Archive for ‘Office Supplies’ Category
Organize Your Thoughts & Your Desk with Desktop Whiteboards
Over the last two years, we’ve understandably seen a vast increase in people working from home. As they’ve done so, they’ve transitioned from those early ad hoc set-ups at the dining room table using chairs better suited for celebrating Thanksgiving than spending eight hours in front of a computer. Little by little, we’ve all added the items that made office work, if not outright enjoyable, at least little more efficient and comfortable.
However, a number of my clients who’ve fully embraced working from home have commented that they miss whiteboards. For some, it’s the collaborative nature; for others, it’s the ease of grabbing a chunky pen and writing on something fixed-in-place.
The impermanence of the words — let’s face it, a whiteboard is just a dry-erase board with a 21st century title — doesn’t seem to bother most people because of the sense of the fixed-in-place aspect of the whiteboards themselves. A loose piece of paper may get buried; a sticky note might flutter into the trash. But a note on a whiteboard stays until you wish it to depart.
However, even if you’ve made your dining room, spare bedroom, or other space in the house into an office, complete with desk and chair, lighting and filing space, you may not have invested in a whiteboard like you had in your olden-days office. But have you considered a desktop whiteboard?
BENEFITS OF DESKTOP WHITEBOARDS
While a desktop whiteboard isn’t always a perfect solution, it can have appealing advantages. A desktop whiteboard is (or can be):
Installation-free — Maybe you’re handy, but Paper Doll is not. My walls are embarrassingly bare, as even though I can find a stud (no jokes, please), the sheetrock in my apartment is pretty “meh.” I’d rather not hang or install anything too heavy. Plus, if your office is in a highly visible area of your home, you may not want a massive whiteboard clashing with your decor. Instead of installing a whiteboard on the wall, opting for a smaller profile item might be appealing.
Portable — Do you need to be mobile? Depending on your work style, you may move around your home or sometimes set yourself up in coffee houses or co-working spaces. If you’re a student, you may split your time between your home or dorm desk and your carrel at the university library.
And even if you do go into the office, more and more companies are going hybrid and eliminating assigned desks, opting for hot-desking where you work at a different desk each time you come in. With all of these situations, wouldn’t having a portable whiteboard you can use on your desk be a nice option?
Analog — To be sure, I’m a big fan of digital note-taking. Have I mentioned that I just completed re-certification as an Evernote Certified Expert?
However, for a lot of us, tiny bits of information need to stay in front of us for almost-immediate use. There are many times where we just want to quickly capture a phone number, name, turn of phrase, or concept, and the fastest way to do this is by grabbing a pen and writing it down.
I’m a pacer — when I’m on the telephone and really in sync with the person with whom I’m conversing, I can get most of my 10,000 Fitbit steps a day logged while chatting and pacing the room. While I could definitely go back to my desk, sit down, open a task app or Evernote screen, it’s going to be more convenient for me to scribble on a small whiteboard.
Sure, I could write on a sticky note, but on a busy day, that might lead to a snowstorm of stickies across my desk, which isn’t particularly eco-friendly.
And yes, I could take advantage of the newest Evernote feature, Evernote Helper to make a quick note. If you’ve got Evernote running in the background, just click Control + Command + H on a Mac or Control + Alt + H on a Windows PC, then type (or copy & paste) information into the resulting mini-note; clicking anywhere else on the screen takes you back to what you were doing and the note hides until you want or need it. I could explain further, but my buddy Dr. Frank Buck created a whole video post on this very topic.)
My point, and I do have one, is that there are times when an analog approach to capturing small pieces of information works best, and a whiteboard can be the way to do it.
Motivational — Again, yes, a digital approach can be motivational. On my iPhone, a reminder to be mindful pops up on my screen (with an associated ding) every time I get out of the car. It asks me, “What are you tolerating?” to help me align with the concepts I discussed in Organize Away Frustration: Practice The Only Good Kind of “Intolerance.”
On my Mac, when I hit F3 to get to my little dictionary app, I also get a screen of inspirational digital sticky notes I’ve created, like these:
But back in ye olden days when I worked in television, I had a whiteboard on one wall and a bulletin board on another. As with most people, I let my bulletin board get cluttered, but my whiteboard served as an ideal spot to write the message of the day, whether it was one word, like RESILIENCE, or an entire message, like, “I have radical trust in the perfect unfolding of my life,” as we talked about in The Perfect Unfolding As We Work From Home.
Environmentally-appealing — Last week was Earth Day, so sustainable products have been on my mind. We should note that not all whiteboards are equally Earth-friendly. Most whiteboards are made of one of three types of materials: glass, porcelain, or melamine. Glass, obviously, is recyclable. Porcelain whiteboards (often made of ceramics with steel or aluminum backing to make them magnetic) are not easily recycled; melamine is not recyclable at all.
If sustainability is important to you, consider these factors when you pick any whiteboard option. (And check out the nifty steel options discussed later in this post!)
PREVIOUSLY ON PAPER DOLL
Last year, in Paper Doll Models the Spring 2021 Organizing Products, while looking at the the Quartet Portable Glass Dry-Erase Pad, I found something nifty on a grander scale. At the time, I wrote the following.
Quartet Desktop Glass Whiteboard Computer Pads
Quartet‘s Desktop Glass Whiteboard Computer Pads are just as environmentally friendly as their portable cousins, but they are designed to be used at the computer, where there’s far less chance of dropping them! (What?! I can’t be the only person who fears being klutzy and having a purse full of shattered glass!)
This two-pound, 18″ wide by 6″ high, angled organizing tool does double-duty. The contemporary-style glass top is made of a sleek, durable, dry-erase surface, designed to fit in with any office or home décor.
The non-porous glass does not absorb ink, so Quartet guarantees (for 15 years!) that it will not stain or ghost, and it’s made to resist dents and scratches in case you have a cat or tiny human (or co-worker who behaves like either one) visiting your desk. So, write your task list or the phone numbers you’re transcribing from voicemail, erase, write something completely new – all to your heart’s content.
The writing area is only part of what makes the Desktop Glass Whiteboard Computer Pad useful. The item as a whole is designed to sit between your keyboard and your monitor, and the built-in storage drawer slides out to expose space for markers, sticky notes, flash drives, and whatever you want to keep at your desk while maintaining a clutter-free work environment.
There’s also a small trough at the top of the angled surface where your dry-erase markers can nest comfortably until you write your next reminder.
The Quartet Glass Dry-Erase Desktop Computer Pads come in five styles: White, Marble (grey with gold accents), Floral (white with pink accents), Dot (white with blue accents), and Black (with silver accents).
Reviewers advised that while a variety of dry-erase markers will work, the Quartet branded ones seem to have the best staying power and erase the most cleanly, so caveat emptor. I should also note that it’s not immediately obvious what color dry-erase ink colors would be visible on a black background. It appears the black version comes with white dry-erase marker.
The different versions range in price from $31-$40 on the Quartet website, and $29-$44 on Amazon.
Since the time I published that post, there’s been an explosion in the popularity and availability of desktop whiteboards. There hasn’t been this much excitement in the world of whiteboards since Tim Russert’s “Florida, Florida, Florida” in 2000!
A BUFFET OF OPTIONS FROM FLUIDSTANCE
You might recognize Fluidstance from their ubiquitous balance board ads on Facebook, but I’ve become fascinated by their ever-increasing desktop products.
Fluidstance Slope Personal Desktop Whiteboard
First up is their Slope Personal Desktop Whiteboard, which takes an upscale twist on the usual whiteboard product. It’s not glass, porcelain, or melamine: it’s 100% heavy-duty steel (so it’s magnetic), and powder-coated using a low-emissions process.
Manufactured in California, Fluidstance says Slope’s design is inspired by “an open, groomed ski run.” The angle is gentle for ease of writing and the top dry-erase surface is described as “premium.” Unlike the Quartet version, it doesn’t have a cubby for supplies, but it does have a channel at the top to nestle dry-erase markers and any other writing implements.
Slope’s raised surface lets you slide your keyboard underneath for storage, so you can free up space on you desk for when you’re having lunch (but seriously, don’t have lunch at your desk — get some fresh air!) or doing some other analog writing.
