The Clutter Diet Blog

Don't Forget Your Toothbrush

With many of us traveling for the holiday weekend here in the US, I thought I would share this really novel travel resource: DontForgetYourToothbrush.com.

It's an interactive packing and preparation list that walks you through all of the things you need to do before your trip. You get to choose whether it's a trip to the beach, to a ski resort, camping, or other possibilities, which then generates a list based on those requirements.

You can tell immediately this is a British site, especially when you see entries like "Take any rubbish to local refuse site" on the checklist!  But we here across the pond can probably translate well enough to use it effectively.  ;)

Have a wonderful Labor Day weekend!

Low-Effort, High-Reward Tips

Today I was in the Austin American-Statesman's new "Life Guide" column, by Sarah Lindner. Click here for 17 time-saving tips from me, Jay White of www.dumblittleman.com, and life coach Celeste Hamman.

Here is a portion to get you started:

Don't underestimate the power of these small steps.

"Implementing one or two of these items would drastically reduce stress," White said. "By making small tweaks to your daily routine, you will slowly improve the things that keep you up at night."

From Lorie Marrero:  Sign up to get your statements and bills delivered electronically and to have your bills automatically paid. "You save time and stamps, and you don't have to worry about your bills being paid if you are out of town," Marrero said.

Click here to read more tips...

Three Tips to Manage Your Reading Pile

I work with a lot of high-achieving people, and they are really intent on being the best in their fields and staying on top of all of the information they need to know.  Unfortunately, there is just way too much information for them to possibly consume... and that leads to "READING GUILT."  There is this expectation that they must consume all of this information and catalog it in their own filing systems, and when they can't, it is a big "SHOULD" hanging over their heads causing stress. 

I worked with a client this week that had saved a huge bin of industry magazines from 2003-2005 that were "To Clip," and we discovered it while working together.  There was also a huge stack of recent ones that also had come through in the meantime!  We have to conclude that the "someday" will never come when she is going to get back to those old publications.  It will be amazing if she gets time to go through these recent ones alone. 

Here are 3 ways to put the brakes on your "Reading Guilt" and manage that pile:

1. Skim through the table of contents initially when you receive a magazine to see if there are relevant articles that are important right now.  You can quickly tear those articles out and discard the rest of the magazine, or you can just flag those articles with a sticky note.  You might even find there is nothing of interest and you can get rid of it!
2. Realize that all of the publications you subscribe to probably have an online version of their content, and most importantly, that content is INDEXED and SEARCHABLE. (I bet your filing system of clippings is not indexed and searchable!) Learn how to log in to the member areas of your publications' websites and search their archives.  Some publications are making electronic-only subscriptions available that would eliminate your magazine pile-up.  Save your online discoveries by making PDFs of the documents instead of printing them out.
3. Prevent the pile-up.  If you find that you have not read a magazine for 3 months, you need to strongly consider unsubscribing.  Get realistic about what you have time to read. If you haven't read it in 3 months, it can't be that crucial to your life or work.  If you just like it anyway, make it a treat to pick up a copy at the newsstand when you have time, like when you go on a trip.

Our Clutter Diet members can log in and read our Knowledge Base article here for even more details and ideas on clippings and reading material.

How can YOU tame the tower of reading material this week?  Share your comments here, and members can join in our message board discussions for direct advice from our team about your situation.

Five Websites I Find Essential in My Work

I've been tagged! My colleague Ariane Benefit from the Neat & Simple Living Blog has tagged me to share 5 of the websites I find useful in my work. It's hard to narrow it down, as you may remember from yesterday that I have over 700 bookmarks! I am trying to strike a balance between what I use for client work and what we use to run our office here. Here's what I came up with:

1. Organize.com: My friends at Organize.com have an amazing selection of products and I like using their site for product research. I often refer our Clutter Diet members to them.
2. Container Store: I use their site for a lot of product research too. As you may remember, I was recently saying that they are pretty much the Organizers' Mecca.
3. US Postal Service's Click & Ship: We ship out a lot of product orders, samples, and other packages here at our office, and we LOVE printing out our postage as needed using this site. We also use their free carrier pickup service all the time. It saves us a ton of time over going to the post office in person. There is a lot more to this-- I wrote a post about this last year around the holidays.
4. (TIE) Thesaurus.com and Visual Thesaurus: Nowadays I spend a lot of my time writing, so I am constantly going to these "thesauri" (I looked that up) to make sure I provide the right nuance to what I am saying. The Visual Thesaurus is quite amazing—you can drag it around and click to expand it, etc. Very fun to play with.
5. Lifehack.org: This year I have been writing as a guest contributor for Lifehack, named one of the top 50 productivity blogs (See a list of the articles I wrote on the bottom left column of my blog page). I read it almost every day and get lots of fresh ideas and insights from it.

