Archive for ‘Paper Organizing’ Category

In Search of Lost Time: Productivity, Proust, and the Culture of Availability

Posted on: January 31st, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 14 Comments

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.

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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? Share on X

In 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 Share on X

If 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

Organize To Reverse a Bad Day

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.

Organize To Reverse a Bad Day

Posted on: January 24th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 26 Comments

Summer Tears by Mark Seton (Creative Commons License)

In a perfect world, our time and task management wouldn’t depend upon our moods. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In theory, our organizational systems should be designed so that we can accomplish our goals whether we’re feeling motivated or not. That’s the whole point of a system, to give us a framework when something external or internal prevents us from feeling our usual drive to achieve.

Last September, in Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine, I wrote:

We also depend on activation energy. Because the hardest part of what we do is the getting started, we have to incentivize ourselves to get going. There are all sorts of ways we can trick ourselves (a little bit) with rewards, like pretty desk accessories or a coffee break, but the problem is that action precedes motivation. We’re not usually psyched to get going until we have already started!

Action precedes motivation. We're not usually psyched to get going until we have already started, whether it's a runner's high or Csikszentmihalyi's flow. Share on X

We may not feel like working out, but once we’re dressed in our best approximation of Venus and Serena, or the yogi of the moment, or whichever quarterback is getting all the endorsements, and have gotten ourselves warmed up, we’re well on our way.

When we lack our usual oomph, our knowledge of the benefits of staying organized may not be enough to keep us motivated to track our expenses, pay our bills on time, file our papers, and stick with our routines, but if we nudge ourselves with giving it just a little try (“just five minutes” or a Pomodoro of 25 minutes or whatever), we may find ourselves able to get into flow.

In other words, well begun is half done.

In that post on languishing, I talked about how to get past the (likely pandemic-induced) blahs and generate flow. We looked at several rhymes-with-brain solutions:

  • Abstain from the distractions that steal your focus.
  • Retrain your brain by shaking up the synapses and making different connections.
  • Restrain yourself from frequenting the people who eating up your time and energy.
  • Constrain your work areas and minimize the space they take up to keep from spending all your energy looking for your supplies and resources instead of using them to achieve your goals.
  • Contain those items in the areas you’ve constrained (above).
  • Maintain your successful routines.
  • Attain (and explain) knowledge to keep your brain active.
  • Gain momentum and jump-start your enthusiasm.

If you haven’t read that post, skedaddle over to it first, as conquering languishing might be just what you need.

BEYOND LANGUISHING

The problem with productivity is that sometimes, we’ll be going along just fine and hit a brick wall. If languishing is the “blah,” a really bad day is the “waaaaaaaaah.”

Judith Viorst captured it best in the title Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Whether you remember it from childhood, babysitting days, or from parenthood, you know what she means. There are days that can go wrong and completely wreck our moods and take our whole day off course.

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Maybe it starts small: you accidentally pour the orange juice into your cereal or realize your gas tank is almost on empty when you’re running late for work.

Perhaps you have a fight with a loved one or the person with whom you get along the least well (that’s a nice way of saying it, right?) gets a promotion or media attention or some other kind of success.

Or maybe something truly terrible (but still in the realm of “bad day”) happens, like a fender bender or news of impending layoffs at work. 

When a few small bad things happen in sequence, no matter how strong your intention, the collective experience tends to upend your schedule, foul your mood, and destroy your day. If you let nature take its course, you may feel better after a delicious grilled cheese sandwich or a tearful phone call to your bestie, or your bad morning may turn into a bad day that scrolls into a bad week.

So, let’s not let nature take its course. Let’s stop that bad day in its tracks.

ORGANIZE YOUR WAY OUT OF A BAD DAY

Organizing your space, time, and thoughts can be powerful. It can even prevent catastrophes. But other times, the best it can do is make catastrophes less catastrophic. At those moments, we must accept what has happened, or what is happening, and turn inward to control our response.

Insert a Break

Anyone who has ever used a word processing program knows the command to Insert Page Break makes sure that there’s ample white space between one set of content and another. You insert a page break between chapters in a book, or between sections in a report. It keeps unrelated material from flowing together.

In your time management, when you’re having a bad day, take a pause to keep your bad morning from flowing into a bad afternoon.

Let’s say something annoying happens at 9:45 a.m. Depending on how resilient we’re feeling, we may get a fat-laden snack from the vending machine or take a walk to get some fresh air, and then regroup. If that little break is enough to reverse course on your bad day, count it as a win!

Embrace Time Blocking

But if you’re feeling resentment from multiple recent annoying things bubbling up inside of you, you may be at risk of bringing the whole day down. Here’s where your break needs to be a little more focused. This is where we can steal from the concept of time blocking.

We’ve explored time blocking often, most recently in Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity. At its most basic, time blocking focuses on creating chunks of time for particular activities. 

The whole notion is that an endless to-do list never sets aside fixed time for the categories of activities we claim to value. If we are constantly putting out fires and dealing with interruptions, the most important tasks never get done. With time blocking in the way we normally approach it, there are some basic tasks:

Start with a brain dump of everything you need to accomplish. 

Group all your tasks into categories. At the time, I said, Work categories may not be all that different from school categories. You had math (now it’s bookkeeping or bill-paying) or English (now correspondence, marketing projects, or reading for fun). All of those activities were regulated by a fixed schedule that ensured you had ample time to focus on each subject. A bell triggered transition time. Your schedule even accounted for lunch and phys. ed. to keep your brain and body healthy.

Schedule your blocks so that you guarantee yourself set time for dealing with each important category.

I also said to “bubble-wrap” your time blocks with buffer time, so instead of trying to having Zoom meetings and major projects back-to-back, you’ll have recovery time. 

Sometimes, life circumstances require you to replace a planned day with different activities. But by grouping categories of tasks into blocks, it’s easier to slide the tasks around and move them to where they’ll fit.

