court.
Spiritual adherents — Whether you participate in some kind of formal Bible study or just like reading holy texts from any of a variety of comparative religions, you probably don’t want to scribble your thoughts in the (or any) “Good Book.” Use transparent sticky notes to highlight and annotate questions, feelings, or motivational elements.
Crafters — Whether you’re trying to map colors for a needlepoint project or adjust the measurements on a pattern, writing directly on the instructions or designs can get messy, especially if you need to revise your notes. A transparent overlay lets you adjust without the mess.

How might you use a transparent or translucent sticky note?

CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

While transparent sticky notes offer many benefits, they do have some downsides to consider.

Potential for Residue

Some brands of transparent sticky notes might leave a slight residue, especially if left on delicate surfaces for an extended period. (Bibles and textbooks from before the1950s tend to have pages that are as thin as tissue paper.)

Obviously, this varies depending on the quality of the adhesive used, and higher-end (and honestly, brand-name) versions will typically avoid this problem. If the book or document you’re using is delicate, test it on a back page, like in the glossary or index.

Adhesive Strength

Transparent sticky notes may not be adhere as strongly as traditional opaque sticky notes, particularly on rougher surfaces. Unlike the recycled paper of traditional sticky notes, the slightly slick material used to make transparent sticky notes makes the notes more durable but the adhesive may be less durable. This means they might peel off more easily, especially on surfaces that aren’t perfectly smooth or when the notes are repositioned (or applied, removed, and re-applied) multiple times. Again, test them.

Writing Challenges

Depending on the material, certain pens and markers may not write as well on transparent sticky notes. This can limit their functionality (compared to traditional paper-based sticky notes) if you (like Paper Doll) prefer one specific type of pen. Again, brand-name versions are likely to allow a greater variety of pen use; Post-it® shows multiple examples of workable writing implements.

Less Absorbent Surface

Unlike paper sticky notes, which easily absorb ink, transparent sticky notes are usually made from plasticky or filmy material, like stiff, glossy tracing paper. This can cause ink to smear or take longer to dry.

Most of the TikTok videos I found on the topic are in agreement that mechanical pencils, ball-point pens, and markers work best, and that water-based highlighters and pens are the least effective. If you use markers or gel pens, especially if you also intend to highlight what you’ve written, be sure to let the ink dry thoroughly before touching or highlighting.

Limited Color Options

While some transparent sticky notes come in pastels and neons, they usually lack the range of vibrant colors available with opaque sticky notes, especially the myriad Post-it® colors. This can limit your ability to color-code effectively when organizing ideas. You can easily find colorful options, but perhaps not your preferred color schemes.

Glare and Reflection

Due to their transparent nature, this kind of sticky note may glare under certain lighting conditions, making them more difficult to read or see clearly in brighter environments or on glossy surfaces.

Cost

Transparent sticky notes, whether brand name Post-it® versions or generic, tend to be slightly more expensive than their opaque counterparts, so if you’re on a budget or need a lot of them, the cost could be a drawback.

If you’re using these sticky notes for creative, academic, or professional purposes where clear visibility is key, these downsides may be manageable. However, for heavy-duty or everyday use, traditional sticky notes are usually going to be more practical.

VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

According to the website, Post-it® Transparent Notes come in 7 varieties, all with 36 notes per pad (though I was able to find an additional 10-pack of the clear version at Staples.com for a whopping $26.46)!

original transparent (clear) pad ($7.29 at Staples.com or $5.35 at OfficeSupply.com)
a two-pack with one original clear pad and one blue pad
a three-pack assortment (pink, orange, and green) pads ($12.59 at Quill)
a five-pack assortment (purple, orange, pink, blue, and green)

an eight-pack with four clear pads and one pad each of orange, pink, blue, and green
an eight-pack with two pads each in blue, pink, green, and orange ($14.99 at Amazon)

a twelve-pack pad with a dozen transparent (clear) pads ($19.99 at Amazon)

All measure 2 7/8″ x 2 7/8″. Note, this is slightly smaller than traditional Post-it® Notes, which are generally 3-inch squares.

In terms of shopping, I should caution that it’s difficult to find all versions manufactured by 3M, though Staples, Amazon, and Walmart each seem to dependably have at least two versions in stock at any given time.

