Picking up can be a hassle.

I know of no young children, who when given the task of picking up their toys, will not try to get out of it. The sad truth is that without some sort of strategy to corral toys, they would quickly take over all living space. Some parents cope with this by limiting the mess to a room where the door can be closed; others ignore the problem completely; some pick it up themselves; others nag.

I have to admit, I was in the last category. My daughter has designated play spaces, but when the toys make it into rooms where they are tripped over, I insist that they be picked up. My daughter, however, will do anything in her power not to pick things up.

One evening after my daughter had gone to bed I had grabbed a spare laundry basket and I was putting stray toys in it. The idea was that I would use it to transport them all upstairs. But another thought hit, and the Saturday Basket was born.

What Is The Saturday Basket?

The Saturday Basket is simply a laundry basket. Any toy that I find in the non-toy areas (kitchen, office, music room, living room) after bedtime gets put into the basket. The basket is stored on a high shelf in the closet, and on Saturdays the basket is taken down, and my daughter has to put everything away in its proper place. If a toy ends up in the basket repeatedly, it will be quietly removed and given away, at my discretion.

No More Nagging

It took me a few weeks to break the nagging habit, but the system is working fine. We all know the ground rules, and we abide by them. We have not had to give away any toys, and I have a more peaceful and less cluttered living space.

2010 Update

I have used the Saturday basket for several years with great success. I still have to remind myself not to nag, and there have been times when I have found the entire contents of the basket stuffed into her closet or under the bed. However, it has now gotten to the point where there are weeks without anything in the Saturday basket. This is progress in my eyes.

This post was originally posted at LauraEarnest.com and has been migrated here before I shut the LauraEarnest blog down.

Photo by Bird Eye

During the past two weeks and this week, I’ve decided to offer a sampling of my tips on how to simplify and organize your home.

Books

• Purge what you aren’t going to read. Be honest. If you have had a book for a while, are you really going to read it? You might find that getting rid of things you really have no intention of reading may lighten your load a bit.
• Purge what you’ve already read. I re-read books. Yet I have gotten rid of many books that I will probably re-read in the future.
• Group books in a way that makes sense to you. If you group by subject, author or series, do so. Don’t worry about having the perfect filing system.
• Get rid of old textbooks. If you’re no longer in school, you probably don’t need your textbooks anymore. Most people (myself included) have hung on to textbooks and notes for far too long. Purge what you can. I have a basic statistics book, my trig book, and two algorithm books. All of which I have referenced in the last five years.

Computer Software

• Keep software media in binders. This is a bit trickier than with DVDs or CDs, because often you will need some sort of code on the package casing. Keep that code with the media, or write the code on the media itself.
• Purge media you can’t read. It does no good to hang onto floppies or zip discs that you cannot read. Get rid of them.
• Clean off your computer. Needs change. Get rid of software you no longer use. Clean out old versions of software. Defragment.
• Get rid of bad pictures. It seems that people keep digital pictures of a quality they never would have tolerated on developed film. Remove poor pictures from your hard drive.

Cleaning Supplies

• Keep supplies where they are used. Even if this means duplicates. Keep bathroom cleaning supplies in the bathroom, kitchen supplies in the kitchen, garbage bags near the garbage can. You get the idea.
• Purge things that didn’t work. If you tried a cleaner and it didn’t work, get rid of it. (If it’s hazardous, dispose of it properly!) Just because you bought it doesn’t mean you have to keep it — especially if it doesn’t work well for you.
• Use old toothbrushes for detailed cleaning. An old toothbrush takes up very little room, and is great for cleaning small spaces.

Pantry

• Keep like items together. Keep your spices together (out of the light, please!) Same with oils, baking ingredients, cereals, etc. This makes it easier to find, and also to know what you have.
• Use baskets and boxes to group. Keep all your pasta in one box. That way you can find what you need quickly, and also prevent spills. I use baskets for pasta, baking chips, spices, snacks, bread “products” (crumbs, croutons, etc), and individual portions of fruit.
• Prevent orphaned canned goods. Put a system in place to make sure you use the oldest food first. It may be putting the new cans behind the old (my favorite) or writing the month and year on the can (my mother’s system).
• Don’t buy what you won’t use. Sure, the pickled whatsits may be on sale, but if no one in your house will eat them, there is no point in buying them. If you’d like to try something, buy one. If it’s a hit, you can stock up then. And don’t buy things because you “should” eat them.