And this is where time blocking comes into play on a bad day. When teaching clients how to time block, I usually suggest they make use of 90-minute blocks. Just focusing on the workday, and not taking into account your early mornings and what you’re trying to deal with from dinner to bedtime, it’s easy to see we have not one big blob of a day, but multiple blocks:

  • Early Morning
  • Late Morning
  • Early Afternoon
  • Mid-Afternoon
  • Late Afternoon

Let’s say you have a run-in with a co-worker or get bad news from your boss in the early morning. Or you have a fight with your spouse or a frustration with a parent in the drop-off line at school. Or, someone is wrong on the internet!

©XKCD/Randall Munroe (Creative Commons License)

It is so freakin’ easy to let an ugly mood settle into your day like a bad cough in your chest. If inserting that page break into the story of your day did work, your next option is to tell yourself that the day isn’t lost.

Take a deep breath. If you’re actually time-blocking, look at the the blocks you have on your calendar and figure out what’s the next possible block you can slide to a different day so that you can use your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit (see below) to get out of your funk.

If your day is not so carefully blocked out, mentally flip through your obligations for the next several hours until a good dividing line appears. If it’s 11:30 a.m., declare bankruptcy on your late morning block, know that lunch is a built-in daily mental health repair kit, and try to move or cancel whatever is in that first block in the afternoon.

The point isn’t to run away and join the circus, but to give yourself ample time to treat the yucky experience as a bad chunk, rather than an entire bad day. Then apply chocolate, or a soothing phone call, or an unplanned yoga class, or whatever, to the bruise forming from your crash with whatever ruined your mood. Instead:

  • Acknowledge that something unpleasant happened.
  • Give yourself permission not to deal with all of your emotions regarding the experience right now.
  • Take responsibility for clearing the decks for the next block (or two) so you can recuperate.
  • Use your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit.
  • Find your path to resilience. 

Create a Bad Day Rescue Toolkit

More than a decade ago, Daniel Powter had a hit with the song Bad Day.

My favorite part of the lyrics is when, after cataloguing the various travails, Powter sings, “You need a blue sky holiday.”

Every person’s Bad Day Rescue Toolkit will include different items, but use these ideas as a guidepost. The key is to organize as much of this now, when you’re having a fine or neutral day, so you’ll have it when you need it.

  • Make a list of the phone numbers of your most upbeat and/or most supportive friends.

Note: these may not be the same people. Scroll through your phone and think about who you might call if you need to vent or need to be perked up. My BFF is my go-to when I need to vent, and I try to be that for her. I’m not as good at refraining from trying to fix the situation as she is. (If you just want to vent, tell the person that before you get started.)

But here’s a sneaky tip. Try to tell the whole story of whatever frustrated you only once, to just one person. Get it out — all the “grrrrr, arghh” — and then move on to the rest of the experience. If it’s the right time to start looking for support with solutions, do that. Otherwise, invite your callee to distract you. Let them tell you about an awful situation at work, something ridiculous their mother-in-law said, or what’s making them bananas these days. (Try to avoid politics. That’s giving us all bad days.)

  • Keep a browser-bar folder on your computer or phone for websites that distract and amuse you — better yet, sync them for easy access. On Mac/iOS, back them up to iCloud. And here’s an article for How to Sync Browsers Between Your Phone and PC.

Similarly, start maintaining a folder (digital or paper) of jokes, funny stories, cartoons, or goofy memes. If you’re on Twitter, use the bookmark tool to save those long, ridiculous threads where people report silly family stories or embarrassing tales.

 

This classic is one of my all-time favorite threads, and by the time I get days into the contributions, I usually end up looking like the laughing-crying emoji.

For professional humor, I particularly like comics that are gentle. My favorites are:

Liz Climo’s The Little World of Liz books and Twitter feed

Dinosaur Comics and Twitter feed

Nathan W Pyle’s Strange Planet comics, books, and Twitter feed

 

  • Start saving videos that make you happy.

It’s shockingly easy. Make sure you’re logged into Google (because Google owns YouTube) and then whenever you come across a video that makes you laugh or lifts your spirits, click on the SAVE button to the lower right of the video.

This is how you create a playlist. When the little window pops up, click “Create New Playlist” and give your playlist a name, like Make Me Happy! You can also decide whether this playlist is public or private.

  • Consider making YouTube playlists of other kinds of videos, like travelogues or workout routines — anything that focuses on what take you out of your head long enough to regroup.

Sometimes, you don’t even need to do the workouts (though it helps). Consider watching The Kilted Coaches. (Your mileage may vary.)

  • Create a playlist of songs that reverse crankiness.  

Having grown up in the era of mix-tapes, I found the late-90s/early-00’s experience of trying to make CD mixes frustrating. 

Nowadays, most folks are going to make playlists directly in Spotify, so whether you want to do it on the desktop or via mobile, here are Spotify’s directions for creating playlists. (And, of course, if you prefer to watch videos along with listening to your music, you can search out your favorite songs on YouTube and follow my directions above.)

If you’re not that up on popular music, you can also search online for happiness-including playlists that other people have created. For example, The Ultimate Happy Playlist on Spotify runs almost two-and-a-half joy-inspiring hours and has more than 10,000 followers. From Katrina and the Waves’ Walking on Sunshine to Pharrell Williams’ Happy to many less obvious choices, it’s a good starter for dissipating a bad mood.

 

 

 

    

  • Build up your success folders.

As we’ve discussed before, having tangible folders for papers and digital folders (generally for email) allow you to keep proof of your successes to read when you’re feeling down on yourself.

In my prior career, I had one particular manager who bore a striking resemblance to Dilbert’s evil, pointy-haired boss — I’m not sure what exactly went on during his long lunches, but depending on his mood, he’d either hunker down in his office or roam around to a pick a fight. He was once heard to scream at a hapless employee, “Everyone hates you because you use too much copy paper!”