3M also references online availability at Quill, OfficeSupply.com, Maxwell’s, and Strobel’s Supply, though the latter two only carry 24-packs, priced in the hundreds of dollars.

ALTERNATIVE BRANDS OF TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

While Post-it® brand is clearly the gold standard for sticky notes, they are definitely not the only game in town, though it’s unlikely you’ll be able to locate many non-3M branded transparent sticky notes in person unless you are shopping at quirky or high-end specialty stationery/office supply stores in larger cities.

Office Depot has its own brand of translucent sticky notes, about $3 for a pack of 50 notes, in clear, as well as yellow, orange, pink, and an assorted pack of 12 pads in all colors for $14.39.

If you’re happening by The Container Store, they also have a proprietary brand, $4.99 for a stack of 36 clear notes.

However, a quick search of Google or Amazon will yield a bounty of options, and if you put “transparent sticky note” into the search at TikTok, you’ll find a number of offers.

Be prepared to have patience. I got excited about the prospect of lined, transparent sticky notes. However, when I went to Stationery Pal‘s website and actually searched for “transparent sticky notes lined,” I was rewarded with some lovely pastel transparent sticky notes, but none were lined. When I tried the same search string but in a different order, I finally got what I was seeking.

In addition to their 2″ x 3″ and 3″ x 3″ pastel-colored “shimmering” translucent sticky notes priced ridiculously low (like $.60 to $1.40 for 50-note pads), they do have blue, green, orange, and pink neon-colored lined, translucent sticky notes. For example, the neon pink, translucent sticky note pads are 3″ square, lined, and $.60/50-note pad, plus shipping.

(I’ve yet to figure out how TikTok Shop advertisers and companies like Temu and Shein can afford to price their products so low. Caveat emptor.)

In general, my inclination is to shop online with Amazon, as I’m generally happy with their customer service. A quick Googling of “transparent sticky notes” yields more than 100 pages of offerings, from plain, clear, 3″-square sticky notes from known brands like Redi-Tag with four 50-note pads for $4.99 to the puzzlingly unpronounceable Brsbock‘s four 50-note 4″ x 6″ transparent sticky notes for $9.99.

Another “unknown” brand on Amazon, Gueevin, offers “extra large jumbo” 8 1/2″ x 11″ translucent sticky note sheets, 100 for $15.99.

Colorful options — if you are openminded about the colors you want — are widely available. I’m transfixed by the LinQuick’s pastel transparent notes. They’re billed as “Candy Color”; a twelve-pack of six assorted colors, 50-notes per pad, costs $7.99.

When I first began researching this topic, I was delighted to find an online store called Rose Colored Daze had a collection of Neon Tabbed translucent sticky notes in three difference sizes, ranging from $4.50to $14.50 for ten-note stacks. Imagine a combination of a sticky note, tracing paper, and indexing tabs!

Sadly, all versions are currently sold out, though they do have a number of other varieties of 50-note pads of translucent sticky notes:

Personally, I find round sticky notes to be inefficient; wouldn’t you want to maximize your surface area? Still, if you have a desire for a round, translucent sticky note, Amazon has oodles, such as these Sabary 1.75″ circular notes, which come in five different color schemes for $6.49 for 500 notes.

So, there’s no need to obscure your ideas — transparent sticky notes will let your thoughts shine through and make the concepts you’re trying to learn less opaque. (So endeth this “clearly” punny post.)

The person who invented transparent sticky notes > pic.twitter.com/hlcDD4gaVy

— The Madwoman in the Classroom (@heymrsbond) July 16, 2022

Paper Doll Shares How To Select a Shredder, Shred Responsibly, and Save

Posted on: April 8th, 2024 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

Much of the following post originally appeared in 2021 and has been updated for 2024 with current product links and shredding discounts.

Klop. KaKLOP! Klunkety klunkety. KaKLOP! Grrrrrr uggggggg. KaKLOP!

No, unlike the officer at U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), I haven’t let a tiny human take over my keyboard. The above is a close approximation of the sound my shredder made last weekend when, after two decades of faithful service and about halfway through shredding documents no longer necessary for tax time, it gave up the ghost.

