The Clutter Diet Blog

How to Efficiently Pack a GREEN Lunch

A green lunch? Eww! I do not like green lunches, I do not like them, Sam-I-Am!

Well, I mean green as in Earth Day! We all know that bringing a lunch with you to work or sending kids to school with a lunch is an outstanding way to save money and eat more healthfully. But are you still using the old brown bag and disposable plastic bags?

In honor of Earth Day today, and in the spirit of all things Efficient, I want to share with you my friend Kelly Lester's own invention, EasyLunchboxes. They are divided containers that make it easy to pack your lunch in a reusable, earth-friendly way, and they fit in their own insulated bag with room for a drink and an ice pack on the top.

I like them so much, I am giving one away! Comment here on this post to enter, and we'll choose the winner via a random number drawing. Winner will get one container and one lunch bag (you get to choose the color), value of $21.90 USD. We'll take entries on this through Sunday, May 1st, 2011, and we'll notify you based on the (private) email address you provide when you comment here. We'll also announce the winner in our weekly newsletter. (This giveaway is offered to US & Canadian residents only. Please do not enter this giveaway if you have won or received free product from EasyLunchboxes within the past 3 months.) 

Here are some more Earth Day fun things to do!

• "Like" the EasyLunchboxes Facebook page where Kelly has some fun lunch tips and people share photos of their awesome lunch-packing skills. :)  Also watch her INCREDIBLE YouTube webisode series with Barry Williams ("Greg Brady") and other stars! (She puts my videos to shame.)
• DONATE to Goodwill®! Take that stagnant stuff out of your house, keep it out of the landfill, and put it to work--helping Goodwill put people to work! See the landfill ticker at the bottom of the page at http://donate.goodwill.org -- so far, 2.5 BILLION pounds of usable goods have been diverted from landfills since 2010!
• Find out the impact of your donations with Goodwill's Donation Impact Calculator. Put in your donated items, such as 2 shirts, 3 DVDs, etc. and you can find out how it helps. For example, one working computer provides 8.1 hours of on-the-job training for someone in your community!
• Watch our new Donate Movement partner Planet Green and their new show, Dresscue Me, featuring vintage fashion and finds from Goodwill!

Enjoy Earth Day, and share your favorite green tips as you enter our contest below!

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5 Easy Ways to Manage Grocery Shopping Lists

Using grocery shopping lists is one of the best ways to save money and time. Shopping with a list, you are more likely to buy only what you need instead of impulse-buying, and you are less likely to forget something, requiring another time-consuming trip to the store to pick up the stray items. Here are my five favorite ways to manage your grocery lists, from least to most sophisticated:

1. The Simple Sheet of Paper: Whether it's a cute narrow lined pad with novelty characters printed on it, or a piece of scratch paper recycled from your printer, simply having The One Place To Write Things Down is the most basic kind of list and is very easy and effective. Just keep paper and a pen stocked in the same consistent place, write things on it when you need to buy them, and you're set! Bonus points for teaching your family to also write things down.
2. The Quadrant Method: Draw lines to divide your list paper into fourths. Write down Produce items in one section, Cold items (dairy and freezer) in another, Dry Goods (cans, jars, mixes, and other "center aisle" items) in the third section, and Other items (health & beauty, paper goods) in the last section. Your list might look like this illustration (click image for a larger view). Writing items into the correct quadrant means you skip around less in the store, saving time and steps.
3. Dane's Clipboard Method: In December my Twitter pal Dane Findley and I co-wrote a post called Top Ten Low-Tech Productivity Tools, in which he shared his Errand Board idea. He uses a clipboard and places sticky notes on it, one for each store, and writes items on each one based on where he will buy it. When he is leaving to visit that store, he grabs the sticky note off the clipboard and goes.
4. Pre-Printed Lists: You can buy a magnetic, pre-printed list pad like the ones we carry in our online store, shown here (click here for info on ordering). These pads allow you to quickly circle or underline what you need from the memory-jogging array of choices. These lists help you remember things you might have forgotten. You can also create your own pre-printed list in a document on your own hard drive, and you can customize it for your own family's typical favorites. If you want to create your own, save a few weeks' worth of receipts to remind you of the common consumables. Some grocery stores offer a map at their customer service desks, and you can use it to create your list in order of the way you walk through the store, knowing exactly aisle-by-aisle what you'll buy. Wow, Ninja Shopping.  :)
5. Go Digital: There are many ways you can use your phone now to help you manage lists. Here are a few free services that you can try-- some of them work from apps for the iPhone or Android, and some of them work with just text messaging:

