Archive for ‘Paper Organizing’ Category

26 Ways to Celebrate GO Month to Get More Organized and Productive

Posted on: January 5th, 2026 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments


Happy New Year! Happy GO Month!

Each January is Get Organized & Be Productive (GO) Month. Back in 2005, NAPO (then called the National Association of Professional Organizers) proclaimed the first Get Organized Month, as a national public awareness campaign about organizing and our profession.

A decade later, the month was expanded to incorporate productivity, just two years before we officially became the National Association of Productivity & Organizing Professionals. Our purpose remains the same. All of us — professional organizers, productivity specialists, declutterers, coaches, etc. — celebrate how we improve the lives of our clients by creating environments and developing skills to support productivity, health, and well-being.

Practitioners like Paper Doll are here to help you create systems and skills, improve your homes, workspaces, and attitudes, and live your best, most productive life.

For more great organizing and productivity tips during GO Month, you can also follow NAPO’s Social Media Accounts:  

Today’s post offers some 26 ice cream samples of organizing and productivity tactics to make 2026 a little easier. 

ORGANIZE YOUR PAPER IN 2026

1) Create a Tax Prep Folder

April 15th will be here before you know it. From now through February, you’ll receive tax documents (1099s, 1098s, W2s) in the mail. You may also get emails reminding you to log in to brokerage and other accounts to download your important tax documents.

Don’t wait until the last minute to gather these items. It’s not just good organizing advice, but helpful financial advice, too, because the sooner you get your important tax documents together, the faster you (or your accountant) can get you your refund, or at worst, let you prepare for the size of your tax bite.

Your tax prep folder doesn’t have to be fancy; a plain tabbed folder kept at the front of your financial files section should suffice. However, if you’re dealing with a lot of documents, you might prefer a dedicated accordion-style folder like the Smead All-in-One Income Tax Organizer.

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Organize now so you won’t lose deductions, pay more taxes, or get in trouble with the IRS!

2) Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your VIPs

Make 2026 the year that you get your affairs in order. Estate documents and other essential paperwork must be created, obviously, but also reviewed and updated on a periodic basis.

As I’ve said before, this aspect of organizing may be boring (if you aren’t a professional organizer), but boring is good! If your VIPs are boring, it means that you and your family won’t ever experience any ugly surprises during difficult times, like when someone is in the hospital, when there’s been a death in the family, or even when dealing with the aftermath of a natural disaster. 

Start by reading these from-the-vault posts to figure out your next steps.

Then list documents you already have (and their locations) and identify what you need to create, and then plan meetings with your family and a trusted advisor to set things in motion.

3) Declutter and Preserve Your Family Photos and Memorabilia

Two years ago, a beloved client passed away, and I’ve been working with his son to go through more than a century of photos, from passed-down black-and-white picures of ancestors on both sides of the family to lighthearted snapshots and travelogues from the gentleman’s young military years. We review prints and slides, as well as delicate (and crumbling) correspondence. 

Do you have print photos that would be lost in case of a fire or flood because you don’t have the negatives (or store them with the photos)? Would digital photos on your phone be lost if your phone got smushed or stolen? You need backup!

I’m not suggesting you do this every day in January, but make a plan. What if you spent an hour every Sunday morning sorting through photos? Could you invite a family member or friend to help you consider what to keep and what categories to use?

Contact a NAPO member who specializes in organizing photos, or visit The Photo Managers to find experts who can help you safeguard your photo history.

While I’m on the subject, I absolutely have to recommend, yet again, my colleague Hazel Thornton‘s What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy.

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(See my review, here.)

For more ideas, consider:

4) Know What’s In Your Wallet

Have you looked at what’s in your wallet lately? Would you notice if one of your credit cards went missing? It’s a new year — did you put your new health insurance card in there? 

  • Pull everything out of your wallet.
  • Discard or put away anything that doesn’t belong in there. (Receipts for taxable events, like medical expenses? Keep. The name of a book your friend recommended? Log it in your Notes app or put it on hold at the public library before you forget.)
  • Take an inventory of everything in your wallet. Depending on your patience, you have two options:
    1. Lay two columns of cards (side by side), face-down, on a copy machine. Press “copy” and then flip each card in place to the rear-side, and copy that, two. Repeat the process until everything in your wallet has been secured. Alternatively, you can scan these to your computer and save it all as a multi-page PDF. If you ever lose your wallet, you’ll be happy to have the account numbers, expiration dates, security codes, and contact numbers for your licenses, insurance cards, and credit and debit cards.
    2. Use your phone to take photos of the front and back of the cards and upload the pictures.

Whichever method you choose, password-protect digital versions of this document in storage or on your phone, and keep the paper copies in your fireproof safe or lockable file drawer. 

5) Clean Off Your Desk

Next Monday, January 12, 2026 is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. Celebrate it by making a clean sweep of everything piled up on your desk, de-germify it, and think carefully about what belongs on it.

Read last year’s Paper Doll Celebrates National Clean Off Your Desk Day for step-by-step for making your desk a space for productivity instead of mystery crumbs and mountains of papers.

Then refresh your space with ideas from Organize Your Desktop with Your Perfect Desk Pad: 2025 Update and Paper Doll Explores the Best of Desktop File Boxes.

ORGANIZE YOUR DIGITAL SPACES IN 2026

Digital clutter may not take up physical space, but it wears down our batteries, both in our devices and our personal batteries because of the overwhelm of excess.

6) Declutter Your Phone Apps

The Pareto Principle says that 80% of our success comes from 20% of our efforts. It holds true in many ways; 80% of the time, we wear the same 20% of our wardrobe, kids play with the same 20% of their toys; we use the same 20% of our apps.

It’s why letting things go from the 80% we hardly ever use makes us feel less cluttered and more productive, even though we anticipate we’ll feel anxious about having let them go — that’s why they’re cluttering up our digital spaces in the first place!

  • Flip through your home screens and take inventory — What apps did you download and never even try because they required creating a login? What apps did you give up on because they were buggy? Let go of low-hanging fruit.
  • Clean up by deleting apps you used the least often (or never). To see the last time you used an app on iOS (for iPhone or iPad), follow this path: Settings>General > iPhone (or iPad) Storage. There are a few different ways to check app usage on Android devices.
  • Addicted to your phone? Check your Digital Wellbeing feature on Android or ScreenTime on iOS. Uninstall whatever is obviously distracting you with overuse. 
  • Move distracting apps that you can’t (or can’t bear to) uninstall to your last home screen page to create more friction and make it less likely you’ll happen upon them when looking for your bank app.
  • Fill your first home screen with apps you need and want to use because of the benefits they bring to your well-being.
  • Organize the remainder of your apps by dragging-and-dropping them into folders labeled for shopping, dining, social media, productivity apps, etc. Keep them — just make them less convenient.

The point isn’t to get rid of your digital life. Just eliminate what distracts you from what’s important.

7) Clear Out Your Voicemail Inbox

In the olden days, people called you and either you were home and answered, or not home, and never knew you had a call. (If you’re GenZ and reading this:  yes, really.) At work, if you weren’t at your desk during working hours, a receptionist took a message. After hours, either the “answering service” took your urgent call, or people waited until you got in on the next business day.

In the 1980s, we got answering machines and our messages lived where our landline phones did.

 

In the 1990s, we had voicemail, and at the turn of the century, people started calling less and texting more. Now, too many of our messages are spam, and voicemail fills up.

Have you ever called someone — or worse, returned a call — only to hear “This voicemail box is full and is not accepting messages. Please try again later.” 

What if your message is important? Do you text? What do you do if it’s a business? On the flip side, if your child’s school, your doctor’s office, or a client needs to reach you, do you want them to suffer this frustration?

Clear up your voicemail box with the following steps:

  • On landlines, dial in, listen, and start deleting messages.
  • On cell phones, iPhones and most Android phones show transcribed messages. Known contacts should appear by name, making it easy to figure out whether a message is still needed even before you read it. Unknown numbers may be spammers (swipe left!), but may be people you’ve never entered into your contacts. Review those messages, and anything that doesn’t make the cut, delete!
  • Save numbers for contacts you may need in the future. — Add a last name and any context necessary. I have a contact saved as First name: MaryBeth, Last name: “Hit my car in the parking lot.” 

Until recently, the only “Terri” in my contacts was my hair stylist, but when I was in Portugal and Spain in September, I added my tour-mate to my regular iPhone contacts. Just before my last haircut appointment, I voice-texted, “I’m here, but looking for parking. I’ll see you in a minute.” When I got to her space, she said she hadn’t received my message. A moment later, my tour-mate Terri texted, “You’re here to see me?” with a series of laughing emojis. Doh!

Last names (and context) are important! 

  • Be ruthless in getting rid of old voicemails. What should make the grade? Messages that you save for:
    • work purposes — but confer with your boss or your IT department regarding rules in this regard
    • legal purposes (such as when someone is stalking or harassing you, or offering a set of deal points for a contract.
    • sentimental purposes — but be judicious. Can you picture yourself sitting in an airport, listening to a loved one’s message over and over? 
  • Download messages you want to keep permanently. On iPhones, tap the voicemail you wish to save and you’ll see the share icon in the upper right corner; share the resulting MP3 to your photos or notes app, Evernote, social media or wherever else, just as you’d share an article or a picture.