That was the point when I first recognized how valuable and life-affirming it can be to keep written copies of positive comments.

You might have an email from a client saying that they couldn’t have accomplished their goals without you, or a handwritten thank you note that shows appreciation for something you’ve done for a friend. Or you might just get a note that says, “You’re the best!” or “You really made me laugh.”

The point is that we never know when an evil, pointy-haired boss, or a bad boyfriend, or a good person having a bad day is going to do or say something to puncture our self-confidence. You can’t organize your way out of being disappointed in a representative of the human race, but gathering up the equivalent of a positive affirmation in the form of someone else’s handwriting (or over their email signature block) can really help reverse a bad day.

Other options to develop for your Bad Day Rescue Toolkit might include:

  • a happy list — Whether you keep a note on your phone or have a sprawling list at the back of your journal, keep a running list of things that please you. My own list is a heady mix of things my friend’s four-year-old has said (most recently, with a big sigh, “HOW am I ever going to find a wife?), experiences I love (like waking up, seeing I have hours before the alarm will go off, and going back to sleep), funny lines from beloved TV shows like The West Wing and Ted Lasso, and a sub-list of just completely unexpected experiences that always remind me that you never know what might happen next!
  • a workout plan with moves that boost your endorphins, or a bookmarked schedule of live exercise classes (in-person or remote) for when you need some human interaction along with your running/biking/downward-dogging.
  • a set of mantras to get you going again (whether it’s a serious one, like “I am not defined by one mistake” or one that makes you laugh, with expletives not deleted) 
  • a meditation app —  Good Housekeeping has put together a list of the 15 Best Meditation Apps of 2022. Calm and Headspace get all the media buzz, there are lots of good alternatives, including quite a few that are free.
  • essential oils — OK, to be fair, I really don’t know anything about essential oils. Mostly, I know that my favorite scent is a grilled cheese sandwich, but many people swear by essential oils, either in the bath or through a diffuser. And I hear lavender oil can release tension. (If you’ve tried this option, let us know in the comments.)

When It’s More Than a Bad Day

Obviously, all of these suggestions are for resources that will help you tackle a garden-variety bad mood or bad day. If you find you’re having more back-to-back bad days or weeks than simple organizing can handle, please give yourself the gift of qualified professional support.

Call your health insurance Member Services number or check their website for mental health providers in your network. If you are experiencing a mental health emergency, please know that you can call NAMI (the National Alliance of Mental Illness) hotline at 800-950-NAMI or text “NAMI” to 741741, or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255)

A Parting (Musical) Note

I hope you’re having a good day right now and that this post has helped you prepare for the future, in case you need to turn a bad day around. Please share your own ideas for organizing your way out of a bad day in the comments section below.

Finally, when I originally created this post, YouTube would not let me share the official video for Bad Day, which you can now see up above. Over the past few years, so many people have told me through the years that it lifts their spirits, so in case YouTube makes the official video unavailable again, I wanted you to have the option to at least hear the song and read the lyrics. [Editor’s note: I’ve had to replace the video multiple times, as it keeps getting taken down, but this lyric video is by Daniel Powter himself, so it’s likely to stay available.]

While there are a variety of explanations for the neurological or psychological mechanism, but truth is that sometimes a sad song helps turn a bad day around.

Organize To Pay Your Bills On Time

Posted on: January 17th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 19 Comments

Photo by Leone Venter on Unsplash

After I wrote Ask Paper Doll: Should I Organize My Space and Time with Color? last week, I got to thinking about how color relates to finance, at least in terms of expressions.

Even though black usually signifies something dire, if you’re “in the black,” it means that you’ve got a net positive income, while finances that are “in the red” are considered bleak, signifying debt greater than revenue.

When you’re “in the pink” you’re in good health, financially or otherwise. And, although it would seem to make more sense that being “in the green” would mean you were flush with money, English lacks that expression. And I’ve learned that in Italian, “Sono al verde,” which literally translates as “I am at the green” means “I’m broke.” Language is funny.

You know what’s not funny? Late payments. Fines for late payments. Increased interest rates because of late payments. Lower FICO scores because of a history of late payments!

During consultations with new organizing clients, people often express frustration over difficulty paying their bills on time. Generally, it’s not that they lack the funds, but that their bill-paying systems get out of whack and fail to fit into their already overstuffed, overburdened schedules. Today, we’re going to look at strategies to get bills paid on time.

BEYOND THE BUDGET: KNOW THE WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, AND WHY

You might expect that I’d bring up the topic of a budget. Certainly, knowing all of your financial obligations is important to a smoothly-run financial life. As Charles Dickens said, 

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. ~ Charles Dickens Share on X

In order to pay your bills on time, it’s essential to know when they are due, and (if applicable) how that relates to when your income will arrive.

Make a chart of all of your creditors and bills. It’s best to do this on a spreadsheet, like Excel or Google Sheets so you can update the chart over time.

  • Note when bills are due. Usually, you have three kinds of bills:
    • Bills that are due on or around the same date every month (like rent/mortgage, health insurance, utility/cable/internet bills, credit card bills, etc.)
    • Bills that are due on a regular cycle but not every month. They may arrive quarterly, like water bills, auto, renter’s, or homeowner’s insurance premiums, or tuition bills, or annually, like professional dues, memberships, or auto registration renewals.
    • Bills that a have no regular cycle. These may be one-off bills, like occasional department store credit card purchases or service providers who bill at their convenience, sometimes after you’ve long forgotten about the expense.
  • List the amounts or ranges of your regular bills.
    • Some of your bills will have the same dollar amount every month, like health insurance or your cell phone bill, because they are regulated by a contract. (These are the ones that for which it is easiest to set up automated payments.)
    • Other bills will vary by month due to different usage or consumption, like electric bills or credit card statements. 
  • List the amounts or ranges of your regular bills. 
  • Learn and list the penalty of paying late! — My office landline (yes, I said land line!) payment is due on the 28th of the month, but there’s a grace period until the 8th of the following month, at which point the extra fee is about $3. No biggie. However, the average late fee for U.S. credit cards is $36, and that doesn’t take into account that late payments can trigger higher interest rates. If your credit card balance includes a 0% balance transfer, you could lose that rate if you make even one late payment. Oh, and late payments can also wreck your FICO score.