At first, I thought I might have just fed one too many staples into the grinding teeth of my little document destruction devil. But, when I lifted the shredder from the bin and turned it over, nothing was stuck in the teeth. However, as I shifted the up-ended shredder motor from my left hand to my right, I could hear something sliding back and forth within. Ruh-roh!

Far more curious than mechanically inclined, I took a screwdriver to the whole housing unit, wondering if I might be able to just stick something back in place. (Yeah, go ahead and laugh.) Sadly, I found that a large octagonal metal washer (for want of a better description) had broken completely in half. The wheels on this bus were NOT going to go round and round any longer. I had to buy a new shredder.

DIY SHREDDER ESSENTIALS

Although I haven’t had to purchase a shredder in a long time, this is not my first shredding rodeo. Many of my clients find themselves either buying a first or replacement shredder as part of our work when we’re organizing and purging paper. So at least I knew what I needed to consider.

I hate to be crude, but size matters: the size of your shredder unit, the size of your “shreds,” and the size of the pile (or capacity) you can shred at one time.

Shredder Unit Size

There are three general sizes/types of shredder units: mini, medium, and heavy-duty.

Don’t buy a mini.

Yes, I know, regular readers of this blog recognize that I rarely invoke absolutes; the world is far more grey than black-and-white. However, unless you are buying a shredder for a child, I want to discourage you from buying a mini, or desktop, shredder.

I admit, most “desktop” shredders are not hand-cranked and adorable like the one above. Indeed, most are more like the Aurora AS420C Desktop Style Cross-Cut Shredder below, in that it looks spiffy. But looks can be deceiving.

Often, I find that clients purchase desktop mini-shredders hoping that the small profile and easy desktop access will incline them toward keeping up with their shredding. However, the opposite is true.

Tiny shredders like the Aurora above only take four sheets at a time (vs. 8 or 12 for a more serviceable shredder), fed through its 4-1/2-inch “throat,” or feeder slot. As most mail is 8 1/2-inches wide, anything not already folded into halves or thirds will need to be folded before fed.

If you’ve got a multi-page credit card or utility bill (AmEx bills are usually a ridiculous number of pages, for example), you’ll have to separate the bill and feed just a few pages at a time. And the entire shredder can only accommodate 40 sheets, meaning you’ll have to repeatedly empty the basket. You’ll likely dread the prospect and avoid the task.

You may not ever need to power-shred, but mini- or desktop shredders just aren’t designed for the kind of paper that the average household, and especially the home-based office or actual office, needs to destroy. I‘ve said it before: A mini-shredder is a lot like an Easy-Bake® Oven. Yes, it can do what it promises, but would you cook Thanksgiving dinner without a full-sized oven?

Paper Doll Shares How To Select a Shredder, Shred Responsibly, and Save Share on X

For typical home use, and for one-person offices, a medium-sized shredder should suffice. It should be able to handle four to six gallons of shredded paper (or about 150 to 400 sheets).

If you work in a large office, particularly one that deals with medical paperwork (covered by HIPAA regulations) or client financial information, you will want a shredder designed for large-capacity, heavy-duty shredding, one with an eight-gallon or larger basket/bin and the ability to shred for much longer without the red-light-of-doom. (You’ll also be looking at a shredder that costs many hundreds of dollars, rather than one in the $30-$150 range.)

Shred Size and Shape

There are generally three types of shred sizes produced by consumer shredders. (Industrial shredders can pulverize paper into a fine dust, but that might be going overboard for destroying old bank statements.) These are known as strip-cut, cross-cut, and micro-cut.

Shockingly, I have another absolute for you: don’t buy the old-style strip-cut shredders; they’re rarely sold anymore, but even if you see a good deal at a garage sale, pass it by. Strip-cut shredders offer poor identity theft protection if someone really wants to get their hands on your data.

You will want a cross-cut or micro-cut shredder. A cross-cut shredder reduces your paper to 1-inch to 1-1/2-inch squiggly strips; such shredders are considered secure or “medium-security” and are rated P4 or P3 security levels, respectively. On average, a cross-cut shredder shreds paper into 200 pieces (for a P3-rated shredder) or 400 pieces (for a P4-rated shredder). At home or in a one-person office, a cross-cut shredder will suffice.