Miscellaneous

• Use toothbrush holders to store things around sinks. I have a toothbrush holder in my kitchen that stores my veggie brush, my dish brush and the kitchen-cleaning toothbrush. There is one in my bathroom holding makeup brushes. My husband keeps one to hold drying paintbrushes.
• Re-purpose old boxes for grouping items. This isn’t just for pantries. Drawers can be organized with old jewelry boxes. Under-sink spaces can be organized using old dishpans.
• Fold towels to fit. Fold towels and other cloths in a way to fit into your space. My mother taught me to fold in a certain way. But my first home after marriage had a triangular linen closet (don’t ask, it was a weird place). Folding the way I was taught made the space unusable and likely to avalanche. Adapt to what you have.
• Use shoe holders to organize small stuff. I have a shoe organizer in our coat closet to hold hats and mittens. I also have one in my daughter’s room to hold small toys and stuffed animals.

Sometimes you just need to take a break.

After a week of playing catch-up and being swamped at work, not feeling 100%, and watching blogging tasks pile up, I was getting downright snarly. And getting even snarlier because I knew I wasn’t getting things done according to my schedule.

Well, sometimes, you just have to throw in the towel. Will the world end if the kitchen isn’t swept? Nope. Will the economy come to a halt because I didn’t write a blog article? Nope. Will I be even more frazzled if I just keep going? Yep.

Sometimes life piles up. And during those times it’s important to let yourself know it’s OK to not get everything done.

Photo by anna carol

Since the end of our school semester is this week, and my daughter has four “adjusted dismissal days” (read: half-days), I decided now would be a good time to share how I work from home while my daughter is there.

Note: I normally do my job from my office, but on days when my daughter is off, my boss is flexible enough to let me work from home.

The Key: Planned Activities

The easiest way to make sure your child is occupied without parking them in front of the television, is to have planned activities. My daughter likes to be in my office with me, so she has her own desk, where she can do activities I have planned for her.

Coloring Pages

The internet is packed full of coloring pages. Sometimes I will print (double-sided, of course) pages of her favorite cartoon characters. Other times I will print an educational book, like the ones found at Enchanted Learning. These allow her to do some coloring on “new” books, which always gets her interest.

Crafts

I also have a bunch of crafts on hand. These can often be found cheaply at department stores, or on clearance at the local craft stores. These crafts have to be simple so that they can be done without my help, but still satisfying. I usually provide a tube of white glue as well. My daughter’s current favorites are origami and stringing beads together.

Puzzles

Small puzzles are also a good way to capture attention. The puzzles have to be challenging enough to get the attention, but not too challenging, which will lead to the child losing interest. We are currently working in the 100 piece puzzle range.

For older kids, there are also puzzle books. Word searches, sudoku and simple crosswords are great for absorbing attention.

Websites

There are a lot of kid-friendly and kid-safe websites out there. My daughter currently loves Webkinz, Build-a-Bear land, and Handicats. She is not allowed to browse at random, but these three sites are ones I feel comfortable letting her play as she will.

Wii Games

One surprising activity that my daughter can stay involved in is Wii games. She favors Wii Fit Plus over sedentary games, so I feel good letting her play. She can easily kill an hour biking around the island or dodging snowballs.

Taking Breaks

One thing that makes working from home with my daughter present is the expectation that I won’t be working in large chunks without being distracted. I try to break my work into chunks and take a quick break every 20 minutes or so. If she is home for lunch, I make sure I take my full lunch break and spend time with her.

I also make it clear that I shouldn’t be interrupted unless there is an emergency (and I define what emergency is). If my daughter wants something from me, I will say, “I can take a break in 10 minutes. Come back then.”

When All Else Fails, Phone A Friend

There are days when I can’t get her to settle into anything. At that point, I will phone one of our neighbors who isn’t working and set up a playdate…at their house. I have two neighbors who understand the situation and will help me out. (They claim that having my daughter over relieves them from the task of entertaining their own child, so it works out well.)

It is possible to occasionally work from home with a child around and still be productive. Provide some activities, connect with your child frequently, and set expectations, and you can manage this as well.

Photo by tinkerbrad

I switched to Firefox almost as soon as it came out. While I work with Microsoft products for a living, I hated working with IE6. Firefox gave me so much more… tabbed browsing, and the ability to expand functionality with extensions! Oh my, the extensions!!!!

Don’t you hate it when something that works well for a long time stops?

But it was bound to happen. Firefox slowed down. To the point where I couldn’t use it at home anymore. I would click on a site, and it would be slow to load. And then any time I was typing anything — search, URL or whatever — there was a significant lag, and sometimes my typing didn’t always show up completely.