Now I have to tag five other people to share their 5 useful websites (let's make a new rule—nobody says normal ones like Google anymore):

1. Susan Sabo: Productivity Café
2. Clyde Lerner: TechMischief
3. Buzz Bruggeman: Buzznovation
4. Stacey Kannenberg: Cedar Valley Publishing
5. Patty Kreamer: Making Life Simple…Again

You're IT!

Organize Your Website Favorites

If you ever want to declutter your list of web favorites or bookmarks, there is a great free tool you can use to quickly test all of the links and clean them up.  It's called AM-Deadlink. It runs a scan to check whether the links are still good, and you can check for duplicates, and even delete the bookmark right from there when you see it is no longer working.  Click the thumbnail here for a screenshot to see more.  It works with Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I could not believe I had over 700 bookmarks!  They are organized in folders so I don't realize how many are in there. I have collected these over years of surfing... it's a good idea to run AM-Deadlink if for no other reason than to just look over all the stuff you've collected. It was fun to find some cool things I forgot about!

Got Collections?

You might imagine in our organizing work that we run into a lot of people's collections.  Whether it's art, comic books, figurines, matchbooks, wine labels, stamps, or dolls, we often advise people that if you have a collection, you really should find a way to display and enjoy it... if it's sitting in a box somewhere that you can't see it, where's the sport in that? 

If you are not able to display your collection physically in your home, you now can display and enjoy it online! My friend here in Austin is one of the founders of iTaggit, a site dedicated to collectors and their stuff.  You can get a free account and make it either public or private.  You can upload photos of your "stuff" and assign monetary values to it, attach documents to it (maybe a certificate of authenticity or something), and write a description of it.  It's very intuitive and easy to use, and it's fun to look at other people's collections too!  You can even trade things and add your own comments to items.  We think this is a great tool for collectors and we're excited that the iTaggit community is now available to celebrate them!

Do You Like to Write in Your Books?

It's Back-to-School time, and I was thinking about study habits and getting organized for school.  Organizing information is a challenge, and some people like to take notes in the margins of their books to help them retain information better and find it faster later.

I just ran into this great note-taking information from Levenger-- They are the quintessential source for people who love reading and books.  Their great page on "Masterly Marginalia" is fascinating!  It shows all of the note-taking marks that are most popular, such as shown here on this screenshot from their site.  They have a printable PDF of these marginalia marks here.

Do you write in your books?  I do!  I use highlighters mostly-- it helps me focus better while reading and reinforces "the main idea" of each section (remember that main idea stuff from school?). What are your favorite marginalia notes?  For more on reading skills, see my colleague Abby's website, Rev It Up Reading.  She teaches speed-reading and also teaches people how to read more effectively on a screen. 

Congratulations to Our Winner!

As many of you may remember, last week my friend Dr. Ragan from Psychology of Clutter had a contest for a free annual membership to Clutter Diet!  The winner was "Heather"-- congratulations! More details about winners are here.  Thanks to everyone who entered!

Hidden Storage You Didn't Realize You Have

I wanted to pass along a tip:  When we are working with clients, we often find extra storage on the "tippy-top" of the cabinets in their laundry rooms and kitchens.  Here is a photo showing where we put some extra bulky light bulbs in a laundry room:

Because there is a nice piece of molding at the top of the cabinet, you cannot even see these items when you are looking up from the floor!

These light bulbs were "overflow" from where the rest of the light bulbs were stored, so we made a label on that shelf that says "Look for more light bulbs on top of cabinets."  That way you'll remember they are up there.

Make some room in your cabinets for more usable stuff and get the less frequently used things up there on top.  Enjoy!

Filter Out the Clutter

One of the more bulky items in our homes is that stack of air filters we're supposed to replace, and how often was that again?  And what about all of those other filters we are supposed to change out, like our water purifiers, pitcher filters, faucet filters, and air purifier filters?  And when was the last time we did that?  Our Clutter Diet members can use our personalized e-mail reminder system to tell them when to change their filters, but there may be something better...

This great service recently contacted me to tell you about how they can help.  It's www.filtersontime.com, a service that mails you the right filters at the right time. Not only does it eliminate the need to store the filters, it triggers you to change them when they come in the mail.  I also know that many of our clients don't have an easy way to remember which type of filters to buy, either, so it helps with that too.  Great idea! Just wanted to pass it along! (logo graphic from FiltersOnTime)