On Android phones, tap on the message to see a list of options. Click one of the save or archive options you prefer and select the storage location. For more voicemail-saving techniques, read Smith AI’s How to Download and Save Important Voicemails.

8) Clear out your email inbox

For years, people have laughed at me, saying that search worked so well and email providers granted so much storage space that it was no longer necessary to clear inboxes. Still, I blithely went on advising my clients to regularly clear their inboxes, and to create a hierarchy based on categories matching their analog filing systems.

Recently, I’ve felt vindicated as Gmail and other email providers have been adding storage limits, and people recognize that search (even AI-assisted search) sometimes takes longer than going to a particular sub-folder with a helpful title.

Email is a headache! According to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute, on average, 28% of work time is spent reading or replying to emails. And the average worker — and yes, you’re all above average — checks email 11 times per hour. 84% of us keep email open in the background while working, making it oh-so-easy to “check” our email.

The problem is that we CHECK IT over and over again looking for that dopamine hit, but we often look at emails without doing anything with them, like opening the fridge in hopes that someone has magically made something delicious and put it in there.

You may think that Inbox Zero is the cure, plowing away at email but getting further behind in important work. James Clear has said, “The most invisible form of wasted time is doing a good job on an unimportant task.” Email clutters our lives like that.

There’s no permanent state of inbox zero (unless you stop sending outbound emails and block all inbound senders), any more than finishing all of the laundry today will create laundry basket zero unless your family plans on becoming very tidy nudists.

There's no permanent state of inbox zero, any more than finishing all of the laundry today will create laundry basket zero unless your family plans on becoming very tidy nudists. Share on X

Processing email isn’t your job, it’s just one method of communication and information acquisition, and it’s not always the right one. Instead:

  • Unsubscribe from whatever you never read. (It’s like buying vegetables that you know you should eat but they disappear into the back of the fridge and eventually get slimy.) Take five minutes a day to declutter your future inbox.
  • Set up a simple hierarchy of subfolders with names of major projects, client names, or whatever works for you. Having a place for emails to safely, dependably live will encourage you to manually or automatically route necessary ones of your inbox. As with voicemail, don’t feel like you should save everything. 
  • Learn how to use your email platform’s filters or rules function to automatically sort mailing lists to one sub-folder, anything you’re always CCed on even though you know it’s nothing to do with you to another, and so on. 
  • If you’re overwhelmed by your huge backlog, move everything from more than a month ago to a folder you call “Archived” and start with a minty-fresh inbox. You can always go into the “Archived” folder and sort if you’re feeling enthusiastic, but at least you’re dealing with something more manageable.

9) Know What You Don’t Know About Your Tech

In Digital Disaster Prep: How to Organize Your Tech Info Before You Need It earlier this year, I walked readers through all sorts of information you need to know before something goes wrong with your tech. Do you know where to find your:

  • IP Address
  • Network and router information
  • ISP contact information
  • Device Identifiers
  • Operating system license keys
  • Software and game activation codes

Your household probably added some hardware and software goodies this holiday season. This is the perfect time for you to read the post and start logging all of your essential tech information.

ORGANIZE YOUR TIME IN 2026

You’ve heard the expression that “time is money,” but time is actually more valuable than money. You can return a purchase that falls short of expectations to get a refund. Time can never be refunded. 

10) Track Your Time to Figure Out Where Your Time Is Going

To improve your productivity, the first thing you must do is get a handle on how you’re spending your time. 

Read my How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity from last January to understand the benefits of time tracking, including mindfulness and focus, prioritization, data-driven decision making, stress reduction, and accountability. The post also prepares you to face challenges and overcome the obstacles, and offers strategies and resources for tracking your use of time.

Track for just one day, or participate in a weeklong time tracking project such as Laura Vanderkam’s annual event. Register for her 2026 Time Tracking Challenge from January 12-19, 2026. I do it every year!

11) Get a Better Sense of the Passage of Time

For some people, knowing what time really “feels” like takes some effort.

First, put real, analog clocks wherever you tend to get lost in time. Is that your desk (even though you wear a watch and your computer has a clock)? Is that the bathroom, because you lose awareness of time while doing your hair or soaking in the tub? Is it your car, which has a perfectly serviceable clock but the time is always wrong because you never learned how to change it for Daylight Saving Time?

Next, read about all the ways timers can help you get a better sense of your time.

12) Time Travel in Your Planner

If you use a paper planner, hopefully you already have one for 2026; if not, that’s step #1. But even if you are 100% digital, this advice goes for you, too.

It’s tempting to just fill in your January pages and figure you’ll adjust as you go along. But even if you’ve had the same meeting every Tuesday for the past 5 years, somehow, some way, you’ll double-book if it’s not in your planner or calendar.

Spread out at your desk or your kitchen table, grab a cup of cocoa or something to soothe you into the new year, and do the following:

  • Page through each week of last year’s planner and copy everything that recurs by date (like birthdays and anniversaries).
  • Add events that happened in 2025 and are already scheduled to happen again, but not on the same dates (like conferences, work retreats, medical tests and appointments, etc.).
  • Use last year’s schedule activities to prompt you to make a list of anything you might need to schedule or add to your long-range tasks, like meeting with your accountant, scheduling annual medical tests/exams. 

13) Eliminate What Doesn’t Excite You

I’m a big believer in the concept that whatever isn’t a “Hell, yeah!” is a “Heck, no!” at least in terms of what you can control. (Unlike Marie Kondo, who encourages people to get rid of tangible items that don’t bring joy, I know that you can’t just toss your old tax returns.

Similarly, you can’t strike everything that isn’t joyous off of your calendar. You still have get a dental cleaning at least twice a year, whether you like it or not.

But why not make 2026 the year you step back from volunteer positions that take your time and energy, but don’t give you delight?

How about taking that book club (for which you never like the selected books) off your schedule? You can always agree to meet the people one-on-one without the obligation to read the newest oversized dystopian novel.

Set yourself, and your calendar, free.

14) Pick a Problem-Solving Day

Theming your days can make you more productive because you don’t have to keep switching tasks. Marketing Mondays or Financial Fridays let you schedule a block of similarly-themed tasks so you can focus and get into “flow.”

I encourage clients to pick one day of the week for problem-solving. Block a few hours on a specific day for sitting on the phone and asking, repeatedly, for someone to escalate your call. This is the day you set aside for time to get help on whatever is making your computer do THAT THING.

Knowing that you have a slot firmly in place will allow you to worry less about getting problematic or frustrating things accomplished, and because there’s one place in your schedule for solving problems, you will be able to focus when that day arrives.

ORGANIZE YOUR FINANCES IN 2026

15) Stop Singing “I Owe, I Owe, It’s Off To Work I Go”

Debt creates mental clutter. Knowing is always better than not knowing, so make 2026 the year that you know what you owe and figure out what’s going on with your money and where it’s going.

  • Make a list of every credit card, loan, and any other kind of debt you have. Note the creditor, the amount, and the interest rate.
  • Next, make a list of every fixed expense you have.

Seeing it all in black and white (and red) may be sobering, but it’s the first step toward figuring what you can do about it. 

Maybe you can refinance a car loan or mortgage to lower your monthly costs?

Perhaps you can call your credit card companies and request a reduction in your interest rates. (Nerd Wallet has a great article on How to Get a Lower APR on Your Credit Card.)

Maybe you can cut expenses for things you’re not even using.

16) Go Spelunking for Lost Money

Start with your couch cushions. Whether your loose change is in a jar in the laundry room or at the bottom of your purse, it’s (literally) weighing you down wasting your financial potential. Put on some music and start rolling coins (or bribe your kids to do it) and take the money to the bank. Alternatively, dump it all in a canister and take it to a Coinstar machine or any credit union that accepts and counts coins for free.

To recoup other “lost” money, follow steps in these Paper Doll posts:

17) Re-Shop Your Auto Insurance 

When was the last time you actually shopped for car insurance? If you’ve kept the same insurance for years, you’re almost assuredly overpaying. As with the cable company, this is one of those instances where newer customers are rewarded with the best deals, and loyal customers are not rewarded for loyalty.

It doesn’t cost anything to shop around. Even if you find a better rate, you may be able to return to your agent and say, “Hey, the guys across the street quoted me quite a bit less. Can you match it?” 

Note: if you use online pricing comparisons, you’ll be bombarded with emails, so consider creating a new Gmail account just for these replies.

Before you make any calls, though, familiarize yourself with the basics of car insurance with Organize for an Accident: Don’t Crash Your Car Insurance Paperwork [UPDATED]

RECITE THESE ORGANIZING AND PRODUCTIVITY MOTTOS

When you’re having a hard time tackling the clutter or focusing on the work, pick one of these mantras to help point you in the right direction.

18) Don’t put things down; put them away.

19) Declutter first, then contain it. (Don’t acquire clutter to contain your clutter!)

20) Everything should have a home, but not everything has to live with you.

21) Someday is not a day on the calendar.

22) Break every task into its smallest possible step. If you can’t get started, the first step is probably not small enough.

23) Cut yourself slack. Give yourself grace. 