A micro-cut shredder chops paper into tiny fragments; micro-cut shredders are rated P5, P6, or P7 (the latter is also called nano-cut, and recommended for government and classified documents) in terms of security levels, shredding papers into 2000, 6000, or 12,000 pieces, respectively.

For an office that deals with HIPAA compliance, financial data, or spycraft, consider a micro-cut shredder. However, this is going to be over overkill (in terms of both function and cost) for use in a home office. (I mean, unless you’re a work-from-home spy, in which case…cool, dude!)

Capacity

There are three aspects to consider when looking at the capacity of a shredder:

1) How many sheets of paper can you feed at one time?

Most shredders you’ll be looking at for home use will be listed as handling 5-10 sheets at a time; for an office, a capacity of 10-18 sheets can be fed at one time. (There’s some cross-over in the home and office categories.) Bear in mind that at the home level, staples and thicker paper can reduce the number of sheets that can be safely fed at one time.

Heavy-duty shredders designed for office use can accommodate anywhere from 13 to 38 sheets at a time, with those at the higher level being much pricier. (That said, remember that shredders are office equipment and can be tax deductible for business use.)

While shredders are generally rated by the number of sheets shredded simultaneously, Paper Doll believes many manufacturers are a bit too optimistic in self-reporting. Just aim for the highest capacity shredder in your budget range.

2) How long can you shred before the shredder conks out? (This is called the shredder’s duty cycle.)

Ever get the red-light-of-doom while you’re shredding? This is the “Do not pass GO, do not collect $200!” message that means your shredder needs to cool down. Promotional materials usually claim that smaller shredders for home use can operate for two-to-three minutes continuously before needing a 20-to-30 minute break.

That doesn’t seem like very much time, but recognize that if you’ve got your shredder set to “on” rather than “automatic,” the shredder is only operating while you are pushing papers through. So, skip the automatic setting, take a few seconds between each multi-page pile of papers, and you’ll be OK for getting a bit more use.

Shredding companies have started listed their duty cycles on promotional material, but official capacity and real-world usage can be at odds, so do read the reviews.

3) What else can your shredder accommodate besides paper?

Any shredder you acquire should be able to handle stapled papers and (expired) credit cards. (Seriously, when you get your new credit card, make sure you put it somewhere away from the shredder and double-check the expiration date on the one you’re about to shred. I’ve heard from too many clients that they’ve oopsied this.)

Most should also be able to shred CDs and DVDs, but if you have a lot of data on disk, be sure to check that your intended purchase can accommodate what you need to shred.

Other Considerations

Aesthetics — Unlike cell phones and other modern electronic devices, nobody seems to have given any thought to whether a shredder is attractive (to the eye or to the ear). I have yet to see a useful shredder in designer colors, and you’re pretty much limited to combinations of black and silver.

Obviously, design shouldn’t be your main concern, but you are likely to avoid using an ugly shredder or one that screeches. (Remember The Great Mesozoic Law Office Purge of 2015? When we cleaned out my father’s law office, he had an ancient, “yellowing” beige shredder. It was capital-U ugly, but Paper Mommy needed a shredder and was convinced she’d make use of it. Yeah. No.)

With regard to sound, whenever possible, test a friend’s shredder or ask a sales associate to help you test a floor model. The noise a shredder makes won’t exactly be pleasant, but some have more vibration or grinding than others. In another “you get what you pay for” instance, high capacity shredders make a smoother, less grind-y noise.

Ease of Use — The main concerns are an adequate-width feeder and an easy-to-empty basket or bin. The nicest shredders have a removable bin that slides out like a drawer or tips out like a laundry chute, but these tend to be more expensive than the budget versions, where the shredding mechanism lifts up and off to reveal a metal or rubber receptacle.

Avoid the low-rent shredders that only provide a mechanism to set atop a trash can; these are usually ill-fitting, poorly balanced, and lead to a flurry of shreds on your carpet, which furry animals and tiny humans will spread far and wide.

Special features — Some shredders, particularly those designed for a communal workspace, market special features at a higher price. For example, Fellowes markets a “100% Jam-Proof” micro-cut shredder upwards of $3100! And shockingly, it doesn’t even come with the hunky office worker pictured below!