There are felt bumpers to protect your desk from scratches or other marks, and it (and all of the Fluidstance products mentioned below) comes with a microfiber eraser pouch in which the dry-erase pen is packed.
And, as of last month, Slope comes with a free silicone phone holder crafted to fit within the pen channel and keep your desk tidy.
Slope measures 20″ long (18 3/4″ underneath) by 8″ wide by 3 1/2″ high (at the highest point, and 1 1/4″ as the lower, near, end); it weighs about three pounds. Slope comes in five color schemes: White, Blue Steel, Slate (grey), Honeycomb (yellow) and, in a limited edition Sequoia (green); Slope costs $69 at the Fluidstance online store (and at Amazon, where only the white version is available).
Slope (as all their products) comes with a lifetime warranty; they will repair or replace items for free.
Fluidstance also has a Slope+ for $99 with all of the features of the Slope, plus a phone charger.
Fluidstance Edge
Do you write a lot? I mean, not necessarily as much as Paper Doll, but perhaps twice as much as you’d need to write to cover a Slope? I guess some of the folks at Fluidstance have the same issue, as they’ve developed the Edge, which is similar to the Slope, but with a reversible, double-sided writing surface in the same 100% heavy-duty steel.
Of course, because it’s double-sided, there’s no marker channel (because, duh, the markers would fall out), and no phone holder. However, the metal base extends up through the writing surface to make a small “fence” where you can rest your markers temporarily.
The Edge comes in white or black-and-white (with a white writing surface and a black metal base); it’s also $69. The measurements are slightly different from the Slope, as shown above.
Fluidstance Lift
The above options are ideal if you’re using a desktop (as I am) or a laptop with an external keyboard. Your little whiteboard fits right in that space between your fingers flying over the keyboard and your computer. But what if you’re using a laptop at a standing desk? What if you should be looking at a monitor that’s up a little higher? Fluidstance has you covered!
The Fluidstance Lift™ is a two-in-one personal whiteboard and laptop riser. It’s designed to improve your ergonomic set-up by “raising your laptop to the ideal height for viewing a primary or secondary monitor” while still giving you a great dry-erase space on a durable, 100% steel, powder-coated platform. Take a look at the video:
There are silicone grommets on the base to hold Lift in place while keeping the desk protected, and there’s a felt pad (made out of 100%-recycled plastic bottles) to nestle your laptop.
The Lift is $79 at the Fluidstance store.
Fluidstance Wall and Flow Cards
If the 100%-steel, magnetic whiteboard appeals to you but you want more elbow room, without having your whiteboard so close to the keyboard or computer, there are yet more options in store. The Fluidstance Wall is a freestanding, double-sided whiteboard wall suitable for sitting on your desk. Consider it a privacy screen combined with a whiteboard, eminently portable for when you’re working in a school library or coffee house or just in a distracting office space.
(For more on privacy screens, whether for safety or productivity, check out last year’s Paper Doll post, Divide and Conquer: Improve Productivity With Privacy Screens.)
Use Wall on its own as a whiteboard or with Flow Cards (see below), or as a pin-up board with magnets. (Use your own, or get Fluidstance’s pushpin-like versions for $9.)
The base and wall are 24″ wide; the entire set-up measures 20″ high, though the vertical writing surface is just 15″. The base measures 5.6″ front-to-back.
The Wall’s base comes in Blue Matte, Orange, or Grey, and has a 19″ x 2.5″ slot (accessible from all sides) for storing markers, pens, and other desk accessories.
The Wall is $99.
At the risk of sounding like a commercial from the 1980s, but wait, there’s more!
If you want a smaller profile for writing your notes when you’re on the go, or want to combine multiple surfaces with the Wall, you can go either way. Fluidstance’s Flow Cards are four round-edged square, magnetic, dry-erase cards. (You get two grey, one green, and one blue one to a set.)
Purchase just the Flow Cards if you want to use them with the Wall, Edge, or Slope, or get a set combined with their 100% steel, white card holder (below).
The front of the holder is also a magnetic whiteboard surface, and you can store up to eight Flow Cards in the rear of the holder. So organized!
A set of Flow Cards is $35; a set sold with the holder is $59.
SIMILAR OPTIONS FROM DIFFERENT SOURCES
Did you like Fluidstance’s mixture of a privacy screen and a whiteboard, but you prefer to use your Amazon Prime account for everything?
VIVO Desktop Whiteboard is a freestanding 23″ x 19″ double-sided dry-erase board that also serves as a privacy divider.
The VIVO has a dual-sided, opaque glass surface with a sturdy aluminum 23″ x 5 1/2″ support base, which holds dual accessory slots to store markers, pens, and other supplies. See it in action:
It’s a heavier option than Fluidstance’s Wall; it’s 18 pounds (vs. the Wall’s 11 pounds, 9 ounces) making it quite a bit less comfy to make portable. It runs $79.99 at Amazon.
If you like the original Quartet Desktop Glass Whiteboard Computer Pads, but prefer more options when you shop, Wayfair has black and white versions of Inbox Zero’s Computer Notepad Desk Organizer for a similar price of about $32.
The white Computer Notepad Desk Organizer comes with a black dry erase marker, red eraser, and a set of sticky notes, while the black version includes a white neon wet-erase marker as well as the the red eraser and sticky notes!
The glass notepad portion flips up to reveal a divided inner storage compartment for office supplies.
Finally, in case you’d like something that feels less modern and perhaps a little earthier, there’s the Nøk and Cranny Desktop Glass Dry Erase Whiteboard Computer Pad with a bamboo storage drawer.
The writing surface is white glass, and the bamboo storage drawer runs the complete length and width at 12″ x 6″ x 2.5″ and can slide in either direction. There are non-slip pads affixed to the bottom of the bamboo housing, and the whiteboard computer pad comes with a fine-point dry-erase marker.
It’s $33 at Amazon.
Readers, what do you think? Would you make use of a desktop whiteboard? Which one? While I liked the Quartet version when I wrote about it last year (and still do), I’m intrigued by the variety of Fluidstance options and would love to try the Slope as well as the Flow Cards with the holder (though I’d prefer some snazzier colors, as the grey, green, and blue really aren’t Paper Doll‘s style).
Paper Doll Post:
On the Road Again: Organize Your Mobile Office
Road Warrior Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
During the last two years, the watchword has been “work from home.” In this recent WFH era, we’ve eschewed office buildings and turned snuggly corners of our bedrooms and dining rooms into home offices. Many companies have closed their local operations altogether, finally trusting that there’s no need to micromanage their knowledge-worker staffs. More and more, companies are OK with letting people work where and how they operate best.
Of course, this isn’t the case with everyone. Some employers are rushing at breakneck speed to return the North American workplace experience to “normal,” despite the distinct rise in European and Asian COVID cases of the Omicron BA.2 subvariant. Count me as one of those who is curmudgeonly aghast at the state-by-state dropping of precautions, as I noted in the following reply to a friend, which got a lot of Twitter love.
I am so tired of people saying it’s over because they want it to be over. It’s not a relationship, it’s a virus.
— Julie Bestry, CPO® (@ProfOrganizer) March 23, 2022
Obviously, though, there are some people who can’t work from home. Your favorite restaurant can’t let the sous-chef work from his back deck. An OB-GYN is the perfect example of how you can’t phone in every kind of delivery!
And people who travel about for work, whose very career depends on them physically arriving at different locations, whether locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally, need to get on the road (or the tarmac), however ambivalent they might feel about the prospect. And, of course, they need to be organized.
HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR MOBILE OFFICE
From smart phones to Zoom to cloud computing, modern technology has made road warriors a little less embattled, but keeping your mobile office from looking like an outtake from Game of Thrones battle requires some special equipment and finesse.
Over twenty years as a professional organizer, I have worked with a wide variety of clients who work, at least some of the time, from the road.
There have been numerous pharmaceutical sales representatives who needed to organize medical literature, promotional materials, medication samples, durable medical goods, and anatomical models and schlep them from medical offices and hospitals in their assigned local or regional areas. I’ve worked with a few mobile pharmacists serving as pharmacy supervisors, traveling each week to different outlets, and working both as members of their profession and in consultant/supervisory capacities on behalf of their companies.