24) Progress, not perfection.

25) Albert Einstein said, “Organized people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” Be lazy!

AND FINALLY…

26) You don’t have to go it alone.

If you’re struggling with organizing your space, your schedule, or your thoughts, a professional organizer or productivity specialist can help. I serve clients in the Chattanooga, TN area, but I also work with clients virtually, around North America. 

Wherever you are, there’s a someone who can help. Happy New Year, and Happy GO Month!

2025 Wrapped: Do An Annual Review To Design Your Best Life

Posted on: December 29th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

The unexamined life is not worth living. 
~ Socrates

WRAPPING UP PAPER DOLL’S 2025

There’s no getting away from your annual review. 

It all started with an email from Spotify Wrapped. Spotify was one of the first online platforms to sum up a user’s habits and achievements for the past year, and people seem to love sharing this bit of self-knowledge. Mine tells me that my top artist was The Floating Men, a group I first saw in concert in 1993, in what we used to quaintly call record stores. I need no app rewind to know this music is the soundtrack to my life, but as a whole, it’s left to me to interpret that I haven’t listened to much new music lately (unless it’s in the background of a TikTok).

Spotify tells me my top artists and songs, how many minutes I listened, and even my listening age, which they peg at 47, not because I’m almost a dozen years more youthful than my actual age, but because I listened most to songs from the 1990s. (While Spotify didn’t bother to mention it, I’m able to see that I’m geographically diverse, with my most listened to music from the Southeastern United States, Canada, the UK, Sweden, and the Pacific Northwest.)

A few days ago, Goodreads sent me my 2025 Year in Review statistics. Breathlessly, it reported that I’d finished 37 books and 9620 pages this year (though it’s already out of date after a holiday week spending reading) and that I’m a top 10% reviewer. (I doubt that’s a qualitative description. Given the length of my blog posts, I think we can just assume it means I write really long book reviews.)

It also lets me know I’m just a handful of pages short of hitting my 2025 Goodreads Challenge goal, so I’d better finish this blog post and get back to reading!

Duolingo started emailing around Thanksgiving, and I don’t love that my year in review is only actually 11 months of data. It’s true that I faithfully studied Italian and Spanish every day of 2025. Thankfully, Duolingo’s year in review kindly avoids mentioning that I quit learning chess after two weeks because — and this is embarrassing for a professional organizer to admit — my sense of spatial orientation and ability to recall which way some pieces move was woeful.

It also ignores the fact that although I tried to learn Portuguese as well as Spanish in advance of my September travels, I somehow failed to learn that when you say thank you (obrigado or obrigada), the gendered form of the word depends on your gender, not the recipient of your gratitude. No wonder I got some funny looks at the airport when I was just trying to be polite!

Even Jimmy John’s is telling me how many (and which) sandwiches I consumed in 2025!

Entertaining and accurate as they may be, how helpful are these backward glances?

Sure, they let me easily click to brag a bit about my accomplishments, but what goes unmentioned (and without fancy graphics) is at least as important; we need to know where we fall down if we hope to get back up!

After five years of averaging close to 11,000 steps by day, I fell significantly short in 2025. Fitbit tells me when I hit my goals, but stares off into the distance and politely ignores that I’ve been slacking off a bit this year.

WordPress, my blogging platform, doesn’t make an annual review easy, and I am avoiding (and wouldn’t believe) ChatGPT in this regard. So, I had to manually count and scroll. Counting this post, I only wrote 30 completely new (non-refreshed) posts this year, versus 40+ in most years of the past half decade. Some of that was intentional, as I’d decided not to publish on holiday Mondays or while traveling, but it ignores that I also took off the entire month of October after I returned from Europe, polishing older posts but not writing new ones. It’s up to me to figure out what that means in terms of motivation and productivity.

And that’s what an annual review is all about.

THE EXAMINED LIFE: BEYOND THE STATS

What if we look beyond the numbers? Professionally, I can (and do) count how many new clients I worked with this past year, and how many “graduated.” But numbers don’t paint the full picture. When we look at the qualitative vs. the quantitative, we see trends.

When I began blogging in 2017, I was focused almost entirely on paper. Since then, I have expanded my reach each year, covering topics from financial organizing to productivity, motivation to time management. Although I work with residential as well as business clients, I tend to leave blogging about residential organizing to my excellent colleagues.

Each month, Janet Barclay curates the Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival. I’ve been delighted to reach Megastar Blogger status, having had 50+ of my posts in monthly carnivals, and I’m working my way toward Ultimate Star status, but with only 12 months in the year, it’ll take a while to hit 100 posts. 

In December, Janet curates the Best of 2025, where each participant explains why, among the posts they’ve written, they consider that one to be their best, and the definitions vary widely. 

“Best” posts in the December 2025 Productivity & Organizing Blog Carnival covered a wide spectrum of topics: useful concepts about ADHD and kitchen gadget clutter, joyfully embracing change and organizing with spreadsheets, intuition vs. pro/con lists and knowing when to slow down. 

Most years, I consider my “best” post based on the quality of writing or how much humor I could pack into one post. However, pressed to describe my best of 2025, I picked a post from late summer, Organize and Lower Your Medical Bills: Spot Errors, Negotiate Costs, and Save Money. Why? Because the impact current events are having on people’s finances and health means this kind of advice is useful and important. While I can count the number of views or comments on a post, I can’t quantify the value of that post vs. others.

Beyond my official “best” post, however, I tried to come up with a Paper Doll 2025 Top 10 List but only got as far as these eight: 

  1. Paper Doll on the Power of a DONE List 
  2. Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Memento Mori and Appreciating Your Time
  3. Global Day of Unplugging 2025: Phones and Apps to Reduce Phone Use and Improve Your Life
  4. Digital Disaster Prep: How to Organize Your Tech Info Before You Need It
  5. How to Track, Lower, or Cancel Your Recurring Subscription-Based Bills
  6. Paper Doll Celebrates National Clean Off Your Desk Day
  7. Paper Doll’s Ultimate Guide to Organizing Yourself to Get a REAL ID
  8. How to Use Time Tracking to Improve Your Productivity

Why only eight? Not because I didn’t love any of the other posts, but because some were silly, some were time-specific, and mostly, because just as every mother loves her children, my posts are my babies, and when you have twins or triplets or quintuplets, you can’t easily pick among them. Thus, my Paper Doll 2025 Year in Review “best” list is eight posts — plus two series. So sue me!

and

EXAMINING YOUR OWN LIFE

When Socrates spoke of the lack of value of an unexamined life, he wasn’t thinking about Spotify Wrapped or “Best of” lists, of course. He knew that looking at where you’ve been is merely the first step in deciding how you will live going forward.

Find the Treasure

Over the past several years, blogging about reviewing the past year and planning for the next one, I’ve come up with a list of questions I think offer a path to living the examined life. However, once you hit December, it’s hard to recall powerful happenings closer to the beginning of the year, so you may need some assistance in your re-examination.

Start by looking at your calendar. That’s where you put the things you intended to do, so it’s a great starting framework. Most of the events on your calendar actually happened, or you would probably have crossed them off or moved them.

Many of the successes and achievements in life are unplanned, however, so try to find the mini-recaps you did all through the year, even without realizing that’s what they were.

Scroll through emails and texts you sent, and flip through the pages of your diary or journal, if you have one. Rereading messages you shared may offer insight into what mattered (and how you dealt with it) during the year.

Pull up the photo library on your phone and navigate to January 2025. Scroll forward and I bet you’ll be surprised by achievements and delights that seasoned your year.

The key is to remember more of the past year than just cold, hard statistics. 

For example, after a quiet December, my initial instinct was to think that my personal year was fairly flat. However, reviewing my personal calendar and photos immediately reminded me that in addition to my big trip to Portugal and Spain, I also:

  • saw Hamilton with my friend Chris,
  • flew to visit Paper Mommy,
  • attended my 40th high school reunion,
  • road-tripped to Massachusetts for my friend Phil’s vow renewal,
  • and after 15+ years of not having seen The Floating Men perform, I went to three shows! 

(Perhaps we’ll need to examine how developing a gratitude practice may be the key to remembering more of the highlights of each year.)

See the Whole Picture

When I looked back at my professional year, I’d only focused on clients and blogging, but my calendar showed me the podcasts I’d appeared on and the speaking engagements I’d done. And when I went back through the emails in my “Success Folder,” I was able to read testimonials for the real change that organizing and productivity coaching made in my clients’ lives. (Don’t have a “Success Folder” of your own? Don’t worry, I’ll have an upcoming blog post on that!)

It’s too easy to erase the good stuff from our brains and focus on the negative. When I started my annual review, my first thoughts were about how two different people hit-and-ran my car 48 hours apart and my disappointment with myself for not doing more and varied marketing this year. But those are just snapshots, not the whole picture.

In a discussion about public reputation, a beloved boss once told me that, “One ‘Aw, <bleep>’ wipes out ten ‘Atta boys’  — but your reputation in your own mind is just as likely to bury the gold under that <bleep>ing manure.

So, answer these in your head, aloud by yourself, or with a yearly review buddy, or try journaling your responses. Give yourself the opportunity to find the truth of your past year.