Others promote energy savings and quiet operations. As always, consider how often you’ll be using your shredder to determine how much extra you are willing to pay for special features.

At the lower end of the scale, you may want to consider the basket or bin into which you shred. The bin for my old shredder, the one that bit the dust, was made of metal mesh, which meant that a lot of the shredding dust poured into the air if I didn’t use a bag, but when I used a bag, I couldn’t tell when it was almost full.

Further, most shredders are designed so that the shredding unit/lid won’t fit properly into the bin if you’ve lined it with a bag, and if they do, most grocery-style plastic bags are smaller than the bin, so you’re not able to use your full capacity.

The front window in my cute new shredder

My new purchase warns not to use a bag; however, the base is made of a solid plastic (much like a trashcan) so there’s no shred dust plume, and has a nice window to give me a sense of when I’m about to reach maximum capacity. At that point, I must carefully lift up the shredding unit, tilt and flip it quickly to avoid spreading bits of shreds everywhere, and then I can upend the whole bin into the trash.

I prefer the shredders with tilt-out and slide-out receptacles, but there’s always a trade-off. I’m frugal and don’t have a lot of demands, aside from my shredder not making the “Klop. KaKLOP! Klunkety klunkety. KaKLOP! Grrrrrr uggggggg. KaKLOP!” sound more often than every few decades.

I purchased the Amazon Basics 8-sheet shredder because it was on sale last week, running five dollars less than it is right now, and because it was a Best Seller (probably because it’s so inexpensive).

[Editor’s note: I have now lived with this shredder for three years and have zero complaints about function. But yes, it would be cool to have a purple shredder.]

Because you need to live and work with it, it’s important to pick a shredder with the features you need and want.

Still not sure what you want? Fellowes offers a very cool interactive Shredder Selector tool to help you choose among a variety of features, including shredder capacity, feeder type, number of users, volume of shredding, maximum run time, security level, shredder safety, and even a few extras.

PROFESSIONAL SHREDDING SERVICES

You already know how important it is to shred the papers that you no longer need for tax, legal, or proof-of-ownership purposes; merely tossing them in the trash could make you a quick victim of identity theft. But you also know that once your shred pile is as tall as the youngest of your tax-deductible dependents, your home-rated shredder is likely to wimp out before you get through your seasonal pile shredding.

If you lack the time, space, shredding power, or intestinal fortitude to conquer your backlog of shredding, you have a variety of options for getting professional help. A number of companies are available nationwide to help with document destruction, including:

You are likely to have local and regional shredding companies at your disposal as well.

If you need help finding shredding services in your area, turn to the International Secure Information Governance & Management Association^TM (i-SIGMA^®) (formerly the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID)).

Search the iSIGMA portal for an interactive map of NAID AAA-certified shredding companies nearest to you. Enter your zip code and the system will provide you with a map and list of document destruction services in your area. You can also narrow your search to filter for different kinds of destruction certifications.

Note: Most shredding services offer a combination of drop-off and secure pick-up services; if your office or organization requires regularly scheduled shredding, you can arrange for periodic pickups.

Many retail locations also have relationships with document destruction services. In these situations, you generally self-serve your papers into a slot in a large, locked container that looks much like the garbage and recycling cans you wheel to the street on trash day; the shredding companies usually do pickups every week–to–two weeks and either shred paper in a specialized truck in the store’s parking lot, or trade out an empty bin and take the full one to their physical operations.

Getting your shredding done in the same parking lot where you pick up your groceries or get your office supplies is convenient (and less labor than shredding piles of paper for yourself), but the cost is likely to be a little more than you’d pay if dealing directly with a document destruction service. Prices typically range from a dollar per pound (when discounted), upward.

Check with your local retail locations to see if, how, and at what price they offer shredding services. Start with:

Office Depot/Office Max

Staples

UPS Store

FedEx Office

Note, some locations (such as FedEx Office) will shred paper but will not shred CDs, DVDs, credit cards, non-paper ID cards, 3-ring binders, file folders, or laminated items. If you have multiple non-paper items to shred, call ahead to your local retailers to verify what they will shred.