Photo credit: Simon Cunningham under Creative Commons CC By 4.0 Deed

  • Make a column for each month of the year so you can mark when you’ve made a payment. This way, you’ll regularly see your progress and recognize when a payment hasn’t been made.

Yes, this sounds like homework, and you may be thinking that if you had the time to do homework in the first place, you’d be able to pay your bills on time.

However, having a sense of how many bills you have, in what amounts, due when, and with what penalty for paying late, can make all the difference in getting your finances in order.

PICK YOUR BILL-PAYING STYLE

No one bill-paying system is necessarily better than the others, but picking a method that works for you will help you stay committed to the process.

Pay Bills the Day They “Arrive” 

This simple strategy requires the least amount of advanced planning and you’ll never have to worry that procrastination will lead to late fees.

If you get your bills by mail:

Bring in the mail every day, open the envelopes, toss out extraneous junk and “shiny” advertising material, and pay your bills immediately. Done! (Now log that you’ve paid it on the chart.) People rarely have more than a few bills each day, and if you get in the habit of doing this diligently, it’ll take only a few minutes out of your daily schedule.

Photo by Abstrakt Xxcellence Studios from Pexels

If you have opted out of paper bills:

Open your email every day, log in (to either your bank’s bill-pay site/app, or the account’s website), pay your bill, and log that you’ve done it. Bing, bang, boom!

Paying bills the day they arrive saves time (because it’s easy to complete quickly), eliminates anxiety regarding whether you may forget to pay, and helps you stick to your budget. If you pay for all of the things for which you have already obligated yourself, you’re less likely to spend on wants before needs.

This is the easiest system, but it’s also the least-often used. 

Some people avoid this option because they lack the funds to pay each bill on the day it arrives. If our two biggest bills (for example, mortgage and insurance) arrived on the same day, it might wipe out (or even exceed) our checking account balances. So, there may be a practical reason to skip this method.

But there are far more common reasons why people don’t pay their bills as they arrive.

For some, there are psychological or philosophical obstacles to using this strategy. They may think, for example:

“I’m not going to pay this bill until right before it’s due. They don’t deserve my money one minute earlier than necessary!” [Insert your own “harrumph” as necessary.]

We see this most often when someone wants to avoid paying a credit card bill before the due date. People are fine paying for their electricity or health insurance, because they see that they’re getting the benefit already, so payment feels “fair.” But with credit cards, it’s common to forget that payment was actually due upon purchase; the cards simply shifted the time frame. People forget that a credit card bill is actually an IOU, the debt having been incurred in the past.

If you struggle with this philosophy, there’s still a way to pay bills as they arrive to prevent late payments.

If you pay bills online, log in now but schedule each payment for a day or two before it’s due. (Waiting until the day it’s due can cause holiday/weekend kerfuffles.)

If you pay by check, write out the checks, but put them in your tickler file (see below) or clip them to the calendar page of the date when you’re comfortable mailing them so only that final step remains.

“I don’t like paying my bills in dribs and drabs. I want to pay them all at once.”

This is similar to not wanting to hang up one shirt, or not wanting to file each piece of paper as you finish with it, or not wanting to wash each dish (or put it in the dishwasher) when done eating. It makes sense…until you find yourself with a backlog.

Sure, there’s something to be said for flow, doing a large project once and pushing through it to give your the satisfaction of completing a major task. However, the more we let our clothes pile up on the exercise machine, the more we let our filing pile up in the office, and the more we let the dishes pile up in the sink, the more of a behemoth the task seems, and the more likely we are to procrastinate altogether.

The downside of procrastinating on those tasks are wrinkled clothes, messy offices, and dried-on kitchen yuckiness. The downside of procrastinating on bill-paying? Late fees, increased interest rates, and lowered FICO scores.

Tickle Yourself Organized

If you don’t do something immediately, you have to do it later. Sadly, that’s just one of the laws of physics, that we can’t go back in time. (That said, if you find yourself with a time machine or TARDIS, please let Paper Doll know. I have some experiments I’d like to try.)

Later requires a system, and a system requires both geographic and behavioral changes from what you’ve been doing thus far.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

Geographically, you need a bill-paying center with the following tools:

  • Tickler file, or at least a bill-paying folder
  • Letter opener (to avoid paper cuts and add pizzazz to opening envelopes)
  • Calculator or calculator app 
  • Pencil and scrap paper (if you have an untenable relationship with calculators)
  • Envelopes
  • Stamps
  • Return address labels
  • Non-washable gel-ink pens (to deter identity theft and fraud) to write out checks OR a printer if you prefer computer-generated checks

This assumes you’re getting your bills in the mail and paying them by check. If you’re paying them digitally, you can skip the envelopes, stamps, and return address labels.

The behavioral process is similar to the pay-upon-arrival system. Show up for mail call. (Seriously, I want you to open your mail every day. But if you absolutely won’t, at least put all of your mail in one spot, near your bill-paying area, and commit to opening ALL the mail at least once per a week.)

Open the envelopes, toss out the glossy advertising inserts, and if you pay online, toss the envelopes, too. Even if you’re not going to pay right away, process each bill immediately to keep it from ending up on top of the microwave or mixed in with your third grader’s math homework.