The Good

  • What challenges made me feel smart, empowered, or proud of myself this year?
  • What did I create?
  • What positive relationships did I begin or nurture?
  • Who brought delight to my life?
  • Who stepped up or stepped forward for me?
  • What was my biggest personal highlight or moment I’d like to relive? 
  • What was my biggest professional moment I’d want to appear in my bio?
  • What’s a good habit I developed this year?

The Neutral

  • What did I learn about myself and/or my work this year? 
  • What did I learn how to do this year?
  • What did neglect or avoid doing out of fear or self-doubt?
  • What did I take on that didn’t suit my goals or my abilities?
  • What was I wrong about? 

The Ugly

  • What challenges made me feel weaker or less-than?
  • Whom did I dread having to see or speak with this year?
  • Who let me down?
  • Whom did I let down?
  • What did I do this year that embarrassed me (professionally or personally) or made me cringe? 
  • When did I hide my light under a bushel? 
  • What am I faking knowing how how do? — Instead of pretending you know how to do something but are choosing a different path, ask for help. Make decision about what to do from a position of strength rather than weakness.
  • What’s a bad habit I regret taking up or continuing?
  • Where did I spend my time wastefully or unproductively? (It’s social media. For all of us.)
  • Where did I spend my money wastefully or unwisely? 

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO WITH YOUR ANNUAL REVIEW?

Use What You Learn

If all you did was answer these questions as if they were a series of college essays, it might be instructive, but it wouldn’t be powerful. Instead, use your answers as guideposts for what’s to come (or what you wish will come).

For example, when there are people or activities that make you feel smart, bold, and fierce, look for ways to add more of that in the year to come. Did human connection make you realize you know more than you thought you did? How can you find opportunities to spend more time with people who challenge you (in all the right ways)?

When you see an obstacle, look for a phrase or quote to help stiffen your backbone. For example, in the years when I had too many answers to the question, “When did I hide my light under a bushel,” I stuck a sticky-note on my mirror quoting Nelson Mandela:

“Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

It’s OK if you were wrong about things, ideas, or people, but how will you secure your chances at figuring out the truth and making better decisions going forward? 

Let your answers about last year guide how you approach next year.

Try Year Compass

Obviously, you don’t have to go with my questions. One of the best platforms to review your year is Year Compass. It’s free, available in 63 languages, and you can download it as a printable booklet and fill in by hand on paper or type in a fillable, printable PDF.

The first half of Year Compass involves paging through your calendar, as I’ve suggested, and answering just six essay-style questions:

  • What are you most proud of?
  • Who are the three people who influenced you the most?
  • Who are the three people you influenced the most?
  • What were you not able to accomplish?
  • What is the best thing you have discovered about yourself?
  • What are you most grateful for?

But that’s merely the beginning.

Year Compass nudges you through a discovery of the best moments of your past year so you can analyze your biggest accomplishments and challenges. It also creates space for forgiveness and compassion (towards yourself and others) and for recapping your year in ways that I’ve never seen on any other annual review platform. Year Compass also takes the insights from the first half part of the process to help you design your dreams and actions for the coming year. 

“My Secret Plan to Rule the World” Photo by Ann H on Pexels

Value Your Values

Socrates was obviously wise; in addition to his recognition of the importance of examining one’s life, he said, “Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.” Only you can decide what defines a “good” life for you, your family, and your inner circle, but centering your future behavior on activities that reflect those values is a pretty good way to organize how your approach. 

I encourage clients to take time to spell out exactly what their values are. However, it’s not always easy to define — and prioritize — our values. If you could use a little support in identifying the values that matter most to you, consider these resources:

No matter how many quizzes I take or versions of these lists I peruse, my values always come out the same. Can you guess? Paper Doll‘s top three values are knowledge, usefulness, and humor.

Please feel free to share your own key values in the comments, below.

HOW TO WRAP UP LAST YEAR FOR THE BEST SHOT AT THE NEW YEAR

This time of year is about endings and beginnings. If you like to start a year with a clean slate, you may want to read Use the Zeigarnik Effect to Finish Off Your Unfinished Tasks, the final post I wrote in 2025 to help you close those last open loops.

Longtime readers may have noticed that I did not talk in-depth about resolutions, goals, and annual themes. In 2025, I started the year with those concepts, so I will just direct you to How to Use Cathedral Thinking and Intentional Words to Organize Your Year for inspiration to create an intentional life in 2026.

But I will tell you that I’ve very excited about my theme word for the coming year: WHIMSY. Most of us found 2025 to be a pretty “heavy” year, and a little lightness and charm is exactly what I want, and what I hope to continue bringing to you wonderful readers next year.

Until we meet again, I hope you all have a very happy, healthy, organized, and productive New Year!

Meet Your Organizing Elves: The Pros Who Help Get Your Life in Order

Posted on: December 15th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 10 Comments

Recently, at the end of a session, my client joked that I was her own Santa’s elf. We laughed, but her description is not that far from the truth.

YOU AND SANTA BOTH NEED ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT

Santa’s elves (and Mrs. Claus and the reindeer, of course) help keep Santa from becoming overwhelmed. After all, Santa is basically running a multi-national corporation.

Certainly, he has to control the means of production for his factory. Can you imagine how much paperwork (and how many computer files) it takes to source, order, acquire, and unpack the resources before the toyshop starts making the toys?

But our friend Kris Kringle also manages a customer base of upward of two billion children (the current number of the world’s newborns through fourteen-year-olds), not even counting all the people for whom the magic of the holidays involves believing in Santa. I’m sure, at some point in the late 20th-century, Santa had to learn how to manage a computer database and CRM system to keep straight not only who was on the nice vs. naughty lists, but track them as their behavior meandered from one to the other and back again. 

Due to non-compete clauses, nobody’s ever ascertained whether Santa has only one sleigh or a huge fleet with one for each of the 24 time zones to which he delivers. Nonetheless, keeping up with the vehicle maintenance and registration requirements in 195 nations must be quite the task! 

 
Time management is a huge headache, too. Not only do those requests for toys and bikes and little red wagons (and all the modern digital doodads) need to be filled, wrapped, and packed onto the sleigh, but timing all of these deliveries in one night, with no respite for bad weather or reindeer infighting, has to be wearying.

It’s a good thing Santa has his elves. 

My clients often feel the same oppressive weights upon them, even if they don’t necessarily have the same international fame as the guy in the big red suit. Whether you need to deal with organizing and productivity pitfalls at home or at work, in your computer or your kitchen, your closet or your warehouse, there are professionals who can give you support.

Perhaps between preparing for Thanksgiving and the winter holidays, entertaining company, trying to make headway on languishing projects with end-of-year deadlines, and figuring out how to make space for everything coming in (to your home, to your schedule, and to your life), you have realized that you could use a little elf-like magic as you go into next year.

Today’s post is a chance for you to get to know all of the organizational (and organizing-adjacent) experts who can help you reduce overwhelm, coach your decision-making, and bring subject-matter expertise to help you overcome obstacles (whether tangible, temporal, or cognitive) so you can be your best self.

(Heh. Maybe that should be my holiday marketing campaign: I’ll be my best elf so you can be your best self.)

PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZERS AND PRODUCTIVITY SPECIALISTS

We professional organizers and productivity gurus didn’t all start out and orderly elves. Paper Doll was a television executive. Many, many of my colleagues were teachers. Some were attorneys, social workers, hoteliers, accountants, designers, and so many other types of professionals.

Sometimes, we felt like we were on the Island of Misfit Toys, but almost as if by holiday magic, we all found where we truly belong. And yes, we know that not all elves are always so lucky to find their fit right away.

 

NAPO

Longtime readers of Paper Doll are already familiar with the concept of professional organizers, but many people are surprised by the variety of services we provide.

If you think a professional organizer is just about moving the stuff around, I’ve got a surprise for you. As I tell my clients, “Housekeeping is about the stuff; professional organizing is about the person who owns (and uses, and maintains) the stuff.”

Housekeeping is about the stuff; professional organizing is about the person who owns (and uses, and maintains) the stuff. Share on X

Among the professionals in the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO), there are plenty of generalists. In just the past few weeks, I’ve:

  • helped a client pare down a collection of family photos and slides ranging from the late 1800s to the 1970s
  • organized holiday charitable requests, identified the client’s philanthropic priorities, and oversaw the donation process
  • supported a client with cognitive decline to maintain daily productivity
  • decluttered and downsized: cleaning supplies in kitchen cabinets, books and décor from bookshelves, a wardrobe that largely no longer served a client’s physique or style, and more
  • assisted clients in accessing funds by searching for unclaimed property, organizing supporting documentation for class action suits, and submitting claims for health insurance
  • reworked a client’s overly-ambitious December schedule so that she actually had time to enjoy the holidays. 
  

Although I do specialize in paper and information management and productivity coaching, my in-person clients seek my help for solving all manner of organizing-related mysteries and kerfuffles in their lives, and it’s the same for my colleagues.