Before you head out, be sure to check the retailers’ sites for discounts, or use your favorite search engine to search “[store name] shredding coupon 2024” to see what discounts are currently available.

Office Depot tends to change discount offerings each month. Right now, Office Depot is offering 5 pounds of in-store shredding for free and 20% off any one-time shredding pick-up service. Both offers expire April 27, 2024. To get the actual scannable coupons barcodes, scroll to the bottom of the Office Depot shredding page and present the coupons on your device at time of sale.

(And sigh, no, I don’t think the fella in the above picture is include in Office Depot’s serivce.)

Staples doesn’t appear to be offering any consumer-based shredding discounts right now, but you can be a hero at your office if you point out Staples’ Iron Mountain 10% off discounts fro one-time shredding of 1 to 21 full-sized bins.

FREE SHREDDING EVENTS

Throughout the year, various government agencies, banks and credit unions, community groups, senior centers, houses of worship, universities partner, and AARP partner with shredding companies for free events billed as shredathons and shred days. In particular, watch for Better Business Bureau-affiliated shredding events associated with tax time and Secure Your ID Day. (Dates vary by region.)

Document destruction companies (like Iron Mountain, Shred-It, Pro-Shred, and Shred Nations) bring their giant paper-chomping trucks to specified parking lots so you can get your papers securely shredded on-site.

Tax time is the perfect opportunity to clear out your file folders, your desk drawers, your purses, wallets, and pockets, and to shred all those random receipts and documents that you don’t need to support your tax returns, keep you legal, or prove ownership of your stuff.

Of course, if you don’t know what you need to keep vs. what you should shred, Paper Doll has you covered with Do I Have To Keep This Piece of Paper?

Whether you shred at home or work, use a service, or attend a shredding event, plan time in your schedule to shred. Declutter, protect your identity, and save time and money!

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Archive for ‘Office Supplies’ Category

How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 3: Tangible Timers

DISK-Y BEHAVIOR: TIME TIMER, THE BIG KAHUNA OF PRODUCTIVITY TIMERS

Seeing Time

Original Time Timers

Time Timer Plus

Time Timer Mod

Time Timer RETRO Eco Edition

Time Timer BRAILLE 8”

OTHER PHYSICAL TIMERS

Focus Timer® Visual Timer

Moaas Timers

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

How to Use Timers for Improved Productivity and Focus — Part 2: Pick the Right Timer

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TIMER?

A Good Timer Must Be Simple

A Good Timer Should Offer A Bonus

A Good Timer Integrates with What You Already Have

A Good Timer Shows You the Shape of Time

A Good Timer Should Be Frictionless

A Good Timer Is Process-Agnostic

HOW TO IDENTIFY THE BEST TIMER FOR YOUR NEEDS AND PERSONALITY

Aesthetics of a Timer

Customizability without complexity

Affective Design Customization

One-and-done or loop-de-loop?

Discretion is the better part of timing

Picking a timer for someone else

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Paper Doll Explores the Best of Desktop File Boxes

THE BENEFITS OF DESKTOP FILE BOXES

Small Footprint for Maximized Space Efficiency

Ease of Accessibility

Improved Organization

Customizable

Portability

Visual Clarity

Versatility

USE CASES FOR DESKTOP FILE BOXES

A BEVY OF DESKTOP FILE BOX SOLUTION STYLES

Metal Mesh

Metallic

Fabric-covered

Wood

Leather

FINAL THOUGHTS

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

See Your Way Clear: Organize With Transparent Sticky Notes

Academic Uses

Organizational Uses

Improve Every Stage of a Project

Who else might use transparent sticky notes?

CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

Potential for Residue

Adhesive Strength

Writing Challenges

Less Absorbent Surface

Limited Color Options

Glare and Reflection

Cost

VARIETIES OF TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

ALTERNATIVE BRANDS OF TRANSPARENT STICKY NOTES

Paper Doll Post:

Like this:

Paper Doll Shares How To Select a Shredder, Shred Responsibly, and Save

DIY SHREDDER ESSENTIALS

Shredder Unit Size

Shred Size and Shape

Capacity

Other Considerations

PROFESSIONAL SHREDDING SERVICES

FREE SHREDDING EVENTS