Eyeball each statement to review the charges, note any unexplained fees, and check for new policies and/or errors. (The sooner you catch a billing error or a policy change you don’t like, the easier it is to address.)

Circle or highlight the payment due date. Then figure out how far ahead you want to pay the bill. Take a glance at the calendar to make sure there are no weekends or federal holidays that might cause delivery obstacles.

If the due date is consistently inconvenient (because of when you get paid, or when lots of other bills are due), ask the vendor to change the date to a more convenient one. Many credit cards let you change your due date from inside the account profile.

Once you’ve opened each bill and figured out when you want to pay it, arrange them in chronological order by due date with the one due soonest on top. You can stop here and just tuck the stack in a folder, but longtime readers know that I encourage you to use a tickler file.

I used to tell folks to put the bills in slots at least 7 days in advance of when they’re due, but with the change in postal service delivery speeds, I encourage mailing at least ten days in advance or paying online. Or, make it even easier on yourself and only pay bills one day per week (like Tuesdays), and then just pick a pay date that’s two Tuesdays (or whichever) prior to the due date.

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If you receive your bills digitally and pay them online, it’s easy to lose track of the email or texts. There are still ways to tickle your memory. Write the name of the bill on a piece of paper or index card and put it in a slot in your tickler file a day or two before you absolutely have to pay the bill, so you’ll see the reminder in the course using your tickler file for all your action paperwork. You don’t use a tickler file? If you read my ebook, Tickle Yourself Organized, I bet you’ll start!

But there’s still an more “alarming” way to remind yourself.

Don’t Worry, But Be Alarmed

Digital alarms and system alerts are the perfect way to ensure tasks get out of your head and conquered in the material world.

You can set a repeating alarm on your phone or computer for every “first Tuesday of the month” or the 17th of every month to remind you to pay a specific bill. Yes, it’s a bit of homework to set it up, but then you you never need to adjust it unless the bill’s due date changes.

Most credit card companies will also allow you to set email or text reminders for X number of days before a bill is due.

The only problem with alarms and alerts is that if you tend to rebel against authority, then repeated alarms might seem like pestering, even if you set the alarms yourself! So, consider making the alarms fun. Instead of creating an alert that says “Pay the electric bill,” make it say “If the electric bill doesn’t get paid, all the yummy ice cream will melt!”

Make bill reminders fun. Instead of creating an alert that says *Pay the electric bill* make it say *If the electric bill doesn't get paid, all the yummy ice cream will melt!* Share on X

ALTERNATIVES TO MANUAL BILL-PAYING SYSTEMS

If just the idea of sitting down to pay your bills, let alone scheduling them, makes you cringe, there are other solutions.

Set Up Automatic Payments

This is the ultimate “set it and forget it” approach. You can accomplish it in one of two ways, and if you already pay some or all of your bills online, you may only need to tweak a few settings to add the “automated” part to what you’re already doing:

  • Set up recurring automated payments at each vendor’s website. Decide whether you want the bill paid in full, if you want the minimum amount paid, or if you prefer some other option. Provide your bank routing number and account number or a credit card. Some creditors (like your mortgage lender) may require you to sign a document in order to complete the process. If you ever have your credit card stolen and get a new number, or cancel your card, you’ll need to go in to each vendor account to update new payment information.

or

  • Set up automated payments through your bank’s online bill-paying center. You’ll create a payee for any vendor whom you want to pay on a regular basis. Provide payee data and the day of the month your prefer ongoing payments to be made. Then set the dollar amount. For fluctuating bills, it’s a little more complicated because your bank has no way of knowing how much to pay a vendor whose charges change from month to month, so you may need to authorize payments of “paperless bills.” 

Automated payments have many advantages. There’s no postage (or going to the post office), no checks, and you can’t mostly ignore the task. And you won’t have to watch the clock or the calendar with dread.

Vintage Alarm Clock (Public Domain)

However, it’s not for everyone.

If your income is unpredictable, automated bill-paying can lead to overdrafts.

If you have a strong need for control (or have ever been called a micro-manager), automation may make you nervous. (Consider starting with just one bill that has a predictable payment amount and due date, like for your cell phone, and see how you like the experience.)

Just because payments are automatic, doesn’t mean that your financial management can go completely on auto-pilot. It’s still essential for you to monitor your statements — whether paper or online — to make sure there are no computer or human errors.

Further, automated payments tend to make people less aware of their spending patterns. If you have to sit down to pay the phone or insurance company on a regular basis, you might be more inspired to check competitive rates, but if you never see your bills, you might become complacent about what vendors are charging.

Remember to cancel automatic payments if you no longer want or need a service, or if you relocate. Gyms and telecomm companies are famous for not ceasing billing when they are obligated to do so, and only your diligence can ensure that they stop billing and debiting your funds.

Outsource Bill-Paying to a Specialist

We all have things at which we excel — and things at which we don’t. Paper Doll doesn’t blink at an organizing project, is a speed demon when it comes to typing, and can decipher a muddled check register from fifty paces. I cannot, however, do any dance step invented since the premiere of the  movie Desperately Seeking Susan and I’m not inclined to prepare a meal more complicated than a PB&J.

You know where you excel. If the above strategies work for you, yay! But if you are constantly overwhelmed, whether by ADHD or running a business or trying to juggle your kids and elderly relatives (your own or your partner’s), it’s OK to wave a white flag. You don’t have to do it all!

If you have a partner, even if you are iffy about the idea of giving up control over the family finances, ask if they’ll take over the task for six months and then reassess. (You can always ask for status reports.)

But what if your partner is treading water as furiously as you are? Or what if you’re a singleton? There’s still help.

You might think outsourcing bill payment is a luxury, but many people find that hiring a professional relieves them of the anxiety, dread, and annoyance related to financial tasks. The amount they pay for assistance is balanced (or even outweighed) by money saved and peace of mind earned. 