Back to Basics

Mozilla recommends that the first thing you do is remove all extensions.

Remove my extensions? Are they nuts? My extensions make Firefox easy for me to incorporate in what I do. Still, I had to do something, so I opened up the screen to see what I could remove. Surely there were things I wasn’t using.

What I Found

If there ever was an area that needed decluttering, it was my Firefox extensions. I never realized how much stuff had accumulated. 3 different managers for GMail, tools for dissecting and reassembling web pages, and some extensions that I don’t even remember why I installed.

So out they came.

But It’s Still Slow!

The Great Shoveling of Extensions had no effect. So I had to go further. I knew it couldn’t be all the extensions, more likely the problem was in one or two of them.

So I made a list of the ones I had to have. Then I removed everything.

Zippy!

Firefox came back to a quick little browser. So I started re-adding the extensions one by one.

Problem Child Found

It turns out that the problem child was the Google toolbar. So while I miss having my Google bookmarks right there, I am currently working without the extension. And Firefox is still zipping along.

Please note this doesn’t mean it is a problem everywhere – I’m still using the toolbar at work with no problems. Go figure.

Photo by fczuardi

An acquaintance of mine was eager to talk. It could have been out of a sitcom: a woman walks into a house, laden with bags. She announces: “I’m going to get organized. Look at all the containers I bought!”

Stop.

All that pretty containers will get you is a bunch of clutter stored in pretty containers.

I don’t agree with Flylady on everything (see Why Flylady Didn’t Work for Me), but this one I do: you can’t organize clutter. Putting clutter in boxes just gets it out of sight. It may not be visible, but somewhere in your mind it will be weighing you down.

Getting organized is one of the top resolutions people make every year. And every year, people fail at this, because they are trying to organize what they have, rather than getting rid of the stuff they don’t need.

Organization is simply applying the rule: “Everything has a place, and everything in its place.”

I will be re-organizing this year, and I have already started. But the difference is that I am decluttering first.

But Where Do I Start To Declutter?

I like a gut-level approach. I know when things bug me. So I decide I’m going to spend some time decluttering – I will usually take a look around the room I am in and figure out what bothers me most. For instance, I was in my bedroom recently and decided that my top dresser drawer really bugged me. This has turned into a junk drawer of sorts, so I spent some time clearing it out.

You can also do a systematic approach, where you cycle through the rooms and areas of your house and regularly declutter them.

How To Declutter

There are many ways to declutter, but the method I prefer is the pile/basket method. Here are the steps:

1. Get some containers or set aside space for piles. You are going to need four: keep, give away, throw away, put away. I like using boxes or baskets for the give away and put away. I usually have a trash bag for the throw away, and I just put the keep to the side, for it will go back in where it came from.
2. Pull everything out. The key to making decluttering work is not to tackle too big of an area. You need enough space to pull everything out of the area you are going to declutter.
3. Sort. Go through the pile and put it in one of the four categories. If you can’t decide right away on something, put it in the put away pile.
4. Put the keep items back. Clean out the space and neatly put the keep pile back in place.
5. Remove the garbage. Take the garbage out of the house.
6. Remove the give away. Put the give away in a place where you will get rid of it in the next three days.
7. Put away the rest. Here’s the key to successful decluttering. You have to have a space for everything. And you have to tell yourself you can’t dump your stuff in an area you’ve already decluttered. (Otherwise you run the risk of just moving piles around the house). If something ended up in the put away pile because you didn’t know what to do with it, think seriously why you can’t get rid of it. If you are still very attached to something that serves no purpose in your life, put it away, out of sight for a while. You’ll get back to it.

Once everything is decluttered, you’re going to find you don’t need all those storage containers. And things will be organized!

Photo by taberandrew

Have you ever had the experience of knowing you forgot something, but can’t remember what it was you forgot? (I know, if you remembered, you wouldn’t have forgotten…) And then perhaps something jogged your memory so that you remembered?

Many experts recommend techniques to get yourself remembering things. The techniques cover everything from moving around your house to reviewing old calendars, to creating a master list of “joggers”.

Being Reminded

I like the idea of being reminded with a list of memory joggers, but my problem with creating the list myself is simple: if I can’t remember why I went downstairs two minutes ago, how am I going to remember what to put on a list to trigger my memory?

The RAM Dump

Enter the RAM Dump (pdf) from the Hidden Clutter page at Paauwerfully Organized.

