As a professional organizer, I am frequently asked by clients what paper needs to be shredded and what can go straight into the recycling bin. Recently I was asked specifically about some old utility statements that a client was throwing out.
Most utility bills have enough information on them to be able to identify you clearly. That’s why its on your bill. Some even contain billing and payment information. This is not information that you want public if it were to go astray. Shred.
As a rule of thumb, if there is anything on the bill to identify you, shred it. When in doubt, shred. You can always sit down with your television show some night after the kids are in bed and shred away during the commercial breaks.
Author Archive for Carolyn – Page 28
Are you visual person susceptible to the noise of many different items of different sizes and colours on a shelf?
Are you a tosser who like to “toss” items into a storage bin/basket/file/drawer?
Are you auditorily inclined? Do you find yourself talking to yourself all the way through the next year’s budget preparation complete with a “There, that’s done for a year!” when its complete?
Much the same way we have preferences in the way we process information and respond to new opportunities, we all have organizing personalities. Your organizing personality is related to your learning preferences and generally falls into the categories of visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. There are however, many other ways to organize. Some people have a tendency to organize by time.
Understanding what your personality will help you to tailor your oranizing systems and process to match your personality. A mismatch wil lead to systems which don’t get used and process which fall apart with the resulting disorganization that ensues.
To determine your personality, whatch and listen to how you organize at your desk. Do you talk out loud (auditory)? Do you like to sort your files by colour (visual)? So you like to sort by date? Do you prefer all your surfaces to be clear but don’t care about the inside of your drawers or cupboards? Do you need everthing out where you can see it (visual). Do you like to get up and file or toss things in your office (kinetic)?
When I was a student, no one carried an agenda. When I entered the business world, everyone carried a day planner. Nowadays, many school boards create day planners or agendas for the students in their schools. Many day planner publishing companies provide planners targeted specifically for students.
Trying to get a student to use a day planner is a much harder task than just finding one to use. If, however, a student can learn to use the tool on a regular basis they will also learn it is a powerful tool to stay organized and give their brain a break from having to keep a lot of schedule and due date information. Here’s some tips to help get your student on top of their agenda:
- Have the student enter into the day planner all the regular activities in their week such as hockey practice, soccer, dance or band practice.
- Have them enter in all the irregular schedule items such as holidays, band concerts or vacations. Most of these items are booked many months in advance and are available from the program organizer.
- Encourage them to write in all their friends’ and family members’ birthdays. Why? Often there will be parties booked around these dates and with the dates booked in the agenda a student can anticipate a gathering of friends or family around the birthday date. With the heads up on their agenda, they can also budget their funds if they wish to go out to celebrate a friend’s birthday.
- Encourage them to keep the agenda with them in their back pack or hand bag at all times. Then it will be available for reference when the opportunity to babysit comes up or when a party invitation arrives.
If you are in the habit of holding meetings, make sure you commit to using and sticking to an agenda. Make the purpose of the meeting clear along with the time you expect that objective to take. If necessary, time out the items on the agenda to ensure you and your meeting participants keep to the time allotted for the meeting. Keep this a habit and people will be happy to attend meetings that you chair.
The best way to keep paper from accumulating is to keep it out of the house.
When you receive the mail, get into the habit of sorting and reading the loose material right over the recycling bin. That way you can throw the unnecessary fliers, brochures and promotional items along with all the envelopes right into the bin as you sort through them and open the mail. The pile of paper will immediately decrease in size and you are left with paper that really in which you are really interested.
If you are working from a home office, you may be struggling with getting everything to fit into a relatively small space. One of the challenges is to keep the space visually calm while keeping all the tools and supplies of the home office contained.
To accomplish this, consider using same colour containers. Whether they are the same style or even shape won’t matter so much if they are all the same colour. The result will be a visually quiet space. Multiple colours create visually noise and can be distracting while you are working.
If you use different coloured containers as a mechanism to identify them, consider using complimentary colours. While they may be different, the appearance with be less like noise and more like music.
As promised – here it is – a kitchen cupboard that refuses to be organized.
You can see that I have made previous attempts with this shelf. The challenge is that it is deep, pulls out but is at knee height. To really use the space effectively, I have to find tall containers to store the food that could then be labelled on top. That would make them easy to see, identify and ,hopefully, with the right size container, easy to access.
My strategy?
- Pull everything out and completely empty the shelf. (Clean it while empty).
- Assess what to keep and what to get rid of (don’t use, don’t need or is too old to keep).
- Determine from what is left how many containers I need.
- Get the containers. You may have your favourite source; one of mine is the Dollar Store. I have already determined a location to get the size and especially the height I need.
- Fill up the containers.
- Label.
- Put everything back. I will make everything fit the space I have as there isn’t any other space i our 1970’s renovated kitchen for these items. They have to live in the space available.
Stay tuned for the after pictures!
Simple concept isn’t it: be prepared. If you were a Boy Scout or Girl Guide, you would have memorized this motto along the way somewhere.
In application to business and time organization, the concept is no different. The more you can prepare ahead of time, the more relaxed, organized, polished and professional will be your presentation and performance. By preparing your material ahead of time, and confirming everything is ready in advance, you will also be able to avoid most technical hangups, forgetting things, or other people forgetting things.
Because you are a professional business person, your dates are already carefully mapped out on your daytimer right? Good. Now schedule in preparation time well in advance. Finally, follow up by scheduling in time, no later than the day before, to confirm that everything and everyone is in place. Now you can relax.
So often we struggle with those not-so-fun tasks that every job, business, company can claim. If you work in a SOHO it might be organizing your receipts to send to the book keeper. Oh, you do your own book keeping and the receipts are still in a box/envelop/pile on the desk?
Here’s a strategy for tackling that not-so-fun chore: schedule, subdivide into bites, conquer.
Start by scheduling some time to tackle the job. Without a Level 10 Intention, its not going to happen. By scheduling time on the calendar, you can at least get your intention close to 10.
Next divide the project into bites, something you can chew without choking. Maybe start by sorting the receipts into months and filing them into separate envelopes one for each month. Already separated? Try dividing or labelling them into your expense categories. Can’t find the receipts? There’s you first bite: spend the scheduled time collecting all the receipts you can find in your office and put them into envelopes, one for each month of the year. (Try an accordian file and you don’t need to worry about labelling the envelopes!).
Too often we fail to accomplish a task because it never gets scheduled into our calendars. Other bits and pieces of our business gobble up the day, the week, the month. If the task is an unpleasant or difficult one and you are procrastinating as a result, you probably find yourself doing almost anything else than sitting down to tackle it. Schedule a date with yourself to take it down.