You could seek a bookkeeper to keep your finances straight and ensure that bills are paid on time.

Similarly, visit the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) to find professional organizers near you who specialize in financial organizing. They can help prune and organize financial records, assist with setting up online payment systems, and actually pay bills and monitor the accuracy of financial transactions, all depending on a your needs and desires.

Also, the American Association of Daily Money Managers (AADMM) is a national organization of professionals who provide personal financial and/or bookkeeping services to senior citizens, the disabled, busy professionals, and others who find keeping up with bills and other financial tasks to be onerous or inconvenient. Not surprisingly, many financial organizers are members of both NAPO and AADMM.

Just as you might work with a fitness trainer, life coach, or academic tutor, a financial organizer can help you accomplish your essential financial tasks so that you can focus on what means the most to you. Whatever bill-paying strategies you employ, know that you can control your financial destiny.

“There’s always something to be thankful for. If you can’t pay your bills, you can be thankful you’re not one of your creditors.” ~ Anonymous

There's always something to be thankful for. If you can't pay your bills, you can be thankful you're not one of your creditors. ~ Anonymous Share on X

Ask Paper Doll: Should I Organize My Space and Time with Color?

Posted on: January 10th, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 19 Comments

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’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 explanation to help explain some of the meanings of color in “Color Code Your Way to an Organized Workspace with Office Products.”

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?

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Paper Doll’s 22 Ways To Celebrate GO Month 2022

Posted on: January 3rd, 2022 by Julie Bestry | 17 Comments

Welcome to GO Month 2022! This is the annual celebration of our attempts to eliminate chaos and help our world make a little more sense. For members of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO) this is our 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, and pretty much every other holiday all rolled into one. We invite you to celebrate with us!

Chances are good that when you read last week’s post (you did read last week’s post, right?), Review & Renew for 2022: Resolutions, Goals, and Words of the Year, you strengthened your resolve (if not actual resolutions) to get organized, be more productive, or do something to further your dreams. Today, we’re going to look at 22 tips to start 2022 in ways to help you get closer to your dreams. 

 

CLOSE OUT THE HOLIDAY SEASON

1) Purge your holiday cards. While you’re taking down the tree and putting away decorations, collect all of the greeting cards you’ve received in one pile and do a reality check. So many people save all of their cards, boxed up, and never look at them again. Not you, not again.

Read the cards one last time. If Hallmark did all the labor and there’s only a short message or a signature, give yourself permission to toss and recycle the cards. If there’s no deeply personal message that makes you laugh or cry, let it go. After all, you don’t transcribe your holiday phone conversations and keep them forever. 

2) Let go of other people’s greeting card pictures. And those cards that are just collages of the families of people you worked with 20 years ago? You’re allowed to let them go, too. You don’t have to be the curator of the museum of other people’s family photos.

3) Update your contacts. As long as you’re tossing holiday cards, check the return addresses on the envelopes and update the information in your own personal database, whether that’s in the contacts app on your phone or in an ancient Snoopy address book.  

PICK AND PREP YOUR PLANNER

4) Buy your new planner. Now. And then make a note to buy your 2023 calendar by Thanksgiving next year.

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash

Are you still scribbling appointments on those extra, orphan, three-lines-per-month “planning” sections at the back of your 2021 planner? If you don’t have a planner that will make sure you honor all of your commitments, now is the time to do it! Consider these concepts:

  • Choose a planner that lets you see a month at a glance. Daily and weekly views don’t offer enough long-range details to let you plan your life over time.
  • Select a planner that has enough space for you to write. Paper Doll has sprawling, messy penmanship, and I know a pocket-sized paper planner would cramp my style, literally and figuratively. Note that even when you’re looking at a monthly view, digital calendars tend to hide most of the details.
  • Use only one planner for your business and personal appointments. If you keep one calendar for your doctors’ appointments and schedule for your kids, and another for work, you’ll never know if your child’s recital conflicts with a major client presentation, or if you’ve scheduled yourself to attend a work conference the week your kids have school vacations. I’ll admit this is where digital calendars like Google’s have an advantage, as you can, with the click of a box, layer or remove different calendar views.)

As a professional organizer, I think the key to organizing your life is being able to visualize your time, whether that’s the hours in the day or the projects in the year. As Paper Doll, I think the best way to do that is with a paper planner.

But if you’re a digital devotée, you do you! However, a digital calendar makes it a little harder to flip back and forth between last January and this one, last February and this one, etc., to make sure everything is as it ought to be. (Yes, in a perfect world, you’d put people’s birthdays in as recurring dates and meetings that used to be every 2nd Tuesday would continue thusly, but with digital planners, there’s a lot of extra fiddling to do to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks.)

5) Update your calendar by filling in all the details.

Go through last year’s planner and copy over everything that recurs on the same dates (like birthdays and anniversaries).

Then add in the things that happened last year and are already scheduled to happen again, but not on the same dates (like conferences, work retreats, mammograms, medical appointments, etc.).

6) Use last year’s calendar to help prompt you to make a list of everything you need to schedule or add to your long-range tasks, like setting an appointment with your CPA to discuss tax issues. 

7) Commit to a planner system. Commitment to your calendar is like having Jeeves as your butler. If you pay Jeeves poorly (and try to use a 12-page stapled calendar from a local funeral home) or don’t feed him (and forget to enter your appointments as you schedule them), such neglect will yield one insolent, neglectful butler (or a calendar of conflicts, illegible notes, and missing appointments). Not every butler is as loyal as P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves or Downton Abbey’s Mr. Carson.

Nurture your commitment to your planning system…every day. If there’s so much going on in your life that you forget to mark appointments in the first place or fail check your planner until it’s too late, upgrade your accountability:

  • Set an alarm on your phone to ring at around 5 p.m. daily to remind you to check your calendar and tickler file for the next day and the coming week.