I had one client who traveled her “territories” in various parts of the country for a restaurant chain, training franchisees and their staff on everything from computer systems to how to prepare and garnish certain delicious foodstuffs. And one client shared memorable tales of his experiences as a high-level insurance executive assigned to travel and review high profile claims.
What all of these hearty folks had in common is that they needed to have all of their necessary office supplies, documents, and resources available to them with the same ease of accessibility as when they were comfortably seated in actual offices. While each had unique needs, their were a wide number of commonalities.
In the Car
Let’s focus on documents. Back at a decidedly stationary office, you’d have filing cabinets, hanging file drawers in a desk, and a variety of other options with the distinct advantage that you never need worry about jostling.
Cars, however, jostle. They are buffeted by the wind on the highway and hit unanticipated bumps from potholes and running over detritus that has fallen off of other vehicles.
If your mobile office requires bringing lots of glossy literature, forms, or other pre-printed material, you’ll want to approximate a standard filing system as much as possible.
Personally, I’m a fan of sturdy file crates. These crates, fashioned after old-school milk crates but with file rails on all four sides (to accommodate letter-sized or legal-sized files) take a licking and keep on ticking when you’ve got a heavy load of hanging files filled with file folders and lots of paper.
My favorite version is made by Sterilite and, like the very best versions of the TARDIS’s control room, has lots of “round things.” I own them in four different shades of pink/plum/mauve, plus blues and blacks. Another client swears by teal.
In most “big box” stores like Target or Walmart or office supply stores, you can usually fine single crates for $5-10. (Storex makes a very similar version, with weirder displays of “round things,” but usually only in packs of three or more for somewhat higher prices.)
A good alternative to file creates is to pick a few sturdy lidded totes equipped with hanging file rails. In this case, I’m not referencing portable file boxes (we’ll get to those), but larger file tubs requiring a two-handed grip. Bankers Box (yes, famous for their fold-into-place cardboard paper storage) has hearty one:
Office Depot and Staples have their own lines of dependable tubs. They key is that you want a heavy-duty file tote or tub with hanging rails, one that will withstand the test of time and changes in temperature and humidity. A warped tote is not a happy tote.
These crates or totes should generally stay in your trunk or the rear of your hatchback/SUV, removed rarely just for cleaning of the vehicle. In general, if you keep the contents organized and maintained, updating which folders (and which file contents) are stored within, they shouldn’t require much upkeep.
Aesthetics are less important than durability. However, if you’re eager to move your resources from your trunk to your a hotel room or event venue, there are other options, with functional and aesthetic appeal.
Last year, I guest-blogged for the great folks at meori, and wrote From Dad’s Study to the Modern Home Office, performing a deep dive into the essentials of a home office. One of my favorite products I got to know was meori’s Hanging Office Box.
It’s available in a few different colors, accommodates hanging files, and is collapsible.
Whichever you choose, use these kinds of file storage for stockpiling multiple copies of leave-behind resources: glossy one-sheets, brochures, catalogs, blank forms, and templates. To ensure that you’re always prepared for a surprise trip, restock your mobile file space weekly if you stay local, or upon each return from out of town.
On Client Calls
When you head into a client meeting while on the road, you’re not going to want to keep zipping back to your car for the documents you want to share or disburse. If you think of the trunk storage totes and crates as the big deep-freezer in your basement, these next options are more like your lunch box or picnic basket. You’ll use them for your laptop or tablet, essential files, and office supplies and related resources, like chargers. It’s the stuff you carry with you.
Recently, I shared with you my beloved ZÜCA Business Backpack.
For an even more refined look, the Samsonite Business Slim Backpack (in Cognac or Black) is a sleek option.
A full analysis of business backpacks is probably better left for a post on travel, but I can tell you that there’s enough of a variety of business backpacks that you can be assured they’ve come a long way from the backpacks of the days of pep rallies and bus rides. To find a professional backpack to your liking, consider these expert round-ups:
Specialist Satchels: The 19 Best Men’s Backpacks for Work from The Coolist
19 Best Laptop Backpacks the Provide Both Fashion and Function from Marie Claire
The 10 Best Business Travel Backpacks from the blog The Broke Backpacker
The Best Minimalist Laptop Backpacks from Proactive Creative
If you’re looking for something with a little more accent on fashion, primarily for hanging files, there are alternatives to the standard backpack or briefcase. Sadly, the long-beloved (by clients and professional organizers alike) leatherette file totes from Jamie Raquel exist no more, but Levenger’s LevTex Portable File Totes scratch a similar itch.
Available in Black, French Blue, Purple, Red, or Hickory, with a tan twill interior lining, the LevTex line runs $99.50 each (though I’m spotting it on sale for $69 at the time of publication of this post).
At a lower price point, Home District has a similar faux leather Chic File Folder Organizer Tote in Red, Brown, and Black for just $39.99 via Amazon:
If image is less important to your line of work than durability, and you’ve got a lot of paperwork to share in meetings or at events, consider a portable file box with hinged lids, sturdy handles, and hanging file rails. Search for “portable hanging file box” and you’ll come up with a wide variety of brand-name and generic versions like this:
These are practical for bringing in just what you need for a specific client call: notes, blank contracts, and a subset of literature from the mobile file space in the trunk.
If you carry blueprints or other large-format documents, carry both a standard portable file box for business papers and an art portfolio case. If you will be leaving designs behind, use inexpensive red rope portfolios; invest in a durable leather or nylon case if you will be using it long-term.
When you’re on the road, is your need to schlep a more heavy-duty experience? Expanding rolling crates are suitable when your display materials include heavy catalogs and sample products. They offer a robust upgrade from portable file boxes and won’t break the bank — or your back.
For a more elegant or refined look, try a rolling catalog case or a leather litigation briefcase like you see lawyers (or, more likely, their paralegals) using on TV.
And while you’re gathering all the resources to show off to your clientele or supervisees, make sure you don’t lose sight of all the chargers, cables, gadgets, tools, and small personal items that keep you efficient.
One favorite line of professional organizers everywhere is the Grid-It! from Cocoon Innovations. I am constantly amazed at how much I can pack into a small space with just a Grid-It! board covered in elasticized bands, but Grid-It! never fails to secure possessions, prevent tangles, and ensure that nothing falls into a black hole.
Cocoon also has an impressive array of slimline backpacks with Grid-It! stylings built in, for the road warrior who is living on the road, or in the air. Speaking of which…
On the Road…and On the Tarmac
Are you spending time in hotels, dropping in at co-working spaces, or hot-desking at divisions of your company as you jaunt around the country or around the world? When space is at a minimum but you want to feel like can keep your eye on all of your documents and resources, it can be helpful to adjust the vertical control. Look upward instead of outward!
For my clients who are always on the road, I suggest the Smead Cascading Wall Organizer. This snazzy revamp of the original can hang on the wall or anywhere from a nail, hook, or even a hotel hanger to reduce clutter in your workspace.
Made of durable, bright, and easy-to-clean polypropylene, the six colorful (yellow, orange, fuscia, green, blue, and purple) letter-size pockets can be removed to take to individual meetings. (Each folder holds up to 50 sheets.)
Use the clear front pocket to show the current month’s calendar, a project timeline or GANTT chart. (Fuzzy on that? Check out Checklists, Gantt Charts, and Kanban Boards – Organize Your Tasks from last year.) There’s a 3-part hanger (use one loop or all three), and an elastic cord closure for putting it all together and stowing it away.
The whole thing is PVC-free and acid-free, and measures 14 1/4″ wide by 24″ high (when fully expanded). Available directly from Smead for $19.03, or you can find it on Amazon for $15.28.
There are two variations on the theme. If the above brights are too vibrant for your super-stuffy colleagues, the clear version (with pastel pockets) of the Cascading Wall Organizer is also $19.03 at Smead or $11.10 at Amazon:
Conversely, there’s one with sumptuous jewel tones for $10.94.
The Container Store has a similar product, the Multi-Color Cascading 6-Pocket Letter File Wall Organizer Tote, for $16.99.