Some professional organizers specialize in particular types of clients:

  • people with chronic disorganization or hoarding disorders
  • individuals with brain-based conditions ranging from ADHD and autism to traumatic brain injuries to dementia
  • people with physical disabilities
  • seniors
  • new parents
  • children
  • older students
  • solopreneurs and small business professionals

Others in our field focus on particular types of spaces for downsizing, clutter control, and organizing in:

  • kitchens
  • closets
  • living spaces (main and guest bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms)
  • home offices
  • playrooms
  • basements
  • attics
  • storage units
  • work spaces (like professional kitchens, law offices, physicians offices, science labs, theaters, etc.)

We also specialist in particularly kinds of services that cross the “who” and “where” categories, like:

  • time management coaching
  • paper management
  • digital organizing
  • organizing and managing photographs and memorabilia
  • financial organizing, including bill-paying, budgeting assistance, and bookkeeping
  • estate management
  • medical history management
  • household management
  • eco-organizing
  • home inventorying 
  • home staging
  • yard/garage/estate sale management
  • packing and unpacking for moves
  • space planning and design

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the services some professional organizers provide to businesses, including: business automation, corporate operations, event planning, records management, technology training, and more.

Basically, are overwhelmed by it, exhausted by it, stymied by it? Do you “just” need someone to come in and do it (or teach you how to do it — or how to do it better)? If it takes less time and you can focus on what’s important to you — then organizing and productivity specialists can help.

To find a professional organizer, visit the NAPO directory directly, or navigate from NAPO’s front page to the Find a Pro menu at the top. Search geographically or within a radius from your zip code, pick the business and/or residential specialties in which you need assistance, and review the list of my colleagues provided.

And don’t forget, much of the work we do with and for our clients can be done virtually, so you can pick that option from the specialty drop-down if you’re open to getting help from afar.

NAPO members represent thousands of separate professionals, coming together to gain continuing education and support one another so that we can support our clients.

  
Certification, Certificates, and Skills

When the NAPO directory provides you with names to peruse, you may see some additional notes.

Certified Professional Organizers (CPOs) are those of us who have attained credentials reflecting specific standards. That originally included 1500 hours (now 1000 hours) of paid client-centric work prior to sitting for a comprehensive exam (among other requirements), adhering to the BCPO Code of Ethics for Certified Professional Organizers, and obtaining continuing education in a variety of subjects during a three-year certification period.

For more about certification, you can check out the “What is a Certified Professional Organizer” tab here on my website, including my article, In Checkbooks And Underwear Drawers: What Certified Professional Organizers Offer Our Clients.

Specialist Certificates — In addition to the deep and wide subject matter expertise needed for certification, NAPO members may also hold certificates in specialized subjects, including: 

  • Brain-based conditions
  • Household management
  • Life transitions

  • Move management and home staging
  • Residential Organizing
  • Team productivity
  • Work productivity

Institute for Challenging Disorganization

Founded in 1990 by my colleague Judith Kolberg and originally called the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, the Institute for Challenging Disorganization (ICD) has as its mission to provide organizing professionals and the public with education and helpful strategies, and conduct research, regarding chronic disorganization.

Membership in NAPO and subscribership in ICD often overlap, and professionals in our field may obtain a variety of ICD specialist certificates related to chronic disorganization, hoarding disorders, and other related conditions.

Other Organizing and Productivity Associations

There are helpful organizing elves everywhere!

Outside of the United States, there’s an ever-growing universe of organizing and productivity professionals.

For our colleagues to the north, Professional Organizers in Canada (POC) has a similar search engine to NAPO’s. At their Find An Organizer page, you can specify services areas and specialties as well as languages spoken. (You didn’t think Santa’s elves spoke only English, right?)

NAPO, ICD, and POC do not stand alone. We have colleagues around the world as part of the International Federation of Professional Organizing Associations, including:

Several times a month, I am asked by friends, former classmates, clients, and random acquaintances to provide referrals and recommendations for professional organizers to help people’s loved ones, whether across the continent or across the world. It’s heartening to know that I have colleagues in so many places, ready to help those who are seeking a little more space or serenity. 

OTHER ORGANIZING-RELATED PROFESSIONAL ELVES

In addition to ICD and POC, and the National Association of Black Professional Organizers (NABPO) referenced above, NAPO has other affiliate organizations.

Daily Money Managers

Santa has to deal with financial transactions in 180 different worldwide currencies. Your finances may not be so complex, but whatever your needs, whether to help Grandma keep up with her retirement investments or to just make sure the bills get paid on time, the American Association of Daily Money Managers (AADMM) has financial organizing professionals to assist you.

Daily Money Managers (DMM) offer a wide variety of personal financial services to individuals and families, and manages financial tasks including bill-paying and oversight, budgeting, and record keeping. Some serve as fiduciaries for clients who are incapacitated. 

Aging/Geriatric Care Professionals 

Santa and Mrs. C. aren’t exactly spring chickens, and like all of us, may someday need support.

The professionals in Aging Life Care Association (ALCA) specialize in aging and disability issues while ensuring client “safety, continuity, and dignity.” As experts in health and human services, they can assist and advocate for families caring for older adult relatives or individuals with disabilities. They can partner with professional organizers and senior move managers whenever clients and their families are going through major life transitions — whether they’re downsizing so family members can age in place or to help them relocate to other living situations. 

Photo Organizers

Many NAPO professional organizers are comfortable helping their clients organize their photos or find solutions for digitizing them. But The Photo Managers (formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers) use their passion for photo collections and personal storytelling to assist clients with culling, organizing, and digitizing photos, as well converting older media to newer formats and sharing pictures.

OTHER MONEY ELVES

Every year, I learn about new types of professionals who can help me help my clients overcome the obstacles that clutter their daily lives. These include:

Claims Assistance Professionals

As I discussed in Organize and Lower Your Medical Bills: Spot Errors, Negotiate Costs, and Save Money, there are a variety of medical billing specialists, medical cost advocates, and patient advocates. In addition, if you’re drowning in medical claim paperwork that makes no sense, or you’re getting the runaround from the insurance company, you may want to reach out to a claims assistance professionals through The Alliance of Claims Assistance Professionals.

Financial Advisors

Knowing what to do with your money can be confusing, and it’s scary to wonder whether the advice you’re being given is good for you, or just good for an advisor taking a percentage of what you earn.

Before considering hiring a financial advisor, talk to the elves in your life: your family members, friends, and colleagues who seem to handle their dollars with sense. I am neither a fiduciary nor a money maven, but I do recommend that if you’re seeking help with building your financial future, you should find a fee-only financial planner. That’s someone you pay a flat fee, rather than a percentage, to provide you with advice.

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) is a great first start. You can also find Certified Financial Planners via the location search at PlannerSearch.org.  

Appraisers

A professional organizer can help you divide the wheat from the chaff when you’re figuring out what to donate and what to keep; we’ll hold your hands when we tell you that your collection of mini Beanie Babies you got at McDonalds will not fund your retirement. We may help you research the provenance and potential value of what you own. But no organizing professional is going to tell you for certain whether that piece of furniture or jewelry or coin collection is worth. For that, you need an appraiser. 

An art appraiser is not a stamp appraiser; fields of specialty range from wine to textiles, furniture to musical instruments, coins to fine art to books. Start with an accredited appraisal association like:

to find the experts that can help you understand the value of your property and make wise decisions regarding what to do with what you own.

Certified Divorce Financial Analyst 

Paper Doll hopes you never have to deal with a divorce (unless it’s something that will make your life better). However, I’ve worked with enough clients going through the divorce process to know that attorneys don’t have the bandwidth to deal with some of the intricacies of the financial situation.

Certified Divorce Financial Analysts are professionals who can help you figure out the complex financial aspects of your divorce. This may help you secure an equitable share of marital assets in order to plan your financial future. 

If you or someone you know needs support in this area, start with the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts. 

OTHER HOUSE ELVES

When you hear house elves, you probably think of Harry Potter. As a GenXer who grew up near Canada, I start daydreaming about house hippos.

But I digress.

In addition to the residential professional organizer services covered by NAPO and her sister organizations, there is some crossover into home relocation specialties.

Senior Move Managers  

The National Association of Senior and Specialty Move Managers is made up of relocation specialists. They’re focused on strategies for helping older adults (and their families) with the relocation process, including downsizing, as well as packing and unpacking, and assisting with logistics.

Home Stagers

In the olden days, when you wanted to sell your house, you hired a real estate agent. They told you to clean the house and pop a sheet of cookies in the oven to make things smell nice. Over the last few decades, however, home staging — literally staging your home to make it possible for prospective buyers to imagine themselves living there — has become a big deal.

Staging can involve removing objects that are overly personal or reflect particular belief systems, subtracting or adding furniture or décor to create a particular aesthetic, and generally working to show a house off in the best light.

As with senior move managers, you will likely find some crossover between NAPO/IFPOA professionals, but to find a home stager in your area, start with the Real Estate Staging Association and the America Society of Home Stagers and Redesigners.

Obviously, your organization and productivity needs are complicated, and by talking about elves, I am not entirely making light of anyone’s struggles.

Sometimes you just need a handy-person to help you lift and carry things to the attic or out to the curb; however, most of the time, a professional organizer or productivity specialist is the ideal person to guide you through the myriad decisions to make to move your life in the direction you want.

And when the real obstacles are not the things, but ourselves, and special services are needed, their are ADHD coaches, life coaches — even decision-making coaches — and mental health professionals!