  • If you have an assistant (especially if you are both working remotely) schedule time each day to talk and review newly-added appointments and obligations.
  • Have a family meeting on the weekend to make sure every appointment and school pick-up is covered.
  • Schedule your next appointments before leaving anyplace you visit intermittently (doctor, dentist, massage therapist, hair or nail salon, etc.) — but only if you have your calendar with you. Otherwise, ask them to call you. Never agree to any date without your planner nearby.

MAKE 2022 THE YEAR YOU YOU ARE A VIP WITH YOUR VIPs

8) Get your vital documents in order.

Longtime readers know how I feel about making sure you have all of your VIPs (very important papers) in line. From tornados and hurricanes to the recent wild fires in Colorado to everything the world has experienced with the COVID pandemic, it’s never too soon to get your papers (and affairs) in order. Check in with these posts for step-by-step guidance to making sure you’re covered.

How to Replace and Organize 7 Essential Government Documents

How to Create, Organize, and Safeguard 5 Essential Legal and Estate Documents

The Professor and Mary Ann: 8 Other Essential Documents You Need To Create

Protect and Organize Your COVID Vaccination Card

9) Clean out your wallet and make an inventory.

It’s been a long time since I wrote my creaky 2008 series on what you should and shouldn’t keep in your wallet, but the advice in What’s In Your Wallet? (Part 3): A Little Insurance Policy boils down to the fact that you need to keep an inventory of the licenses, insurance cards, and debit/credit cards you have in there and all the information contained on them.

Back then, I advised wallet protection services, photocopying or scanning the fronts and backs of your wallet contents, or logging a digital database in a spreadsheet. Nowadays? Unless you have a scanner at hand, just pull everything out of your wallet, make two columns of cards on the table, and take a photo with your smartphone. Then flip each card over in the same position, and photograph the back. Finally, password-protect the document on your phone or in your cloud back-up, secure in the knowledge that your info is safe.

MAKE SENSE OF YOUR MONEY, HONEY!

10) Create a Tax Prep folder.

If you do nothing else this month, setting aside a safe place to collect tax information will at least prevent essential financial paperwork from building up or getting lost. You’ll save time (in CPA or TurboTax hours) and money (in CPA dollar-hours and tax deductions).

Starting near the end of January and continuing through mid-February, your mailbox, email inbox, and digital financial accounts will be filled with lots of weirdly named and numbered forms. (For some idea of their significance, review Paper Doll’s Tax-Smart Organizing Tips: 2021, though this will be updated once the IRS releases more information for the new tax year.) Just pop them in a manila folder in your financial files or in a dedicated holder like the Smead All-in-One Income Tax Organizer.

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11) Know what you owe.

Let 2022 be the year you figure out what’s going on with your money. As your bills and statements come in, make a list of all of your credit cards, loans, and other debts, as well as their balances and interest rates. Seeing it in black and white in one place is the first step toward taking control of your future.

12) Don’t get buried; stay on top of your money.

In a perfect world, everyone might still maintain a reconciled checkbook register. (If you’re a younger millennial or Gen Z, go ask your mom.) But in a world where most people’s money doesn’t just flow from one checking or savings account to everywhere else, but instead involves PayPal, CashApp, Venmo, Zelle, and even those crytpcurrency wallets, no one little paper register is going to cover it.

So, make this the year you embrace a financial dashboard and budget program, like Mint, Personal Capital, or You Need A Budget.

13) Seek out financial wisdom and organizing support.

If you don’t know the difference between an NFT and BBQ, and when you hear people talking about 401Ks and IRAs, your eyes glaze over, consider sitting down with a fee-only Certified Financial Planner. You pay for their expertise, and they give you unbiased advice because fee-only CFP’s don’t get any commissions on the investments you make.

If thinking about investing seems impossible because you need strategies for getting your bills paid on time, every time, there’s help available. There are NAPO members who are financial organizers; you can also find a Daily Money Manager through the American Association of Daily Money Managers (AADMM).

GATHER YOUR THOUGHTS AND PRESERVE YOUR LEGACY

14) Find your perfect notebook.

In 2021, I regaled you with nine posts about all the different types of notebooks, from waterproof to hybrid to magnetic. Stop writing your notes and ideas down on the backs of envelopes; start embracing a notebook made for your needs.

Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 1): Re-Surveying the Landscape
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 2): The Big Names in Erasable Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 3): More Erasable & Reusable Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 4): Modular, Customizable, Disc-Based Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 5): Customize with Magnets, Hooks, and Apps
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 6): Get Smart (Notebooks)
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 7): Stone Cold and Super-Strong
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 8): Waterproof Notebooks
Noteworthy Notebooks (Part 9): Epilogue and Updates

Instead of making the same lists, over and over, but never getting anywhere on them, having one central repository for everything meaningful to you will help you be more organized, more productive, and so much happier.

15) Make 2022 the year you safeguard and preserve your photos.

Digital photos mean we can have multiple forms of inexpensive backup without taking up more space in our homes. But what about all the old Kodachrome snapshots and negatives, fading away a bit more every day?

You needn’t be overwhelmed. Find a NAPO member specializing in organizing photos, or visit The Photo Managers (formerly the Association of Personal Photo Organizers) to find experts trained to organize and care for your family’s photographic history.

And once you get your photos together, you (and everyone else) will probably want to know what was going on in them. So once again, I give you my pitch for Hazel Thornton’s new What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy.

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(You can read my review here.)

EMBRACE PAPER DOLL‘S KEY PRINCIPLES ABOUT ORGANIZING

16) Follow the Ice Cream Rule.

I tell my clients, “Don’t put things down, put them away.” The word “away” assumes you’ve already got a location in mind. But good organizing systems have two parts: the where & the how.