It measures 13 3/8″ wide by 10 1/2″ high, and when it’s not fully extended, it folds and collapses into a 1 1/2″ thick tote. Two snap closures open to reveal six cascading pockets (red, orange, yellow, green, teal, and dark blue) that hold letter-sized interior file folders (sold separately). You can label the tabbed pockets, and there’s both a handle for carrying the closed tote and a ring for hanging it for display.
At a similar price point of $16.95, the Pendaflex Hanging Organizer looks and works much like the others, with color-coded file pockets in an indestructible, poly carrying case.
Expand it like an accordion file, collapse it to store in a briefcase, or hang it with the files neatly cascading from a hotel doorknob or coffeehouse chair when you set up a temporary workspace.
And sometimes, you just need a space of your own when you’re away from your own space. For such occasions, the Plan Station Pro is kind of interesting. It reminds me of the graduate student study carrels in college libraries, but set up on an ad hoc basis.
This nifty workstation measures 24″D x 48″W x 24″H and lets you create a sitting or standing desk wherever you land, whether that’s a hotel or a job site, for just $40. You carry it like a large portfolio, then hang or use the included dowels so it will free-stand to create a mini office.
Finally, even if you have to work in a public space, avoid the temptation to invest in a wheel-mounted desk. If you must work from your car, it is roomier and more comfy (though admittedly more awkward-looking to ouotsiders) to sit in the center of the rear seat and balance your laptop on your knees.
Be Tactical With Your Tech
As Paper Doll, I’m always going to focus on your tangible, paper resources, but that doesn’t mean we’ll forget about the tech and other essentials. Your digital resources may live in the cloud, but you still need to reach them from down here on earth (and, OK, sometimes when you’re up in the clouds, too).
Generate a packing list to use with your backpack or satchel so that every night before you get on the road, you can make sure you’ve packed what’s necessary. Consider the following
- Phone (or a note to remind you to pack it in the morning once it’s charged)
- Laptop or tablet
- Mobile hot spot (you can tether your phone’s internet access, but you may want to buy a more powerful mobile router to make sure your computer, tablet, and any other Wi-Fi-able device gets the connection it needs)
- Bluetooth keyboard
- Bluetooth mouse (if you, like me, never got the hang of a trackpad)
- Bluetooth or wired number keypad (if you crunch a lot of numbers when working)
- Chargers and charging cables
- Adapters (because, between USB and USB-C, not to mention Lighting connections, nothing attaches to anything else these days without some fiddling)
- Headphones or ear buds (so that you can dial in to conference calls or Zooms with minimal distraction for yourself or other attendees)
- Flash drives (because you can never count on your laptop communicating nicely with the presentation set-up at any conference venue or work location)
- A legal pad or notebook (because sometimes, the internet or WiFi isn’t your friend)
- Post-It® Notes — always have a stack in your favorite color. Combine a sticky note and a Sharpie for everything from leaving a note on the bathroom mirror for hotel housekeeping to capturing an idea when the data on your phone peters out
- Your favorite pen, a colorful Sharpie (or several), highlighters (for calling someone’s attention to something in the analog/paper world)
- Headrest hangers, so you can keep your jacket or suit neatly hanging and wrinkle-free
Making Time for Putting it All Back Together
Block time every evening to review the list of people you will be seeing the next day. This is also a good time to check tomorrow’s slot in your tickler file. C’mon, you didn’t think I’d miss a chance to remind you about the value of tickler files, right? I’m always going to prompt you to tickle yourself organized, even when you’re on the road! (Especially when you’re on the road!)
Clarify the end goal of the meeting, so you know what you need to display or distribute. Verify that you have (or can acquire) enough copies of each. Make sure all essential items are in tomorrow’s tickler file slot.
After each appointment, before belting yourself into your car, ensure that any papers you acquired in the meeting are either filed for reference or added to your tickler file for prompt follow-up.
Laminate a checklist or create one in Evernote or your favorite digital system so that you can follow the same procedure every time you return from a client visit or sales trip.
Finally, taking a few moments to remove the pop cans, meal wrappers, and other schmutz of the day ensures that you will enter a fresh-smelling, chaos-free mobile office tomorrow.
Happy travels, and stay safe…and organized!
Paper Doll Post:
In Search of Lost Time: Productivity, Proust, and the Culture of Availability
Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, translated from the French À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, was first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past and is known for its theme of involuntary memory.
It’s apt because, as I tried to decide what to write about this week, conversations and internet discoveries kept bringing me back to the concept of time: the way we accommodate our time for others, how we aspire to (and fail to) use time for tasks, and how we struggle with “managing time,” which is really an attempt to manage our thoughts, actions, and inner selves.
So, rather than a typical Paper Doll post of how-to and what-to, today’s post is a chance for you to look at my Proustian involuntary thoughts and memories. I’m going to share the thoughts that resulted; please join me in these rabbit holes of time-related thought.
IT ALL STARTED WITH SOME ROCKS
I wasn’t even searching for anything about time. But one of my superpowers is to notice headlines with words related to my work, like organizing, time management, clutter, lost, missing, etc. And a headline caught my attention.
A Billion Years of Time Are Mysteriously Missing. Scientists Think They Know Why.
I mean, I’ve had clients lose checkbooks and passports, Halloween costumes and crockpots, birthday checks and tax returns. And, as we’ll get to, I’ve heard them complain about many ways they lose (and lose track of) time.
But I can’t say that any of them have ever reported losing a BILLION YEARS!
Scientists are savvy. They can tell how old a body is by its bones. Cut down a tree and they can look at the rings to know its age.
Well, geologists can reconstruct whole chunks of our Earth’s history from the rocks, fossils, and detritus of eons under the surface. And it turns out that while we were all searching for free COVID tests and KN95 masks, playing Wordle, and seeing how Irish fisherman were putting Vladimir Putin in his place, found a big, gaping whole in our planet’s history.
Well, not a hole. Maybe a wormhole? But definitely a huge lapse in time where there’s no evidence that anything has been going on. It’s like how you eat lunch and figure you’ll just check your Twitter feed before getting back to your next project, and then next thing you know it’s 5 o’clock and there’s no evidence of what happened with your whole afternoon!
Rock/Geology Photo by Aaron Thomas on Unsplash
More than one billion years of time is missing! This period is known as the The Great Unconformity, and it’s been puzzling geologists, who have been trying to figure out why sometimes, in some places, there are 550 million-year-old rocks sitting on top of completely ancient layers of rock that apparently date back as far as 1.7 billion years ago. And there’s no sign of what happened during all those lost eras, epochs, periods, and TV seasons.
Scientists are still working on the mystery, and there are some theories you can read about at the above link. But this is what first got me thinking about lost time.
LOST TIME
Do you ever wonder where the time goes?
In the last few days, I kept hearing people say some version of, “How is January over already?”
Last week, a client was referring to something that happened “last year” when her spouse chimed in that, no, what she was thinking of was actually two years ago, in 2020.
Culture of Availability
Some of the amorphous aspect of time is because modern life just moves at a different pace, with a greater sense of immediacy baked into “instant” messaging and expectations of immediate responses. If we’re “always on,” when do we have the opportunity to recuperate and rest our engines?
If we’re always living for others’ expectations, when are we living our own lives?
If we're *always on,* when do we have the opportunity to recuperate and rest our engines? If we're always living for others' expectations, when are we living our own lives? Click To TweetIn ye olden days, people wrote letters. They arrived when they arrived (if at all, not unlike the current postal kerfuffles); if you needed someone’s attention sooner, you sent a telegram.
Eventually, you could place a phone call through the operator (and later, directly), but there was no guarantee you’d reach someone when they were in. (And on the flip side, much time was lost in the lives of young women who waited by the telephone, as immortalized in the plaintive prayers in Dorothy Parker’s famed A Telephone Call short story.)
At work, one might have a secretary to take messages during business hours, but it would be another half-century before “important” people (doctors, physicians, movie stars) would have answering services.
Answering machines were still uncommon enough in the 1970s that the opening sequence of The Rockford Files, with a new inbound message each week, was still novel.
(But click to hear the show’s actual theme music.)
And of course, voicemail was still even further away. And this doesn’t take into account all of the other places we can be found today — and where we are expected to reply. There’s email, texts, Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, WhatsApp, SnapChat, Slack, and who knows what else.
To that end, I direct you to I’m Not Sorry for My Delay, a recent piece in The Atlantic about our culture of availability.