Today’s post is a reminder that whatever is causing clutter in your space, your schedule, your finances, or your mind, you’re not alone. Reaching out to experts is a gift you can give a loved one — or yourself.

I suspect Santa would approve.

Paper Doll Organizes Snoop-Proof Ways To Hide, Label, and Wrap Holiday Gifts

Posted on: December 8th, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 12 Comments

With only a week until Hanukkah and 2-1/2 weeks until Christmas, we’re in the home stretch of the holiday season.

It’s possible you’re the kind of person who bought all your presents over the summer, wrapped and labeled them, and stored them in your secret hiding place months ago. (It’s also possible now you’re wondering why you can’t recall where that secret hiding place might be.)

Or maybe you haven’t even started buying gifts yet.

Either way, how are you going to keep the gifts a surprise until unwrapping time? How are you going to keep the kids (and the grownups who act like kids) from finding the gifts, poking at them, shaking them, and generally behaving like the gang on Friends.

 
ORGANIZE YOUR HOLIDAY GIFT HIDING PLACES

Very often, I find that the best place to keep gifts, wrapped or otherwise, from the prying eyes of tiny humans and others with insatiable curiosity is in an old suitcase. People may in cabinets and closets, but nobody looks in those cheerless valises in the basement, the ones that are faux leather and lack wheels and haven’t been used in 40+ years.

Yes, as a professional organizer, I encourage people to donate or recycle things that they don’t use, but quietly repurposing that blue vinyl-and-cardboard suitcase circa 1978 counts as recycling!

Develop a Variety of Hiding Places for Gifts

Obviously, if you’ll be traveling for the holidays and using all of the suitcases at your disposal, you may need a bevy of secret-stash solutions:

  • Hidden in plain sight — Would your kids (or your spouse) actually show any interest in prying up the lid of a Bankers Box labeled “2015 Tax Receipts,” “college textbooks,” or something similarly boring? Probably not. (Piling other stuff on top of those couldn’t hurt.) If you’re the only one in your house who cooks, a small wrapped gift or two hidden in the back of a kitchen cabinet, inside a rarely-used fondue pot, may be just what you need to stymie the sneaky searchers.
  • In a decoy household container — A similar idea, depending on the size of the gifts you want to hide, is using a decoy box may be just the ticket. Check your own storage spaces or ask your friends if they have boxes that were used for vacuums, TVs, or other medium-to-large appliances. A box labeled “seasonal décor” may suffice, unless someone else in your home is really eager to start decorating without your assistance. 
  • Masquerading as kitchen equipment — The people who are most likely to sneak around and try to find their gifts are probably not looking in the Crock-Pot. A bread maker or ice cream machine may serve similarly. If you’ve got small-to-medium-sized gifts and unused, lidded pots and pans, this may work. Just don’t put a gift inside kitchen equipment and then gift that kitchen item as a gift and then let your wacky boss throw a hissy fit and turn the Secret Santa into a Yankee Gift Swap. (If you know, you know.)
  
  • At your friends’ and neighbors’ houses — One solution is just to trade storage. Take your wrapped gifts in boxes or lidded tubs to your cousin’s, co-worker’s, or BFF’s place, and return with hers. You can even tell your family not to bother snooping because you’ve made this trade. (Note: if your kids and their kids are friends, one may spy on the other’s behalf.)
  • In trunk of your car — Obviously, this works in only two situations, when you normally have an incredibly tidy trunk (with ample room to store a gift-filled box labeled “work project”) or if you normally have a predictably packed and untidy trunk (in which case you’ll need to hollow it out and hide gifts underneath the faux facade of mess. (Do not mark any boxes as “donations” or someone may unhelpfully deliver all your holiday gifts to charity!)
  • Cardboarded up — Store all your wrapped, labeled gifts in the million Amazon and Chewy boxes you already have laying around your house. You can just stack them in the corner until you’re ready to put them under the tree or at people’s place settings, and then open the big cardboard boxes.

Photo courtesy of Kimberley Purcell

  • Up in the attic — The upside is that children and pets generally can’t get up to the attic on their own. The downside? It’s probably not that easy for you to get up there, either. Also, it’s probably dusty, there may be “critters,” and there’s almost certainly temperature and humidity variations throughout the year. Keep that in mind if you’re storing any gifts that are sensitive to those kinds of changes, and store the gifts in a tightly lidded tub. 
  • Inside old purses and backpacks — This is a riff on the old suitcase approach, but may be easier to access. If a shelf of your closet has all of your handbags, messenger bags, no longer used diaper bags, computer cases, or backpacks, load them up with wrapped gifts, as long as they’ll fit without scuffing the wrapping or stretching the container too much.
  • In guest room — This is a good option assuming a) you won’t have guests between now and gift-giving time or b) the storage space in your guest room is ample enough to hide the kids’ things, at least, in drawers or closets, or under the bed. 
  • In the guest bathroom — Sandwich wrapped flat gifts between guest towels; there’s almost no reason those box-shakers will be thinking to peek between the layers of towels. Consider it a fabric lasagna of secrecy.
  • Laundry hamper — Let’s face it; nobody is enthusiastic about doing laundry. Your kids aren’t about to suddenly volunteer to take the laundry to your room to the washer/dryer, even to please Santa. Note: the humidity in a laundry room may be unfriendly to your wrapping paper, so try keep gifts well protected in the hamper or basket, perhaps covered by an old blanked or comforter.
  • Inside board game boxes — Do you have board games that nobody has played since the Eisenhower administration? You have two options. You could just jettison the contents and replace it all with someone’s (or a bunch of someone’s) small gifts. Or, you could turn some of the gifts into surprises, if your family is more loosey-goosey with the gift exchange present exchange: put a LEGO mini-fig in with the Monopoly tokens or a gift card in your old game of Life, and then suggest a game.
  • Hiding inside trash bags — Big, black trash bags or leaf bags, especially if you have an attic, or garage, or basement with a variety of things already obscured by bags, may be the ticket. The problem? If there’s anyone who ever visits your house trying to be “helpful,” they may assume it’s trash and toss it out. You may want to warn your spouse, in-laws, or houseguests.
  • Inside other holiday decorations — If you’ve got a hollow ceramic tree, a Santa cookie jar in which nobody expects to find actual cookies, or a Nutcracker the size of a Buick, gifts can wait within.
  • Up, up, and away, or down among the dust bunnies — Let’s face it, you may not need to be creative at all. If everyone in your household is staring at screens all the time, just hiding gifts in a nondescript box at the top of any closet may work just fine. Similarly, if you’ve got a dust ruffle hiding the area underneath your bed (or the guest bedroom bed), and you don’t have pets or tiny humans at the crawling age, sliding things under the bed will work. 
  • At the office, with a caveat — If you have a home office that’s off-limits to the rest of the household, or if you have decent private storage at your place of work, you’ve got additional hiding places for your gifts. However, if the gifts aren’t at home, they may not be covered by your homeowner’s insurance, so think twice before stashing something pricey that could get stolen or damaged if it’s at your workplace.

Wherever you hide the gifts, make a plan for when you’re going to pull them out of their hiding places, especially if it involves climbing up, wiggling down, or matching schedules with someone else.

Make a Treasure Map for Hidden Holiday Gifts

The key to hiding your gifts without making you crazy or ruining the holidays? Make a list of each person’s gift, what it is, and where you’ve hidden it.

Whether it’s hand-written or digital, hide it from prying eyes. On the computer or in the cloud, give it an innocuous name, as long as it’s one that you will remember. With a paper copy, keep it in your wallet, or tidy it away among the holiday bills — anywhere your average household member won’t think to look. 

 

In professional organizing, we often point out that if you have so many things, or so much clutter, that you can’t find what you own, it’s as if you don’t even after it. This is just as true for gifts you’ve stashed so safely that you’ve hidden them from yourself.

Try Some Sneaky Gift Labeling Tricks

If your storage is at a premium and you have to keep wrapped gifts out and on display — and this trick works once you’re ready to put the gifts under the tree — fake the name tags. Instead of Grandma, Dad, Aunt Jen, etc., use celebrity names but don’t match the names to the personality of the recipient. So, Dad gets Taylor Swift’s present, Uncle Joe’s gift says Dolly Parton, and the baby gets a gift labeled for Keanu Reeves.

Of course, you could pick any category group. Choose board games, and label different gifts as Scrabble, Monopoly, and Cards Against Humanity. Label your gifts with the names of different countries, cities, rides at Disney World, movie superheroes, or whatever suits your fancy. 

If your family isn’t inclined toward whimsy, you can just number the gifts. The key is that you really should know whose gift is whose before the unwrapping begins.

As with gift hiding spots, make yourself a cheat sheet matching real names to “gift” names.

GET WRAPPING SAVVY

Paper Doll is terrible at wrapping any gifts that don’t come in perfectly rectangular shapes. All the way back in NAPO2014: It’s a Wrap! Organizing Your Wrapping Supplies with Wrap It!, I told a story of my wrapping failures (and shared this adorable photo of a now thirty-something) opening a stuff lion I’d wrapped so badly that only a two-year-old could look at it with any affection.

