Speed Organizing: Surmountable Tasks

Does the idea of getting organized leave you feeling overwhelmed?  It’s easy to think of each project as a multi-day affair – and really, who has that kind of time?  Each day you don’t address the issue, the area continues to collect more and more clutter, and the project feels even more insurmountable in your mind.  Here’s a secret – you don’t need days or even hours to take control!  Here are 7 things you can do RIGHT NOW to get organized, enjoy peace-of-mind and prevent clutter from piling up in the future.

Read more at Affluent Magazine!

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Lazy Days: Why Being Lazy Isn’t (Always) a Bad Thing

We are well into the lazy days of summer and maybe the heat wave has you feeling less than motivated to tackle that growing to-do list.  And that’s OK.

Being organized means that you can find the things you need, when you need them. It says nothing, though, about your closet looking ready for a photo-shoot for the pages of a home décor magazine.  It says nothing about taking care of household tasks like a TV personality. It says nothing about the number of papers permitted on your desktop. So, let yourself off the hook a little!

Want to learn more? Check out my article at TheBeautyBean.com!

My Calendar is Color Coded

January has got me thinking about calendars.  OK – that’s a lie.  I’m pretty much always thinking about calendars. But I figured that January might have YOU thinking about calendars.

It’s is a remarkable tool really — when kept up to date, your calendar tells you what’s happening today and what you’ve got coming up a week, a month, a year from now.  When kept in a central location, it let’s your family know where you’re going to be and when.  It tells you about your responsibilities, but it also tells you the fun stuff that you have to look forward to (to reward you for living up to those responsibilities).

As a person who plans ahead, you can imagine the love I have for the calendar in general. For many years that love manifested itself in the form of a Filofax (though quite a few models made their way into my heart and into my bag). About a year ago, I went digital — and I never looked back. Here’s why:

• I can color code without the markers. Back in my corporate days, I used to print out a clean calendar each month using Word’s Calendar Wizard feature. Then I took my markers, assigned a color to each project I was working on, and filled in the due dates. It was pretty to look at and made it visually clear which projects should be prioritized on a specific day.  Happily, the folks over at Apple knew a few crazies like me, and let me set up my iCal to have multiple calendars, each assigned a different color.

My Color Coded Calendar

• It’s easier than ever to remember an occasion. In my paper days, I always had to set aside some time to copy over all of the birthdays & anniversaries into the fresh pages of the new year’s calendar. Now that I’ve gone digital I can set these events up to repeat every year. If it’s a date that’s really important, I can set an alarm (I like to set it a few days in advance — it’s a good reminder to drop the card in the mail). And I have NO excuse not to remember my newly married friends’ anniversaries….I simply go to the entry with the details about their wedding, take out the location details, and edit it to repeat every year.

• Someone out there has already done a lot of the work for me. Want to know what date Memorial Day will fall on in 2012? How about game days for your favorite sports team? There’s a subscription calendar for that! Whether you use iCal or Outlook, you can subscribe to an internet calendar that will bring that information directly to the digital calendar you use everyday. Apple users can find calendars for download here. Outlooks users click here for more information.

Whether you do it digitally or on paper, keeping a calendar is key. Need help? Contact me at info@chaostheorynyc.com!

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Increasing Your Productivity

Take a look at your to-do list. I bet there a bunch of things on there that require a high level of concentration, and then there are a bunch of things that require very little effort (they just need to get done).

Now, think about they way you work. Are you a morning person? A night owl? Mentally, when are you at your best?

Schedule those “high level concentration” items during the time of day when you’re sharpest. Handle the “busywork” during the hours when you’re a bit more sluggish. This way, you can give that “thinking task” the attention it deserves and still manage to power through all those little items (like online bill pay, sending birthday cards, filing papers). At the end of the day, you will have crossed a ton off your list!

Follow me on Twitter for a daily organizing tip! http://www.twitter.com/chaostheorynyc