The piece quotes Melissa Mazmanian, an informatics professor at UC Irvine, about the trend that started with the post-beeper, circa-1999 invention of RIM’s BlackBerry.
BlackBerry Photo by Randy Luon on Unsplash
With this magical “two-way pager” came the almost-miraculous ability of professionals to conduct business on-the-go, and it’s easy to see how, in two decades, we got to what we have now, including the ubiquity of ways we can — and are expected to — be available. The author notes that “The superpower morphed into an obligation” and Mazmanian calls it a spiral of expectations.
Yeah, it is!
Certainly, the more work we are expected to do, and the more often we are expected to be available (at the in-person meeting that could have been a Zoom, the Zoom that could have been an email, and the email that could have just not been), the less time we have for anything, and especially, anything important.
As an organizing and productivity expert, my job is to guide clients past the morass of overwhelm brought on by this spiral of expectations. The key (and I do not mean to ignore the difficulty in the simplicity) is to set and maintain boundaries. For example:
To set boundaries for yourself:
- Know how, when, where, and by whom you are often distracted.
You can’t change what you can’t identify. If you tend to get lost online, but aren’t sure where the quicksand is, try an app that tracks your time and gives you a report of where you’re spending it. RescueTime, Toggl Track, and MyHours are a few good options to consider.
And if your lost time is more vague and non-techie, try keeping a time log for a week. Set a phone alarm at frequent, regular intervals prompt you to fill in the log. A few years ago, A Life of Productivity’s Chris Bailey interviewed time management expert Laura Vanderkam about how to track time. There’s even a link to time logs you can fill in, either via excel or on a printable log.
- Make some rules regarding how you will respect your time.
You can start with a classic Paper Doll post, R-E-S-P-E-C-T: The Organizing Secret for Working At Home.
Set specific office hours. When does your work day start and end? When will you do only “work” things” and when will you do only “home/family” things and, yes, shockingly, when will you do only “personal” things? While there’s certain to be overlap in some parts of your day, having a plan for who gets to pull you or push you when is a mighty first step in controlling your day.
- Head technology off at the pass.
Your employer may dictate when you must be available and via what technology, but the rest of your time, you get to decide! Try removing all (or even all but one) social media app from your phone for a week. (You can easily download it again next Monday.) If you have an urgent need to see what’s going on at Twitter or wherever, you can always use your browser.
Turn off your app notifications. That doesn’t mean you won’t know someone tried to reach you. You’ll just only know when you decide to go find out. Read your email at the time you’ve blocked off for email review instead of having to focus while your email dings at you. Check your Twitter retweets and DMs when you decide to, rather than having your phone “whoosh” at you all day.
To set boundaries for others to respect:
- Put a message in your signature block of your emails, letting people know that you check and return emails once in the morning and twice in the afternoon (or once a day, or never). The key is to set expectations.
Maybe you’re one of those folks who prefers a call to an email. Or an email to a text. Or perhaps you want everyone to call your assistant…who happens to be on a planned leave for the next six months, or forever, so everyone better be forewarned! 😉
The point is that if you set an expectation, nobody else (except within the realm of what your employer can control) has any final say.
- Change your voicemail’s outgoing message to reflect your availability. Decades ago, I was shocked by a colleague’s outgoing message that said that “all calls would be returned by the end of the next business day.”
Really?
No getting back to her home office from a full client day and returning calls at 8 p.m. as she rushed to make dinner? No returning calls that came in on Saturday afternoon? No identifying with Superman that someone out there needed her?
And no turmoil over the idea that if she weren’t sitting by the phone to answer a prospective client’s call AND she didn’t return the call the minute she finished with one client, even though she was supposed to be at her daughter’s dance recital, the person might call another company? (Some echoes of Dorothy Parker’s story, perhaps?)
After having spent my first career in the fast-paced world of television, where a succession of general managers and master control room operators would call me at dinner time, at 3 a.m., and on holiday weekends, this was a revelation. And it’s one I teach to my clients.
Notwithstanding hiccups (a toddler’s meltdown, a canceled flight, fire, flood, blizzards, or burst pipes, you get to decide what to do with your one wild and precious life.
*Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?* —Mary Oliver, The Summer Day Click To TweetIf you’ve been following good time management guidelines, you’ve mapped out what you need to accomplish, grouped categories together, time-blocked your tasks, and scheduled them.
The next step is to analyze whether anything new that comes in is (truly) more urgent or (really-and-truly) more important enough to kick a pre-scheduled activity out of its slot.
And if it’s not? Well, it can go on the schedule for another day.
- Only use the messaging apps at which you want to be reached. In my stride toward giving Facebook less and less control over my time, I deleted the app from some devices and deleted the Facebook messaging app from all of them. Only my friends and clients know my cell phone number; my public-facing phone number is my office landline, and you can’t text it.
Living in a Pandemic (and Still Not a Post-Pandemic) World
Of course, not all of our lost time is due to the culture of availability. Much of it is still dictated by the vagaries and whims of living and working during COVID.
All of the benchmarks and signposts of our week (and children’s weeks) have come unglued. To gain as much control (as possible) over the flow of your time, I encourage you read some of my lovingly crafted (and only rarely unhinged) posts from the past two years (but especially the very first one):
Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is? 5 Strategies to Cope With Pandemic Time Dilation (Seriously, kids. Read this.)
The Perfect Unfolding As We Work From Home
Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine
Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions
TIME- AND TASK-RELATED PRODUCTS CALLING OUT TO ME
So, all of this has been on my mind. Massive lost geological time. Lost time due to the culture of availability. The weirdness of pandemic time. And then two products kept showing up in my analog and digital life.
Post-it® Noted Line
Post-it® has developed a whole series of Noted products only tangentially related to the regular (but beloved) Post-it® Notes we use daily.
Yes, they’re paper. And yes, they’re adhesive. But if traditional Post-it® Notes are quotidian, workaday items for the home and office, and Post-it® Extreme Notes (which I covered in Sticky to the Extreme: Organizing Information in Extreme Situations with Post-it® Extreme Notes) are Brawny Man-level solutions, Noted items seem to be up-and-coming executive who appreciates pretty things.
The Noted line, which I’ll cover in greater depth in a future post, includes notebooks, organizing tools, pens, and of course, notes. But in my forays online and off, I kept finding myself face-to-display with a few Noted products related to keeping track of your tasks and time, including:
Noted by Post-it® Daily Agenda Pad — This 100-sheet pink pad measures 3.9″ x 7.7″ and is designed as a no-frills agenda pad to schedule or track your day hour-by-hour. If you generally use a digital calendar and are finding you’re missing the tactile granularity of a paper calendar, you might want to try this. You can affix a note to the front of a notebook or portfolio or stick it on your wall or the top of your desk to keep it in view.
Noted by Post-it® Daily Planner Pad — Like the agenda, the planner is 100 sheets/per pad of adhesive notes with a more task (rather than appointment) oriented view. The Daily Planner Pad measures 4.9″ x 7.7″ and has section headings for:
- Do That Work (with a checkbox on every line)
- Move That Body
- Drink That Water (with little water glass illustrations you can check off)
- Morning, Noon, and Night activity spaces
- “Etc.” for free-writing and other activities
Noted by Post-it® Habit Tracker Notes — If your lost time is keeping you from hitting your goals and keeping up with your habits, these 2.9″ x 4″ habit tracker notes (also available in a mini size) give you a teeny, tiny calendar-esque view to check off your important habits. Stick it in your planner or on your desk to track whatever habits you want to acquire or eschew. (This one one has a self-care theme, but there’s a generic Habit Tracker version.)
Mover Erase Combo
The precursor of the Mover Erase Combo had been just on the periphery of my attention for the past few years as part of Bravestorming’s crowdfunded Mover Line. (Mike Vardy, the Productivityist, mentioned it once and the notion stuck somewhere in the recesses of my brain.)
But for the last week, though I’m certain I hadn’t clicked on anything to put a cookie in all of my devices, it kept showing up! If a white board and sticky notes had a baby, and the midwife were magnetic, and the baby shower were thrown by crowdfunding sources, you’d get Mover Erase Combo, a reusable (analog) system for scheduling, accomplishing tasks, and brainstorming ideas.