Many years ago, I offered up some alternatives for people with wrapping skill deficits. This was early enough in my blogging years that the formatting of the posts lacks some panache, but I stand by the efficacy of the solutions:

It’s a Wrap! Wrapping Paper Alternatives, Furoshiki & Frogs (2008)

Paper Doll Wraps Up the Holidays and Makes It All Stick (Part 1) (2011)

Paper Doll Wraps Up Some Alternatives to Wrapping Paper (Part 2) (2011)

Still, I’m obviously not the only person who has trouble wrapping presents when there’s no perfect box, as there are videos all over YouTube and social media, offering up guidelines for ensuring that enough wrapping paper (or a reasonable facsimile) prevents your gift from being naked.  For example, That Practical Mom has a short video with great gift-wrapping tricks:

The coolest trick, to my mind, is turning gifts diagonally when you don’t have quite enough wrapping paper.

By the way, if you care, Popular Mechanics has a feature on the math behind the diagonal wrapping hack. 

WRAPPING & PACKING & SHIPPING, OH MY!

Finally, while I’m my logistical skills as a professional organizer are pretty top-notch, I’m definitely not an expert at wrapping and packing gifts. I generally buy gifts online and have them sent directly to recipients and then just warn them the day that the shipper says they’re arriving so they don’t spoil the surprise by opening them to early. Otherwise, I usually put presents in gift bags topped by an excessive amount of tissue paper and call it a day.

Luckily, Quill developed and Visualistan has shared this infographic to walk you through each of these holiday headaches. Isn’t this better than getting wrapped up in cellophane and ending up with a million mismatched and weirdly cut bits of wrapping paper? (That’s always so disorganized!)

Gift wrapping, packing, and shipping hacks to save money and make your life easier #infographicYou can also find more infographics at Visualistan.

THINK BEYOND TANGIBLE GIFTS

Of course, the best gifts don’t necessarily need to be wrapped or shipped. 

Over the years, I’ve written many holiday posts focused on giving gifts of experiences. It’s a lot easier to wrap, label, and hide gift cards and certificates for experiences than big, awkward, stuff-lions!

  • adventures — like the NASCAR Racing Experience or an afternoon in an escape room)
  • entertainment (tickets to sporting events, museum exhibits, concerts, theater events, six months of Netflix or Hulu, or a year of Amazon Prime)
  • practicality — think gift certificates for car washes or an auto club membership like AAA
  • consumables — consider homemade yummies or one-time or subscription-based foods. Alternatively, give the opportunity to look forward to meals out with gift certificates to restaurants or coffee houses.
  • organization and productivity — whether it’s a gift for a loved one, or a gift for yourself, opt for some delight and peace of mind with a session, or package of sessions, with a professional organizer (like Paper Doll), either in person or virtually.

For a more in-depth look at gifts of experience, you may want to review Paper Doll on Clutter-Free Gifts and How to Make Gift Cards Make Sense, which also harkens back to older Paper Doll posts on experiential gifts.

It may feel early in December, but the days pass quickly. Whether you’ll be celebrating Hanukkah starting this Sunday night, December 14th, or have ten more days after that for your Christmas Eve festivities, whether you’re celebrating Festivus, or Yule, or the Solstice, I wish you joy (and organization) through the end of this year, and into 2026.

Show Me the Money — A 2025 Guide to Finding Forgotten Funds & Unclaimed Property

Posted on: December 1st, 2025 by Julie Bestry | 8 Comments

Whether you spend a small fortune over each Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend or you’re super-cautious with your dollars and cents throughout the year, I bet you’d like to have more money. And I bet you’d particularly like to have more of your own money — money that has been kept from you for some reason — back in your own pocket.

MISSING MONEY AND UNCLAIMED PROPERTY, REDUX

One of my most popular posts is one I published almost three years ago: Lost & Found: Recover Unclaimed Money, Property, and Savings Bonds. In it, I explained the basics of unclaimed property. To borrow from myself:

The term unclaimed property is what you’ll hear most often when searching for lost money in various types of accounts. Unclaimed property usually refers to funds that a government (federal, state, or local) or business owes you because you’ve, quite literally, left it unclaimed.

It’s possible that you’re so organized with your paperwork that you feel affronted that I’ve implied you might have just haphazardly left money sitting around. But I’m not saying you’re absent-mindedly leaving piles of cash wrapped in newspapers like Uncle Billy in It’s a Wonderful Life. (By the way, that $8000 deposit that ended up in Mr. Potter’s hands would be worth $121,762 in 2023 $132,913.23 in 2025! Maybe Uncle Billy should have tied the money to one of those strings around his fingers.)

Thomas Mitchell as Uncle Billy, searching the bank’s trash cans for the lost Savings & Loan deposit. Let’s boo Mr. Potter!

I posited the various reasons why money gets separated from its rightful owner.

Sometimes, you’re due a refund, but the refund sits so long that a company loses track of you. Several years ago, when I began working with a client, I had sorted through all of his bills and paperwork to figure out what we could discard, what should be filed, and what required action. Typically, that last category involves paying a bill, but in his case, we found that he was owed money. He and his late wife had opened a retail store credit card to purchase a service they’d later canceled. A prorated amount was returned to the credit card, but because they never used the card again, the balance just sat there, neither accruing interest nor being used, statement after statement.

Happily, in this case, one call to the credit card company (and many, many transfers between departments) later, and within a week, he had a check for the amount. Better yet, that credit card company doesn’t send statements in months when there’s no (positive or negative) balance, so it also meant that he had less paper clutter! 

Other times, you and your money are parted because you’ve done a magic trick and disappeared. Think of times when you’ve put down money, such as a security deposit for an apartment or a local utility account. The landlord or company holds your money as security, or collateral, in case you skip out on your payments. In many cases, that money is held in an interest-bearing account.

In the best case scenario, when you terminate your lease and cancel your utilities, you get back your deposit plus a little bonus (of interest) for your troubles. The problem is that too often (and particularly when we are younger), we’re so focused on where we’re headed that we miss out on what we are owed. However, if you left no forwarding address (and remember, in the olden days, when we moved, our phone numbers did not move with us), landlords and utility companies had no way to reach out and return that money.

In theory, that money is/should always be turned it over to the state.

These are only the most common examples of money that may have been left behind when you jetted off to the next part of your life. And, of course, most of us know the frustration of someone else not being clear about what or where valuable funds may be.

 

There are a variety of situations where your money might go unclaimed. Consider this a mental checklist to jog your memory of money that may have disappeared or been forgotten.

Financial Accounts

  • Abandoned bank accounts
  • Abandoned credit union accounts

It’s not uncommon to calculate how many outstanding payments will need to clear and leave only a bit more than that amount in a bank or credit union account you plan to close. The payments clear, and then the forgotten accounts often lay dormant, occasionally collecting interest.

Most bank and credit union accounts require some sort of activity — even just the deposit of $1, once per year — to be considered active. Banks won’t put in too terribly much effort before turning money over to the state.

Employment-Related Funds

It’s one thing to quit a job and leave behind forgotten leftovers in the break room fridge, but so many people manage to ghost their own money. 

  • Un-cashed checks or failed direct deposits — I’ve had clients who had been so overwhelmed and overworked that when they switched jobs, they forgot to cash their final paychecks. (Yes, even though most people are regularly paid via direct deposit, final checks are often issue with old-fashioned paper checks.)

I have also seen people fail to notice or remember — in the chaos of moving — that a final check was never actually direct-deposited; or perhaps that payment was issued, but the direct deposit failed to go through because the old bank account was already closed. I’ve seen all of these! And other payments may go un-deposited. Un-cashed checks might include:

    • paychecks
    • employment bonuses
    • refunds of expenses submitted to your employer
    • sales commissions
    • vendor checks
 

Poor Milton. They kept moving his desk, and the Payroll Department could never find him.

Investment Instruments

It’s common for people to have chaotic investments. I try to get clients to list all of their accounts, but often have to play detective.

When you’re fresh out of college, you may have a few savings bonds (far from their maturity dates) and nothing else to speak of. However, after a variety of jobs (particularly if you started working before the era of 401(k)s and Roth IRAs), you may have picked up (and then failed to roll over) a smattering of retirement accounts.

If you came into adulthood before mutual funds were really a thing, your investment portfolio may include a random collection of individual stocks, some of which are in DRIPs (dividend re-investment plans) and others where you randomly get checks for $1.53 or $4.52…which you try to remember to deposit and then find smushed in the pocket of your winter coat on the first cold day of the season.

Consider the following investment instruments you may have forgotten that you even had after a lifetime of cross-country moves:

People change addresses, firms merge or dissolve and then change names, stocks split or get sold off — whether they lost track of you or you lost track of them, it’s all worth tracking down.

Insurance Policies

Have you ever seen Gerber Life Insurance — yes, like the Gerber baby food. It’s whole life insurance advertised to parents to give their children life-long guaranteed coverage. Debating the pros and cons of getting life insurance for children is beyond the scope of this post; however, paying attention to organizing the documentation/paperwork for such policies is key.

After having been a professional organizer now for almost a quarter of a century, I have worked with many clients who, when they clear out their elderly parents’ homes, find random references or partial documents for those kinds of baby life insurance policies. In every case, the cash value of those policies have long-since stopped increasing in value.