• Cozi
• RememberTheMilk
• ZipList
• ReQall
• Evernote

What is your favorite way to manage your grocery lists? I use both the "All-Out-Of" Pads that we sell in our store and the Quadrant Method for writing out something quick from scratch. Share your list-making prowess in the comments!

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Never Do Laundry Again

Yes, you heard me... never do laundry again! I just figured out how to make that happen.

Recently I was doing some journaling on the question my friend Wendy Lipton-Dibner poses in her book, Shatter Your Speed Limits: "If I woke up tomorrow morning and magically found I had everything I truly wanted, how would my life be different?" One of the first things I wrote down was that I would never do laundry anymore. How could this happen? Would I need to hire a full time housekeeper like Alice in the Brady Bunch? Would I start wearing disposable clothes?

The solution is about OWNERSHIP. I have written a post before about the concept of ownership of tasks ("I Thought YOU Were Going to Do It!"), and how that is often what prevents regular maintenance tasks from getting done. If ownership of a task is unclear, nobody ends up doing it.

For 20+ years, my husband and I have shared laundry duties and we always seem to get it done just fine, but what I recently noticed is that he doesn't seem to mind doing it as much as I do. I also noticed that my husband really doesn't like to cook or help plan meals, which we also have always done together. I offered that I would completely take over all of the cooking and meal planning duties, entirely, if he would take over all of the laundry.

NO PROBLEM.

Yippee! All I have to worry about now is my own personal delicate wash load, which I would strongly prefer to do myself. My boys do a lot of their own laundry as well, and my husband is coordinating that and making sure it's all flowing smoothly.

I have gone for a few weeks now with only my "unmentionables" to concern myself with, and I am in heaven! I love doing the cooking and meal planning, especially if I know it means no more laundry. I just pop on my iPod and catch up on podcasts and audiobooks, learning and laughing while I chop and clean.

Here are some questions to consider:

• What household maintenance tasks would you be happy to never do again?
• What tasks do you enjoy or not mind as much?
• What tasks does your spouse or partner seem to enjoy doing? 
• What could you negotiate to help everyone be happier with the ownership they have?
• If you are single and don't have a person to negotiate with, have you ever investigated the actual cost of outsourcing your dreaded tasks? If you don't know how much it costs, it is hard to set a goal to pay for it. Consider the value of your time as well. If it takes you 3-5 hours a week to manage and you can outsource it for $20, is that worth it to you?  Here is a well-crafted answer I found online of one person's experience, which amounts to around $20 per week for 2 people. (NOTE: Added this bullet after publishing initially, because I didn't mean to leave out the single folks!)
• How will you ever get "everything you truly wanted" if you never write it down and ponder how to make it come true?  (It worked for me.)

We have a 26-page Household Systems Workbook that lists all of the tasks involved in maintaining a household, with workspace to decide ownership and frequency of them and help you create a customized maintenance plan for your own home. This workbook could be a great way for you to figure out how to never do laundry again! The members of our innovative online program not only get expert consulting on their own organizing projects-- they also get this workbook as a bonus for joining. Our first month has a low introductory price of $4.95 a month-- one Abe Lincoln (UPDATE July 2011: We now offer the FREE 7-Day Quickstart which includes seven days of focused guidance from me plus an additional 7 days of full access and support!)-- to get the workbook and get unlimited help from our team too. Click here to read more about it.