I’m still wrapping my head around the new iteration, but rather than losing any more time (heh) before sharing it with you, I thought I’d see what you think of the video.
Please share your thoughts in the comments, below.
Readers, I doubt anyone would imagine that Marcel Proust and I have much in common. I’m certainly more likely to hit on unanticipated memories when I scarf down a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup than he experienced with his famed madeleine:
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.”
But lost time and thoughts pervaded this week, and I thank you for letting me indulge in them.
Paper Doll Post:
Ask Paper Doll: Should I Organize My Space and Time with Color?
This is part of a recurring series of Ask Paper Doll posts where you can get your burning organizing questions answered by Paper Doll, a 20-year veteran professional organizer and amateur goofball.
Dear Paper Doll:
It’s only January and I’m already at a loss for motivation. I’ve been thinking about using color to organize my office and maybe my calendar, but the more I look at my options, the more overwhelmed I get. How can I organize by color and not constantly be tinkering with my systems and remembering what color goes where?
Signed,
Feeling grey with a case of the blues
Grey sky, grey streets, grey mood? Even if we weren’t in the second winter of a pandemic, January is a tough month to feel sparkly. We’re still nine weeks away from Daylight Saving Time, so our late afternoons are dark and gloomy. Plus, after the ongoing glow of holidays from late November through New Year’s Day, of course you’re feeling a loss of spark.
And yes, color is a great way to pump up the mood. If color weren’t so vital, Pantone wouldn’t be known worldwide for coming up with its color of the year. By the way, Paper Doll is a huge fan of this year’s color, Very Peri.
But organizing by color and organizing with color can be very different things.
ORGANIZING BY COLOR
Some people are enthusiastic about using color to organize everything in their homes, offices, and lives. Maybe they have a signature color that serves as a personal brand; others believe in color-coding and sorting everything by hue. Paper Doll isn’t necessarily keen on that. Using color to decide where something goes and with which it is grouped depends on the situation.
Organizing clothing or shoes by color? Sure. Imagine you have all of your long-sleeved shirts hanging in the closet, in roughly ROY-G-BIV color order, or group all your black pumps together, then the blue, then the red, and so-on within your collection of heels.
This will make it easy to recognize you’ve tipped the scale toward full-on goth when you’ve got 17 black turtlenecks, or may be mistaken for Dorothy if most of your shoes are ruby red. Sorting and ordering your clothes and shoes by color makes sense, but probably as a secondary sorting characteristic within clothing/shoe types.
Organizing your calendar by color? Absolutely! Whether you grab a selection of pretty markers to fill in your paper planner (medical appointments in red, billing or tax dates in green, social events in purple) or use the settings in Outlook, Gmail, or any other digital calendar, you can color-code to your heart’s delight.
And the best thing? If you select the wrong color, you don’t need white-out or an eraser to fix it. One little click, and you’re back in business!
Organizing files by color? Mayyyyyyyybe. I hate to sound coy, but the effectiveness of a system based on color-coding files depends on the level of commitment of the user.
In the abstract, it can be great to organize your files (either tabbed folders or hanging folders) by color. Figure out what your overarching categories are, and assign colors to those categories, whether in your reference or action files. For example:
- Red folders — Urgent tasks or information you always need to get your hands on in a hurry
- Green folders — Financial information related to taxes, payable accounts, and investments
- Blue folders — Planning, like for vacations or work projects
- Yellow folders — Client information or class materials
- Purple folders — Creative tasks
and so on. Color (as we’ll see below) stirs emotions, creates enthusiasm and motivation, and triggers action. What could be better?
The problem isn’t with the system, per se, but with the users. If you let yourself run out of yellow folders just as you sign on a new client, what will you do? Are you likely to order new folders in that color scheme right away? If so, you’re set. If not, you may let a pile of papers related to that client languish in the corner of your desk, risking them getting mislaid or lost.
Plus, keeping many different boxes of colored tabbed folders can be expensive and get out of balance quickly. You may use three times as many purple folders as red ones and your red box may sit year after year, mostly untouched.
If you want to embrace color, there are a few other options beyond a full-on color-coding assault. You could:
- Pick your favorite color, and use those tabbed folders exclusively.
- Start with just two or three of your most used categories and pick colors to define each of those. You’ll still be using color as a sort of trigger or label, as above, but you won’t be going “whole hog,” at least not at the beginning.
- Use plain manilla tabbed folders, but pick a beloved color for hanging folders. (Because hanging folders hold tabbed folders, and can generally accommodate three-in-one, we don’t run out of them as quickly.) Traditional olive/army green hanging folders aren’t likely to cheer anyone up, and using a fun hanging folder uniformly through your filing system will brighten your mood without requiring you to keep up with a complex system.
(These purple Smead hanging folders are bright and bold, and are available in most Big Box stores and at Amazon for $17.89 for a box of 25.)
Organizing your spices by color? How experienced a chef are you that you could catch yourself before you added a visibly similar (but wrong) spice to a recipe? Ground nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon look alike; but would you want to risk grabbing the wrong one and making iced nutmeg rolls or clove-raisin coffee cake?
Are you willing to mistake similarly-red cayenne pepper for paprika? Perhaps it’s better to group spices by the categories of usage (baking tasks vs. preparing meat/vegetables, etc.). SpiceAdvice has a nice Quick Reference Spice Chart sorted by usage categories.
Organizing your books by color? Oh, gracious. This question has stirred quite a bit of controversy over the last few years. I mean, there’s this person:
I feel like coordinating books by color is one of those things you either love or are wrong about. pic.twitter.com/U6GfIZLgnQ
— Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright) July 15, 2020
I’d take umbrage, but I’m too busy worried about how cold her legs must be.
And then there’s Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin from the Netflix program Get Organized with the Home Edit. They’re known for their passion for color-coding, and they did that with a few bookshelves on their show. But they were children’s books, and let’s face it, the way tiny humans pull books off shelves, it’s not like alphabetized books are going to stay that way. (Their background, at the above link, shows a full set of bookshelves for grownups arranged by color. I’m looking around for my fainting couch.)
Magazines have been rife with headlines in favor of organizing books by color. For example, Jezebel ran with a piece called Sorry, Color-Coded Bookshelves Look Good, while Slate stood up for the design-oriented folks with Arranging Your Books By Color Is Not a Moral Failure.
Of course, in this highly competitive media market, every online magazine’s job is to stir controversy and curry clicks. Thus, I suspect these headlines recognize that those of us who read may care more about the content of our books than using them as decor and are trying to drive some righteous indignation clicks to their sites.
But Paper Doll stands firmly in the NOPE category on organizing books by hue. The color of a book’s cover is about marketing; it was almost certainly chosen by a marketing team based on the designs in fashion for that genre during that season. The color may not even have been approved by the author or seem to make sense. I mean, even early versions of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple didn’t have a purple book cover or spine!
I’m a practical person. I believe that function should always come before form. A gorgeous outfit that doesn’t cover all your fleshy bits and gives you frostbite? Nuh-uh. A bookshelf that requires you to remember the color of the cover vs. letting you just walk over to peruse the category (fiction? organizing? recipes?) or authors? I can’t countenance that.
I’m not saying you can’t do it; I’m saying I can’t advise it.
And that’s because, as a professional organizer, my role is to help you live a more organized and productive life. Sure, I’ll leave your space looking better than it did before, but my reason for being in your space is to leave it working better than it did before.
ORGANIZING WITH COLOR
So, what’s the difference?
Organizing by color requires creating a system. With clothes or shoes, it might just be ROY-G-BIV and keeping things in order. When you put away your clothes, as you approach with a freshly-laundered shirts on hangers, you’ll be able to put away each item in the general color order. It’s your closet, so you don’t have to be too persnickety unless Vogue is coming to do a photo layout of your walk-in, in which case, good for you!
With file folders, as described above, organizing by color requires a stricter system. In effect, you’re deciding, up front, what all of your categories will be and assigning colors to those categories. You have to be willing to stop, each time you create a folder, to consider what category the contents of the folder belong to, and select that color every time. If you’re comfortable with that, then you have my blessing. I just don’t want to see you get stressed out.