Sometimes, they’ve been able to cash out directly but often the policies have been sold and resold to other insurers who have lost track of the policy-holders and turned the money over to the applicable state governments. (Are you noticing a trend? Even companies with everything organized by 21st-century computers don’t want to keep up with the nickels and dimes of seemingly abandoned accounts.)

Insurance-related money may be owed to you in the form of:

  • Matured insurance policies
  • Terminated insurance policies
  • Life insurance payouts
  • Annuities
  • Unclaimed insurance refunds — If the beneficiaries of insurance policies fail to claim death benefits, or policy-holders never cash refund checks (either because they never receive them or because they pile the mail on top of the microwave and it gets lost), that money goes unclaimed.

Legal Balances

If you won a million-dollar judgment, Paper Doll suspects you’d probably notice if you forgot to accept payment, but there are a variety of funds (usually far less than seven figures) that are legally yours but may be forgotten. When you go spelunking for unclaimed property, you may find you are due money for:

A client’s ex-husband once owed her a significant amount of back child support; she couldn’t collect because when the ex had arranged to be paid “under the table” so as not to have his wages garnished. However, when he won a significant judgment in an unrelated lawsuit, my client was able to receive what was due to her and her children because she had made the effort to keep the state agency overseeing child support enforcement updated whenever she moved.

  • Royalties owed for minerals, oil, gas, or other assets you own. (Your Grandma once owned land in Oklahoma or Texas? Think Dallas, but with more paperwork and fewer shoulder pads.)
  • Royalties owed for creative works, like published books or music, recorded performances, etc.

Have you ever heard of Sixto “Sugar Man” Rodriguez? He was a Mexican-American musician in the late 1960s and 1970s, whose songs focused on the societal difficulties facing those living in poverty. When his albums sold poorly in the United States, he ended his music career. Unbeknownst to Rodriquez, his music was so popular and influential in South Africa that it was said he sold more records there than Elvis Presley. But for decades, he wasn’t aware of, or paid royalties for, his talents — as told in 2012’s Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man, fans even mistakenly thought he was no longer alive!

 

If you’re due royalties make sure you are findable!   

FIND GENERAL UNCLAIMED PROPERTY OR FUNDS

As I explained in the original post three years ago, there’s not one central database for all unclaimed property. Generally, unless the money you’re seeking is in a special category (see further below), you should start your search in the unclaimed property office for each state in which you have lived.

Begin with Unclaimed.org, the website of the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators. (For detailed instructions for your search, see my original post.)

To search for multiple states simultaneously head directly to MissingMoney.com.

MissingMoney.com allows you to just type a first and last name, and all possibilities for that name, across all state databases, will come up.

FIND MISSING RETIREMENT AND EMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Do you vaguely recall having some funds trickling into a pension or 401(k), but you’ve had several jobs, homes, and kids since then? Is it all fuzzy?

If you’ve kept meticulous records, you may have files about your old retirement accounts; if you’ve kept mediocre records, you may have an old address book with the names of former colleagues whom you could find on Facebook or LinkedIn, and ask if they remember what retirement benefits you were supposed to have. However, there are more official methods for tracking down your hard-earned benefits.

Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database

Did you know that the US Department of Labor’s Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database can help you find your lost or missing retirement funds? Run by the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), the database should be your first stop if you or a loved one has lost track of an old pension or 401(k). Per the website:

EBSA is helping America’s workers and beneficiaries search for retirement plans that may still owe them benefits by establishing a public Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database through the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. 

This database serves as a centralized location to find lost or forgotten benefits and get information on how to obtain those funds. Learn about the tools and resources available for you to recover your hard-earned benefits.

Visit lostandfound.dol.gov — but note that to access the database, you’ll need a valid ID-Proofed Login.gov account, first. 

Once in, you’ll be able to search for any retirement plans that were a) linked to your Social Security number and b) sponsored by private-sector employers and unions. The database includes:

  • Defined-benefit pension plans — any kind of benefit plan that guarantees either a lump-sum payment when you retire or a lifetime monthly payment, like an annuity
  • Defined-contribution plans — accounts that employees fund during the years that they work, such as 401(k)s, and which continue to grow while they work and after they retire.

The Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database doesn’t include Social Security benefits,  personal investments like individual retirement accounts (IRAs) or retirement plans sponsored or overseen by religious organizations or government entities. So, if you’re a senator or a nun (or, y’know, a court clerk or church secretary), this database isn’t for you.

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

Have you ever worked for a private-sector company or organization whose retirement plan went kaput?

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) Database, is responsible for holding any unclaimed benefits for current or employees where the retirement plan ended and not everyone got their payout. 

Search the database to find your benefit plan; just enter your name and the last four digits of your Social Security number. Once you verify that PBGC is holding your benefits, follow the instructions for submitting documentation to claim them. (Once again, a plug for getting your Very Important Papers organized).

Other Retirement Benefits Solutions

The National Registry of Unclaimed Retirement Benefits (NRURB) operates a free database to assist former employees, employers, and plan managers to find one another and ease the problem of distributing retirement benefits that have been forgotten (by the accountholder) or abandoned (by the plan administrator). They use Department of Labor data and information from employers to help identify lost and/or unpaid benefits.

Speaking of abandoned plans, the Department of Labor’s EBSA also operates an Abandoned Plan Search database to help you find a plan abandoned by its administrator. (Maybe those administrators need to hire some professional organizers?)

If you’re still having trouble securing your company-sponsored retirement benefits, you may want to contact the non-profit Pension Rights Center. They operate the U.S. Administration for Community Living’s Pension Counseling and Information Program, and if your company or pension plan operates in one of the thirty states they serve, you may be able to access their free legal services. 

Find Unpaid Wages through WOW

Did you know that if an employer breaks labor laws, the Department of Labor’s Workers Owed Wages program is empowered to try to recover your back wages?

 

If you think you may be owed back wages from your employer, search the WoW database. Don’t dilly-dally, though, as they only hold unpaid back wages for three years.

Find the database at https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/wow.

FIND UNCLAIMED LIFE INSURANCE POLICIES

Unclaimed insurance payments are typically turned over to the state. However, there are some situations where money may be owed related to federal insurance policies.

  • VA Life Insurance Unclaimed Funds — The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has a database for searching unclaimed insurance funds. The VA holds onto money it owes to current or former policy holders or beneficiaries of those policies whom they’ve been unable to locate.

When my father, a WWII veteran, died in 2018, I had access to the paperwork related to a life insurance policy he was given upon leaving the Army at the end of the war. Contrary to expectations when dealing with government agencies, I was able to resolve all of my questions with one call. However, had I not had access to any of the paperwork, the link above would have been my first stop.

Note: the database doesn’t include funds from Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance (SGLI) or Veterans’ Group Life Insurance (VGLI) policies from 1965 to the present day. 

  • FHA-Insurance Refunds – Homeowners who previously had an FHA-insured mortgage may be eligible for refunds issued by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Click on the link above to access the HUD database. Scroll down and provide your name, FHA case number, city, and state.

FIND UNCLAIMED MONEY FROM BANKING & INVESTMENTS

Did your bank fail? What about your credit union? Were you scammed by someone like Bernie Madoff?

  • If you had money in an FDIC-insured bank that failed, you can search for your unclaimed funds at https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/funds/.
  • If your money was in a failed credit union liquidated by the National Credit Union Administration, the NCUA.gov site’s Unclaimed Deposits database can connect you to your funds.
  • Were you an investor parted from your money as a result of a bad-faith investment manager? The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lists “enforcement cases” where individuals or companies money to their investors. You can check the status of distributions to harmed investors at SEC Claims Funds. 

THINK OUTSIDE THE MONEY BOX

All of the categories described above cover unclaimed funds that someone else is holding. However, you may have money, or something just as good as money, hiding in your drawers and glove compartments and under the piles of papers on your desk: 

  • Unused loyalty points, rewards, and frequent flyer miles — These represent quasi-lost money, things with value but only if you use them. Bear in mind that some unredeemed points, rewards, and miles have expiration dates or may be considered abandoned if you don’t use them (or the apps/accounts) for a long while.
  • Unredeemed gift certificates, store credits, refunds, or vouchers from retailers service-based companies. Depending on the state in which you live, they may be treated as unclaimed property if they go unused too long. Remember that year Aunt Gertrude told you that she schlepped out in a snow storm to get you that gift card for for Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and a Toys ‘R Us gift card for your tiny human? Uh-oh. Too late now. Stores close or restructure, and value goes poof!
  • Contents of safe-deposit boxes — When people move or pass away, families may forget about the contents of old safe deposit boxes, and it’s very hard to reunite tangible property with original owners or beneficiaries. 

In short: unclaimed property is often “anything owed to you that you forgot existed.” Take time to search for whatever may be owed to you or loved ones who can no longer search for themselves.

Remember, unclaimed property comes in many forms, from many possible sources.

As always, when you keep good (and organized) records (with account numbers and names of institutions, and your own addresses over the years), the search and claim processes will be easier. When searching databases, consider that your identity (or that of a deceased loved one) may not have been quite so organized — check name variations: with and without maiden names, nicknames, initials vs. middle names, etc.) 

Good luck finding unexpected funds!

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