What are your dreaded tasks? Do you have any big household negotiating wins? Share in the comments!

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The Most Important Room in the House

A reporter just asked me this: "If you had to pick just ONE room in the house, which do you think is the most important to have organized, with the goals of reducing stress and saving money?"

And after some thought, I said, "The Kitchen." Here's why:

• The kitchen is the most shared utilitarian space in the home, where everyone eats, cooks, cleans, and gathers multiple times in a day. People refer to it as "the hub of the home."
• Planning your meals means you will be likely to eat more healthfully at home-- saving money, reducing stress about money and time, and over the years possibly even resulting in lower medical costs.(Better for your arteries than a daily fast food run!)
• Knowing where things belong means that every person saves time locating things every day. This time savings really adds up.
• Organizing your pantry and refrigerator so that only fresh, edible food is available and visible means that you will save money and have less waste.
• Having a kitchen that accounts for workflow patterns and logical placement of tools and equipment means that it's easier to cook and clean, which means you'll do it more often and more willingly.
• Usually other functions are included in the kitchen, such as mail sorting and communications, that add to the importance of getting this space right.

The home office and primary wardrobe closet come in a close second, because home office disorganization can relate to finances which is definitely related to stress... and an organized closet helps you start every morning with less stress, get ready faster, and make smarter purchasing decisions.

If you are moving into a new home, remodeling your kitchen, or just want to start all over again organizing it, I invented a product that helps with that process called the SpaceScaping® Kitchen Organizing System. When I was doing a lot of client move-ins, I started printing out my own removable adhesive stickers, so that we could take all of the categories of a kitchen and plan it out by sticking them all around the cabinets before we started moving things around. After strategizing it fully, we used the stickers as a guideline to moving things where they belonged, and after finishing, we left the stickers up for a while to help the family get used to the new arrangement. They just pulled off the "Post-It"-like adhesive whenever they felt ready. My clients LOVED these! So I made them into a product to help other people and other organizing professionals. The set of labels is only $6.99 and you can read more about them here.

What do you think? What are your top three choices? Do you agree with mine? Share in the comments!

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How to Make Something Better by Ripping It Up!

Quick weekend tip for you...When organizing or when unloading groceries and other purchases and putting them away, I am always annoyed at how packages are designed well for shipping and selling and store display, but not for dispensing and everyday use and storage. Sometimes things are hard to open, too. Are you listening, package designers?

When organizing pantries and bathrooms for clients (and myself), I often rip or cut off the box flaps to make the packaging work for dispensing the items inside. Here are two examples from the kitchen-- plastic bags and oatmeal packets from Costco (click the images for a larger version):

 

Make it easier for yourself every single day when you reach into that drawer or box! Why scrape your knuckles against the box flaps and struggle to pull things out? It's a simple, quick fix that streamlines your storage, adds visibility, and lessens your frustration.

It's the little things in life, right?  :)  Doing this may seem obvious to some of you, but if you think that, you'd be surprised that most people don't. What are the little things you like to do? Share in the comments!

Cheers,

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Bulk Up: Top 5 Tips for Storing Bulk Purchases

I just got home from accompanying my husband to Costco. He thought it was so we could spend some time together, and that was nice, but he didn't know that he was being chaperoned. He tends to vastly overbuy! We managed to get out of there with about half what he would typically bring home. At least this time I didn't have to rescue him from being there on a scooter. (See my previous post, "Never Go to Costco on a Scooter.")

It's so easy to get carried away, since the large portions at warehouse stores appeal to our need to have more than enough-- to be "stocked up." But our eyes are often bigger than our stomachs --and our storage-- especially when it comes to perishable items like produce.

It's also easy to get carried away with the bulk bin barrels in natural foods stores. The bulk bins offer better pricing and selection of many granolas, dry goods, nuts, and candies, some of them hard to find elsewhere. But they don't come with containers that work well in a pantry.

So we are coming home with these gargantuan warehouse packages and also these varying loose amounts of bulk provisions in feeble plastic bags. How do we deal with storing them?