You also have to be relatively sure that you’ll “feel” this association going forward (unless you’re just having fun and don’t care whether there’s a cognitive connection between your colors and your categories); if you soon realize that you hate the color orange but have assigned orange to your accounts payable, you might stop filing your paid bills or (eek!) avoid paying them altogether.
Organizing by color can be great, and I’m absolutely in favorite of it, as long as you, as an individual, feel comfortable sticking to a system. If not, that’s OK. There are still magnificent ways to organize your life with color, without adhering to strict or narrow categories.
Organizing with color lets you pick functional objects that add a pop of color but don’t require a lot of mental or physical effort to maintain.
It’s more thematic than systematic.
It’s sort of how we talked about about goals and resolutions vs. picking a word of the year. (If you haven’t read Review & Renew for 2022: Resolutions, Goals, and Words of the Year, this is a great time to help you get back on that motivation kick!) Goals — and the habits we embrace to achieve them — are like the systems for organizing by color; a word, mantra, or theme of the year, rather, provides a sense of focus, and color can do that for you.
Pantone does it with the color of the year; you can brand yourself, or your year, with color that’s meaningful to you! Think, “2022 in Royal Blue!” (Good luck rhyming a year with periwinkle or burnt sienna, though.)
Let’s get a sense of what color psychology tells us. Our friends at Quill created a nifty infographic to help explain some of the meanings of color.
Do you have to use the specific colors that are associated with specific feelings? Of course not. I don’t particularly find the color yellow to be “associated with hope, happiness, and positivity.” I don’t even buy the original yellow Post-it® Notes because yellow just doesn’t do it for me. (I’m so into pinks and purples, as you might have guessed.)
But do experiment and take advantage of the aspects of the psychology of color to make your space your own.
A FEW FUN WAYS TO INTRODUCE COLOR INTO YOUR LIFE THIS SEASON
Our friends at Time Timer have come up with some gorgeous, new colorful timers.
First, they’ve released their original 8″ timers in Learning Center Classroom Sets (of 3) in two different color schemes. But you don’t need to be using them in a classroom to brighten up your office or workspace. There’s a primary color set:
and a secondary color set:
These sets are priced (for pre-order) at $104/set. Again, these are designed for learning activities, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t have one timer in your office, one in your kitchen, and one in your workout area.
Each set comes with three Original 8″ visual timers (for up to a 60-minute duration) with magnetic backs and fold-up feet, three dry erase cards for labeling the current activity (great for helping you focus during a 25-minute pomodoro task), and one free download of the Time Timer Desktop App.
They’re also selling a Time Timer MOD® – Special Edition Tie-Dye version (for pre-order) for $36.95. I’m a big fan of the little MODs, and this 3 1/2″ square MOD provides a tiny pop of color while helping you visualize time passing, and keep you motivated to accomplish your tasks.
For a burst of color for office supplies, consider Poppin desk, wall, and office accessories:
You can buy their products directly from the Poppin website, or at Staples, Quill, and The Container Store. Be sure to check out Poppin’s Work From Home section for more fun, motivating bursts of color.
Do you like to wrap yourself up in color or just use it for accents?
Are you comfortable with intricate color-coding systems, or do you just want to surround yourself with your favorite hues?
And what’s your favorite color?
Meet me in the comments and tell all!
Paper Doll Post:
The Humble Index Card: Organize Your Life, Then Organize Your Cards
When was the last time you used an index card? Chances are, you don’t give a lot of respect to the humble three-by-five, but we owe so many of our systems, including almost every type of categorization and computerization, to what first got plotted out in a precursor of the little cards we know so well.
Index cards, of a sort, have been around ever since the 1760s, when Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (the science of classification), figured out that he could name, categorize, and keep track of animals, plants, and minerals. All that Latin nomenclature, with genus and species and sub-species, needed to be written down somewhere, and Linnaeus figured out how to square it all away.
I know, it’s hard to believe someone had to invent an index card, but realize that file folders weren’t even invented until the late 1800s, filing cabinets came to market in 1898, and paper clips showed up around 1900. If you crave more about the history of office supplies — and I mean, who doesn’t? — you might like to check out:
A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order by Judith Flanders (which is about so much more than just alphabetical order, and provides some eye-opening backward glances into how hard it was to organize information throughout most of recorded history).
The Perfection of the Paper Clip: Curious Tales of Invention, Accidental Genius, and Stationery Obsession by James Ward, which offers intriguing narratives (with a British twist) on how all our office supplies were developed.
In the world of Evernote and OneNote, of CRMs and productivity apps, the humble index card often gets lost in the shuffle (if you’ll pardon the card pun). But there are a variety of ways to organize information and knowledge to help you lead a more orderly life — inexpensively, easily, and without internet access.
I have nothing against using the web and all the magical apps available to help you achieve your goals, but Paper Doll would be doing a disservice not to note the old-school ways you can organize your life with index cards. And of course, while I’m at it, I’ve got a deep dive on options to help you organize those index cards to keep clutter at a bare minimum.
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH AN INDEX CARD?
Think back. What was your earliest interaction with index cards? Was it Grandma’s recipe for your favorite cookies, perhaps with an oily thumbprint in the upper corner of a card covered with her curling scrawl? Maybe you learned how to do geometry proofs with each card bisected vertically? Or perhaps you studies for the SAT vocabulary section using index cards as flash cards?
In this digital age, you can still do so much with a package of 3″ x 5″ index cards from the dollar store. Off the top of my head, you can use an index card or stack for:
- Address Collections – The problem with a print address book is that once you fill up a “popular” letter (M? S?) until all the blanks are filled, or if one of your vagabond friends has used up an entire page of one letter of addresses for her travels hither and yon, you need to acquire a new address book to make up for the oodles of scribbles and cross-outs. Sure, using the Contacts app in your phone is ideal, unless you’ve somehow failed to back your phone up to the cloud, in which case, one accidental trip through the washing machine can erase a lifetime of contacts. But index cards were a simple, inexpensive precursor to a Rolodex and continue to make an appealing alternative to digital address apps. Using one card per person/family lets you keep track of addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, the names of newly-arrived babies, and so on. When one card has enough cross-outs and re-writes, just replace it with a new index card rather than a whole new address book.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) — Yes, a CRM software program is the gold standard for new businesses, and I wouldn’t encourage you to start a business by keeping this kind of information on paper. But if you’re the kind of person who just doesn’t embrace technology for everything, using an index card with your client’s name, phone number, birthday/anniversary, and key preferences might be a good way to help you get started. When your customer reaches out to you, or vice versa, you can put a date on the line, with a quick note about the conversation, letting you trace the history of the relationship over time.
- Expense Logs — In the olden days, we wrote checks and then noted information about the transactions in our check registers. Paper Doll still uses a register for every transaction, but is prompted by receipts (from debit card transactions, mostly) to remind myself what to log. However, just carrying an index card in your wallet gives you an easy way to keep track of your financial activities in the moment. Write the date, the amount, and a one-line description of what you bought. If you tend to use cash, this will help you track your expenses without need of logging into your bank account; if you use your debit or credit card, mostly, this offers assistance for keeping tabs on your day-to-day spending (as using plastic doesn’t “feel” like money, and you may not realize how much outlay is going on).
- Meals and Snack Logs — Are you on any kind of eating plan? (The word “diet” is so last century!) Whether you’re keeping track of protein grams and carbs for nutritional reasons, calories for health, or exact foods to figure out a mystery allergy, index cards offer a quick solution.
- To-Do Lists — Start your day with your three most important goals on an index card. When you have only three inches by five inches of real estate, you’re going to be pithy and get to the point. (Sure, you can use a Post-it® Note, but lined index cards give you a little more formality.) I like to pick 1 big task, two medium-sized tasks, and three small tasks, but even these should fit on a “today” card.
- Wanna-Do Lists — Yes, if your friend recommends a book, movie, restaurant, or podcast, you can pull it up in your phone, but only if your phone is handy. (And then, how much more likely are you to then be distracted by your phone and ignore your friend?) Keeping a running list on a card or two in your wallet or purse lets you pull it out when the context is right — when you’re trying to find somewhere to eat on Saturday night or roaming the bookstore (or even surfing online) to find something to read.