When you bring groceries home, you put the ice cream away in the freezer immediately to keep from having a melted, sticky mess. It’s pretty rare for someone to put away the toilet paper or breakfast cereal before the frozen foods. The freezer is the “where” but putting the ice cream away first is the “how.” It’s so innate, you don’t even think about. But for most of your stuff, including papers, you do have to think about it.

Whatever comes into your space, when you go shopping, or even when things are free, decide on a home before you bring it in.

Once it’s in your space, build fixed time into your schedule for how/when you’ll deal with maintaining it or getting it back to where it lives. When will you do laundry? When will you file financial papers? What will be your trigger — when the laundry basket or in-box is full, or will you put it on your calendar?

Remember: “Someday” is not a day on the calendar.

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

Prospect clients are often so focused on organizing what they already have that they ignore a key truth: not everything you own needs to stay with you forever. If it’s broken and you’re not willing to spend the time or money to repair it, let it go. If you’re sentimentally attached to something that’s broken, outdated, or takes too much space or effort to keep, take a photo of you holding it or wearing it. Then set it free!

If you have piles and files full of magazine clippings and articles you haven’t looked at in years, you’re not alone. 80% of what gets filed is never accessed again. Trust that the internet is a vast storehouse of everything you’d want to look up, and if the paper you’re holding has nothing to do with you, personally, or reflects information you’ve long since learned by heart, recycle it and give yourself space.

18) Don’t fight clutter with more clutter.

I love The Container Store and all the office supply stores as much as every other professional organizer. (Really!) 

But buying oodles of storage containers – bins, boxes, tubs, and shelves – can only help you organize if you pare down to what you need and want.

Photo by Lia Trevarthen on Unsplash

When you see a great outfit at the store but it’s not in your size, you shouldn’t say, “Hey, I’ll buy this now and then lose (or gain) 30 pounds to fit into it.” Even if you do declutter the personal poundage, you never know from where, exactly, that weight will disappear. It almost certainly won’t be a perfect fit.

I’m not saying never to acquire storage containers (adorable or otherwise), but don’t do it first. Once you pare down, pick colorful, fun containers that suit your needs, space, and tastes.

19) Take baby steps. Declare small victories. 

When it comes to clutter, it’s not the space it takes up in your house, it’s the dent it puts in your life! If you’re late every day because you can’t find your keys and your kids can’t find their homework, it’s a much bigger deal than a cluttered guest room closet or drawers of old birthday party pictures that haven’t been scrapbooked. 

Focus on your biggest daily stressors, break them down into small, actionable steps, and solve those first. You don’t need to do it all at once, but if you develop a habit of doing a little bit at a time, once your space is straightened up, maintenance will feel natural.

20) Declare bankruptcy on clutter debt. 

Give yourself permission to declare bankruptcy on the “debt” of unread magazines, charitable contribution requests that aren’t really your cause, unworn clothes three sizes too small, or email from last July.

Holding onto something just because you spent money on it, or because it was a gift, or because you feel guilty over it doesn’t make it any more valuable or useful; it just ends of costing you time (dusting or caring for it), space (that you could use for more important things), or money (spent on dry-cleaning or storage rental).

Holding onto something just because you spent money on it, or because it was a gift, or because you feel guilty over it doesn't make it any more valuable or useful; it just ends of costing you time, space, or money. Free up the… Share on X

If you’re overwhelmed with thousands (or tens of thousands) of unread emails, magazines, catalogs, or junk mail, check out the classic Paper Doll post, A Different Kind of Bankruptcy, to give you some action items to let go of paper and information.

21) Follow the buddy system and get some accountability.

Getting your space, time, and priorities in order can be overwhelming, but you don’t have to go it alone. Weight Watchers and 12-step programs succeed because they give people accountability and support. To help you reach your goals, buddy up with:

  • Your partner – Trade tasks you don’t particularly love (like laundry for balancing the checkbook) and you’re less likely to procrastinate on doing what you enjoy.
  • Your kids – Children love to “catch” adults breaking the rules. Tell them what you want to accomplish and have them keep you honest!
  • Friends – Make organizing social. Invite a friend over for lunch or set up a Zoom to partner on organizing your closet or home office this weekend. Then do the same for your friend’s pantry or laundry room next week.
  • Formal accountability — be willing to go virtual. Refer back to the posts I wrote last year on accountability: Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions and Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek.
  • A professional organizer – As a Certified Professional Organizer®, I know how much my clients get out of having the support to make difficult decisions and develop systems to surmount those challenging obstacles. Find a professional organizer near you by using the NAPO’s search function. You may also want to consult with our colleagues in the Institute for Challenging Disorganization.

Yep. Hire a professional organizer. Whether you need to reinvigorate a closet, learn how to use Evernote to get your productivity zipping along, or downsize Grandma’s house so she can move to Boca, professional organizers can show you the way. We’re not just experts in organizing stuff, but experts in helping you figure out how best to organize your ways of thinking and living.

22) Cut yourself some slack. Give yourself some grace.

Being organized isn’t a contest. It’s not about whose home looks better, whose papers are more easily accessible, or who has the lowest clutter-to-house (or office) ratio. Being organized is about things being easier. More functional. More fun. It’s about having time and space serve you, rather than the other way around.

Jettison guilt. Remember, supermodels on magazine covers are airbrushed and photoshopped. They don’t really look like that. The same is true with the rooms you see in home and garden magazines. Nobody actually lives in spaces like that — those rooms were specially designed and curated to look “perfect.”

Even your friend’s Christmas card photos were carefully staged; once the photo was taken, they went back to their real lives. And nobody’s calendar is perfectly scheduled to eliminate stress. Almost everyone who seems to have a perfect life is like a duck, smoothly gliding above the water and furiously paddling below.

Give yourself and your family some grace, and take it day by day. GO Month is about getting organized, bit by bit. You have the rest of the year to work on staying organized.

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