• Warehouse packages are generally made for selling and shipping, not necessarily for storing and dispensing. I believe you should unpack the bulk item into its smallest components for the best and most visible storage. For example, large flats of paper towels can have the outer plastic removed and the individual rolls of paper towels stored more efficiently.
• For flimsy packaging, you can tape the original package instructions on a permanent container with clear packing tape. Here we've used a recycled rice container to hold oatmeal that came in a non-recloseable plastic bag. (Click to enlarge the photo) Texmati rice containers are SO great, by the way!
• Keep a basket of chip clips in the pantry right next to the large chip and cereal bags. For lots of inexpensive chip clips, just buy some strong clothespins at the dollar store. Binder clips also work in a pinch. (Groan...) You can also stick chip clips on the back of your cabinet doors or pantry door with Velcro. (Thanks to my friend Monica for this idea)
• Let the box be its own dispenser. For large boxes of packets like oatmeal, microwave popcorn, or macaroni & cheese mixes, you can simply open the box and cut off the flaps with a box cutter and grab and go. (Click photo to enlarge)
• I am not a believer in buying a big set of matching containers that you intend to transfer everything into, for look's sake more than function. Yes, you can get your pantry to look like a magazine photo with these container sets. But transferring every cracker and marshmallow into containers is not how I would like to spend my time. Don't use special containers if the food will get eaten really quickly, or if the package itself is good enough for keeping the food fresh and pests out.

What are your favorite bulk foods storage tricks? Share in the comments!

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Great Moments in Kitchen History

This week I was in New York on a media tour for Staples, as I am currently working with them as a spokesperson for some fun new office products and some great tried and true ones too! More about that later…

During my trip I got to visit the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to see their new kitchen design exhibit called “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen.” I went with my longtime friend and organizer colleague Linda Rothschild of Cross It Off Your List (serving New York, the Hamptons, and Los Angeles). It was fascinating!

Did you know there was a woman named Christine Frederick who took the famous time and motion industrial studies of Frederick Taylor and applied them to the home and the kitchen?  This woman is my new hero, and I am embarrassed I did not know about her before. She published The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management in 1914 and founded and directed the Applecroft Home Experiment Station from her home in Long Island. She had a laboratory that investigated 1800 different products. I (heart) Christine Frederick.

Many fairly common kitchen gadgets were displayed in the exhibit as examples of excellent design, like the Dyson vacuum, the good old Slurpee “spoon straw,” and other standbys. I was pleasantly surprised to see that OXO Good Grips kitchen gadgets, specifically the peeler, jar opener, and paring knife, were displayed as well. I have always loved and appreciated how the OXO kitchen products feel substantial and “chunky” and full of quality and excellent design. And, I am excited because OXO has an exclusive line of office products with Staples that I get to represent! We were talking to magazine editors this week about the great 3-hole punch, staple remover, and thumbtack and paperclip dispensers they have at Staples, with that same chunky, ergonomic design that I love in their kitchen gadgets. They are excellent and I am proud to represent them.

A few other fun nuggets I learned in the exhibit:

• I also learned in the exhibit that cooking with Pyrex glass cookware became more popular back in wartime because people couldn’t spare the metal—it was needed for the war effort.
• You should see the film they showed that went through all of the steps that used to be required for a woman to simply heat up some water! There was a cleaver involved in chopping up kindling. Right there I would already be foregoing my morning cup of tea. No wood-chopping for me.
• This magazine photo shown here features a woman displaying all of her kitchen tools and gadgets and it says: "Kitchen Tools: Most Homes Have Too Many." Ha! That would be way worse today.
• There is actually a term for the phobia of the fear of cooking: “Mageirocophobia.” Who knew??

Go see this exhibit if you get the chance! And I hope you enjoy my photos, which can all be clicked for a larger view. For more old-timey kitchen thoughts, see my recent post on the terribly funny ads my sons and I found in old 30s and 40s McCall’s magazines in the library. Share your memories and thoughts in the comments!