- Flash Cards — I love my Duolingo for learning Italian, but to remember attraversiamo, già, and sempre, or to distinguish among ora vs. poi vs. allora, you can’t beat a flash card. Whether you’re learning bones and ligaments in medical school, national capitals and top exports in geography, or embracing those definitions for the SAT verbals, flash cards are inexpensive and easy to make, quick to shuffle, and require no battery charge. Plus, research shows that we remember what we hand-write, with greater context and nuance, than what we type.
- Recipes — This one can’t surprise you. For a century, families have passed down handwritten recipes on index cards.
- Household Inventories — Sure, you’ll create the best, most complete inventory if you video your possessions and log them in software like HomeZada or Sortly, or even in a self-created database in Airtable, but if you want to do a quick-and-dirty inventory of your space, noting descriptions, model numbers, serial numbers, etc., an index card inventory is a great start.
- Research — Whether you’re writing a report for Social Studies or looking up some genealogical records, index cards provide a way of encapsulating information. You can use numbers and letters to code which things are related to what. My 7th grade English teacher taught us to create an outline (with Roman numerals and letters, breaking down each section), putting each bibliographic item on its own card with its own code, and then each fact or quote got a card, linking it to the outline and to the bibliographic source. Not only did I use this method (with small modifications) in college and graduate school, but I incorporated into research I’ve done for my ebooks and other publications. The size of the index card forces you to focus on bite-sized pieces of information.
- Maps for Creative Endeavors and Adventures — Writing a novel? Use index cards to keep track of the essential traits of each character, and then map out your plot points, and put it all up on a bulletin board. (This method is actually the model for the popular Scrivener software.) Planning a vacation and can’t decide among all the options? Make a card for each alternative, with essential information like dates and times each museum or attraction is open, then sort by location (Paris, London, Madrid? Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Rochester?) and order by priorities. Bring the stack with you on your trip, and if weather or a venue closure blocks your plans, you’ll be able to pick the next priority in the stack!
SPECIAL USE OF INDEX CARDS: THE HIPSTER PDA
Have you ever heard of the Hipster PDA?
Back in 2004, Merlin Mann, writer and founder of the productivity website 43 Folders, (somewhat) jokingly turned his back on the increasing complexity of what we used to call personal digital assistants (like those pre-iPhone Blackberry and PalmPilot devices). He put forth the idea of using a small stack of index cards and a binder clip to gather essential information and keep it at hand.
Teo, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
While Mann may have been applying the concept with a bit of tongue-in-cheek goofiness, the followers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (GTD) approach picked up the idea of the Hipster PDA and ran with it. In GTD, one of the focuses is on keeping context lists, so that when you’re at the office, you have an Office list; when you’re at the supermarket, you have a Piggly Wiggly list, and so on.
While most people are keeping that kind of list in the reminders app of their phone, fans of the Hipster PDA have a context card for each item or task to be slotted where appropriate.
The Hipster PDA requires only index cards (used vertically or horizontally, as you prefer) and binder clips. If you want, you can use multi-color card packs to color-code different features or contexts. There are even crowdsourced templates all over the web (here’s a set at DIY Planner) and on Pinterest to help you use index cards to create the productivity approach of your dreams.
HOW CAN YOU KEEP YOUR INDEX CARDS ORGANIZED?
The answer may seem almost ridiculous. After all, a simple rubber band around a packet of index cards should be enough to keep them from spreading out across a desk drawer, a high school locker, or an office. But if you’ve ever come across an old stack of index cards, wrapped in a rubber band like that, you know that rubber bands dry out and break. That’s why the Hipster PDA uses binder clips.
For many, the main drawback to using index cards is the potential for disorganization or card clutter. However, there are a variety of solutions you can use, whether you want your card stack to be mobile or just neatly arranged on your desk our counter. I’ve gathered alternatives for corralling 3″ x 5″ cards, as they are the most standard, but you should be able to find similar solutions for 4″ x 6″ and sometimes even 5″ x 8″ index card storage.
Note card rings — Don’t be tempted to think you can organize your cards with traditional keyrings, the kind where you have to pry the metal apart with your fingernails or a key. Use a search term like bookbinder rings or loose leaf binder rings. You want the kind that lets you push inward from both sides and then pull the sides apart to grant you access. Depending on the thickness of your card stacks, you might want to get an assortment of sizes. A few dozen rings (which you can always use for other purposes) won’t run you much more than $5 or so.
Index card binders — If you want your cards to have a little more protection, you can opt for a miniature binder, similar to the kinds of three-ring binders you’d use for loose-leaf paper. This Oxford Index Card Binder has a poly cover, two rings, and two poly dividers. It’s available in red, blue, or green for about $13.
Index Card Cases/Boxes — If you have small stacks of index cards you want to keep attractively but make portable, another option would be a poly index card case or box. I really like these colorful ones from DocIt. Each poly case (available in blue, pink, grey, or green) has a snap closure, holds 100 cards, and includes five dividers with adhesive label tabs. You can buy one for about $5, or packs of four ($12.99) or 24 ($35.99).
If you want a greater variety of colors for a similar price, check out these four-packs from Emraw. Note that these aren’t accordion-style; I find that accordion-style index card cases hold fewer cards, and chances are you won’t need the kind of mini-sections they enable.
Plastic Index Card File Box — This is probably what you used in school, and it’s a stalwart of the office supply arena. Plastic is water-resistant, durable, inexpensive, and won’t rust, and these kinds of card file boxes usually fit easily in a drawer or on your desktop, but are light enough (with secure enough closures) that you can pop them in your backpack. But, of course, it’s plastic, and not everyone likes petrochemical products. (Plastic = petroleum = dead dinosaurs.) You can buy a brand name version at any big-box store, or get one at your nearest dollar store for no more than $3-4 each, or try this Alfion set of four for about $16.99 from Amazon.
Metal Index Card File Boxes — I grew up with Paper Mommy‘s gravy-brown metal index card file box housing one set of her recipes. The metal version isn’t as lightweight as the plastic ones, and they usually lack a secure closure, making them poor options for mobile card storage. They also tend not to be very pretty. However, with a little creativity (and some paint, washi tape, or contact paper) you can make your card box match your personal style.
You used to be able to find metal card file boxes in the same size/shape as the plastic file boxes above, but in recent years, larger/deeper metal cases have become more popular. This Steelmaster card file box has a 900 card capacity and is 8 1/2″ deep; it costs $26.60 at Amazon.
Collapsible Card File Boxes — If your need for card file storage ebbs and flows, you might want to consider a collapsible index card file box. This one from Snap-N-Store holds 1100 3″ x 5″ index cards. The box is made of sturdy fiberboard with a water-resistant laminate cover, metal snaps and steel-reinforced corners. It runs $10 at Amazon.
Decorative Solutions — While the above solutions are standard, you should be able to find a wide variety of “fun” options for organizing your index cards if you search beyond office supply stores.
If you want an old-fashioned wooden file box, perhaps as a gift box already filled with recipe cards, your best bet is to haunt Etsy or specialty craft shops; the search terms “wooden recipe box” should pull up something useful. I found this ArtMinds® wooden recipe box for $6 at Michael’s.
I have to say, however, that my favorite index card storage option, from an aesthetic perspective, is the Oxford at Hand Note Card Organizer. Each metal organizer has a non-skid base to keep it in place and prevent it from squeaking against your desktop or countertop. It’s designed to hold 3″ x 5″ cards and comes with 25 matching dot-grid cards, but of course you can use any card style.
The Oxford at Hand Note Card Organizer comes in Charcoal Grey as well as three designer colors: Coral, Shoreline Blue, and Orchid Bouquet. They run $22.75/each, but must (unfortunately) be ordered in sets of 6 or 12 if you buy directly from Tops Products (Oxford’s parent company). However, you can get a single case in the Charcoal Grey and Shoreline Blue versions on Amazon for $12.99/each. (I’m still searching for a vendor selling just one in Orchid Bouquet, so please write in if you see them anywhere!)
Of course, there’s so much more to be said about index cards (sizes, styles, patterns), storage, display options, and uses, but we’ll have to save that for another time. Do you have a strategy for using index cards that I didn’t mention? A favorite storage solution for cards that I didn’t include? Please share in the comments below!
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