I’ve used this very detailed list to help keep me on track and to remind me of things I may need to get to. It is an extensive list, so I only do it twice a year. More than that would overwhelm me.

Using the RAM Dump

To use this list, I print out one copy. (This is contrary to the instructions, but my work is highly structured and a planning system keeps track of all open loops for us.) I take the list and start putting notes right on it.

I usually couple this with a walk around my house, inside and out, opening every closet, cabinet and drawer along the way.

Next my notes go into my Bonsai outline. From there, they fall into my regular task system.

Just Done…

I just finished the first Dump of 2010. I didn’t find as much as I had a year ago, so that tells me that I am doing a better job of keeping up with things. Of course, I found some things that came up in previous dumps, and now I have to consider if I am going to actually do them, or if they need to be jettisoned.

Why This Important

I find that doing regular RAM dumps keeps me from having the nagging feeling I’m forgetting something. Or actually forgetting something. This list of memory-joggers helps me capture fleeting thoughts of “I need to do this someday” that happen at odd moments.

By freeing up having to think about these loose ends (which David Allen calls open loops), I can concentrate on what is at hand.

I encourage each of you to take a look at this list and do a RAM dump of your own. Post a comment with your likes/dislikes and the results!

Photo by William Hook

I love digital photos. You can see them right after printing, print what you want, and send them all over the place with a click of a mouse. What I don’t love is organizing them.

I have taken the simple tactic of making a folder for each month (labeled YYYYMM, i.e. 200908 for August 2009) and dumping the photos in there. Unfortunately, our camera likes to reset its date, and I can have a difficult time figuring out when photos were taken. My husband is terrible about resetting the date, leaving me with tons of photos that are dated “1/1/1980″ that won’t sort properly.

So I looked for a way to reset the dates on photo files, so that they can sort properly.

Enter File Date Changer.

This application allows you to select files, then change the dates in a batch. Awesome software. Simple to use.

If you have ever needed to do this, check out this great little utility.

I have not been paid to endorse this product. I am just a happy user of the software.

Photo by chris bartnik photography

The Book Cover

As you can see, it’s a pretty ordinary spiral bound notebook, which I found in the bargain section of Barnes and Noble.

The Project Page and Inside Cover

The inside cover has a list of questions gleaned from a favorite writer that struck me as pertinent. Not in the scolding way my mother used to ask, but as real questions. Underneath are a few sticky notes to make quick notes of things that don’t necessarily work into a project, but I don’t want to forget.

The right-hand page is the project listing. It was started 12/14, and I add things as they come up. The project listing helps me keep myself real — I can’t add too much here and expect to make real progress on anything.

The Project Pages

These are two sample project pages. The first one shows the blogging page, along with some dated items, and some brainstorming. The second shows a sample of a project with sub-projects and dates.

The Daily Page

This last page is a sample of one of my daily pages (1/3/10, although the date isn’t showing). The left-hand page lists my non-project tasks, and the right-hand page has tasks that correspond to items in the project pages.

I hope this helps!

One of my co-workers is wise beyond her years. She never seems to get flustered. During a recent episode where all was in chaos, she remained serene. I asked her how she did it. Her first reply was glib, but I pressed her further, and she responded that the key to her calmness was taking 10 minutes every morning and night and just breathing.

This is one of the forms of meditation I have come in contact with since studying inner peace, and it does work. You sit quietly and focus on your breath, in and out. It sounds easy, but in fact is rather difficult at first, as your mind will probably wander. When this happens, I have to remember to gently bring my mind back, rather than wrenching it away from the thoughts. The latter, as you can probably guess, is not very peace-like. As a go-to-sleep tape of mine says, “You will have thoughts, but you’re not obliged to think them.”

I can do this type of meditation in the evening with no problem. I find it a nice end to the day, and I generally sleep better after having done it.

However, I can’t do this in the morning. The few times I have attempted it, I have fallen back asleep. It doesn’t matter if I am sitting in bed, in a chair or even outside. I just doze right off.

A few days ago I had some extra time in the morning, and picked up my knitting, which happened to be right by the chair I read in in the morning. This is rather mindless knitting, not something that requires concentration. What I found was that I could concentrate on my breathing without danger of falling asleep because part of my mind and my hands were engaged in something that would not allow me to fall off.

For those of you who may have trouble with early mornings, this might be something to try. Find something you can do that uses your hands actively, but you can do without thinking too much about. And see if you can focus on your breathing while doing it.

Photo by knittinging