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What's For Dinner? 5 Ways to Solve It!

We're getting back into our routines again around school and extracurricular activities, and that means the nightly "What's For Dinner?" question becomes even more crucial. Timing is tight around homework, carpooling, practices and games. Here are five ways to reduce the culinary stress:

1) Just DECIDE. The hardest part about getting dinner on the table is simply making the decision about what to cook. I've written before about doing your "Sunday Planning." During the school year this becomes even more important. Read my previous Sunday Planning post for complete guidelines. Part of this simple process is doing a quick menu plan for the week. If you just decide that you're going out once and having leftovers once (the night before your trash collection is a great night to clean out your refrigerator), then you have only 5 dinners left to plan. Decide and do it... you'll be amazed at the peace of mind you have each day just knowing that dinner is already figured out.

2) Bite off a month at a time. A rotation menu is a great way to capture the decisions you've made and make sure family favorites are sprinkled in regularly. You can get a free template for a rotation menu (Word document) on our free tips page (look on left side of page for our free stuff). Basically, you figure out four weeks of meals that your family likes, then cook them on a set schedule and repeat. Done! Grocery shopping is easier and all is well.

3) Cook in one big batch. Let someone else do most of the deciding on the menu, show up, and assemble all of your meals for the month at one time. There are many meal assembly stores out there now, such as Dream Dinners and Super Suppers and others. Find one in your area and give it a try! These stores buy food in volume so they are able to actually save you money on costs, and certainly are a savings over going out to eat instead. You'll have a stocked freezer of ready-to-go dinners and have spent only a couple of hours putting them all together.

4) Learn from a pro. My friend Audrey Thomas has put together a very high-quality DVD and workbook product called "What's For Dinner?" in which she teaches her grocery shopping and meal planning system. Following Audrey's system will  absolutely pay for itself many times over. I decided to carry this in my own store because I know how good it is! Read more about it here.

5) Let someone else figure it all out for you. Another friend, Aviva Goldfarb, has a wonderful service called The Six O'Clock Scramble. Each week you get a new weekly menu plan, complete with a grocery list of everything you need. You can even customize the plans and generate new grocery lists from your changes. I really love what she has created-- it's a huge help, particularly when you are torn between your same old tired favorites and the bewildering allure of infinite possibilities. Her site is full of family-friendly, easy, fast recipes to give you lots of fresh ideas.

The key to the whole thing, as with most challenges, is just making decisions and taking action. It requires time and attention, no doubt about it. And by the way, you don't have to be a Food Network star... just make simple meals that do the job and don't worry about making it a culinary masterpiece every time. Try one or two of these ideas and see what works for you, and stick to it! What works for your family? Share your meal planning thoughts in the comments...

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Defrosting My Freezer in Hell

I live in Austin, TX, and it is just flippin' hot right now. No nice way to say it. My car's thermometer showed 112 (F) yesterday when I was out driving around. Austin, you know I adore you, but this June & July have been like Hades.

That said, it's a GREAT time to organize your freezer. Ahhhh! Our paid members were working on their freezers as one of our "Side Dish" projects on our weekly plan last week, and if you follow me on Twitter, you may know that I did some freezer tips on our daily #ClutterTweetTips recently too. (We just celebrated one full year of our daily Twitter tips on Wednesday! Yay!)

My kids tend to leave the door open on my "deep freeze" causing more ice to form, so I have to defrost it once a year or so. It is very satisfying to do that-- the shelves have so much more capacity when they are not supporting a glacier. I just did this big defrosting project, so I'd love to share with you my best freezer tips for getting the most out of this wonderful appliance.

• Get out the big heavy-duty garbage bags. You're going to need them. We advise using bags no less than 1.1 "mil" in thickness.
• If you need to defrost the freezer, take all of the food out and put it somewhere to stay cold, like another freezer or a cooler. Turn the freezer off and open the door. You can either let it naturally melt, or you can put pots of boiling water in there and shut the door to encourage the thawing. You'll want to put some big beach towels down to catch the water, and you can use drip trays and the drain if your freezer has them-- I put baking pans at the bottom to catch the ice and water and empty them into a bucket. Don't be tempted to take an ice pick to the shelves--you might stab some of the tubing (or yourself) and do some damage. Just be patient or use the boiling water. I am not a big defrosting expert so I am quite sure some of my readers will post great tips to help in the comments here.
• Let's get to the organizing part. You're taking out all of the food...while you're handling it, it's time to make some decisions. Here's what to think about:
  • How old is the food? Is it safe to eat?  Here's a food storage chart from the FDA that has guidelines--basically most things should not be kept more than a few months to a year at the most. Check for "use by" dates as many packages have them. When in doubt, throw it out. You don't want to make your family sick.  
  • Is there just a smidgen of food left, like the tiny handful of french fries that nobody ever would bother to cook, or the one lonely old popsicle? These are easy decisions. Toss. Next!
• Sort what you have left into categories that make sense. Here are some ideas: Veggies, Fruits, Meats, Frozen Meals, Breads/Breakfast Food, Pizza, Desserts/Ice Cream, Nuts, Ice Packs...
• Once the freezer is cleaned up and ready, put the food back in by category on the shelves. Sometimes it works to label the shelves with binder clips--see my previous post called "Ode to Binder Clips" to see how.
• Make a list of what you have and post it on the freezer door. You can use a write on/wipe off board or just a piece of paper. This gives you VISIBILITY to what you have, which as we always say, is one of the big goals of any organizing project.
• Think about using your freezer to make things more efficient moving forward. When you're cooking or baking, make double-batches of things like waffles or pancakes and freeze them, and freeze leftover portions of dinner for quick lunches later.
• Get into the habit of marking the date on everything that goes into your freezer-- use a permanent marker and keep it close to the freezer to conveniently mark things as you put them in. Next time you clean out the freezer, there won't be any guessing as to the age of the food!

Break the ice and get your freezer organized--it will pay off in cheaper food bills, more dinners at home, and lots of saved time and energy. Share your polar ponderings in the comments! 

See also my related post on "Eating Down the Fridge." (Flickr photo here from akadruid)

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Eating Down the Fridge...and the Pantry and Freezer

I just got clued in by my Clutter Diet members in the message boards to a growing economic (and gastronomic!) trend... trying to use up what you already have in the fridge, freezer, and pantry to save money. I am so thrilled to weigh in on this topic, as I am of course a big believer in how being organized can help this process!

We always talk about how one of the main goals of any organizing project is VISIBILITY. If you can't see it, you probably don't know you have it, and if you don't know you have it, you are not going to use it. So the first step in "Eating Down the Fridge" is to organize it so you know exactly what you have and can easily reach items to use them.

Whether the fridge, freezer, or pantry, start with a big heavy duty garbage bag. Get rid of the deadwood... excess packaging from warehouse stores, expired items, dried up stuff, and things that are growing appendages. Group like items together and label shelves and bins if possible to help it stay organized long term. We like using small bins within the refrigerator to group items you're always getting out at the same time, like sandwich condiments or jams & jellies.

For the freezer, it's often helpful to make a list of what you have, since things tend to get packed tightly and visibility is more difficult. You can use a small write on/wipe off board on the freezer door and remove things from the list as they are used. You can also make lists of pantry and fridge items if you like, just to jog your memory about what you have.

We have seen many resources online for using up random ingredients. Here are a few places to go when you just have a jar of dijon mustard, some wasabi paste, and a clove of garlic and are trying to think what the heck to make out of it: http://allrecipes.com/Search/Ingredients.aspx, http://www.cheffy.com/recipefinder, and if you are a member of my friend Aviva's menu planning website, Six O'Clock Scramble, you can do these searches in their member area.

Read more about "Eating Down the Fridge" in this Washington Post article. And search Twitter for the hashtag #eatfridge to see what other people are doing. This is big, people! Great way to save money by getting organized.

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