Amber's Organizing - Tips

How long should I keep my paper? Hopefully, by now, you are starting to shift towards paperless bills, automatic bill payments, and e-statements. If you haven’t tackled one of those yet, I’d encourage you to make it a priority. It saves you a lot of time, you will never be late on a payment and you can always view the statement when it comes in the mail or via email so you stay in touch with your spending. If you are still collecting papers and your files are outdated, I’d like to suggest a few of the following tips for…

Best practices to avoid a full Inbox . How to keep emails at bay. Don’t print emails. It wastes paper and adds clutter to your desk. Instead either put the information onto your calendar or create folders in your email inbox to drag emails into them. Create helpful, relevant folders to file emails if you need to save an email. Don’t go crazy with fifty folders. Keep it to a maximum of 10-15 folders. Look at each email once and then act and decide. The longer you sit on something the longer it lingers as clutter and indecision. If too…

The amount of mail today should be less and less. We have so many online options that give us the power to stop the mail from arriving, cluttering up our tabletop and wasting our time opening it up. To start, go paperless as much as you can, and to figure out which places you need to switch over, start with your current pile of mail. In the current piles, you will find lots of places you should log into and choose e-delivery. You will have to create usernames and passwords on each website but in the end, it will be…

Accumulating Paper and Letting it Go Much like other things in life. Paper has a life cycle. It isn’t meant to stay permanently, and it does have a specific job for a short amount of time. When we treat paper as a keepsake or an antique piece of furniture that we won’t part with, it poses a problem. So let’s take a look at the cycle a little in detail. Beginning of the Cycle- Paper arrives. It comes through the mail, through our computer (hitting the print button too often), through backpacks, through purses and briefcases. We are the culprits….

Sometimes cubicles and office nooks at work start to feel like a cave and a deep dark abyss of paper. Take notice of the current state of your cubicle and follow these office organization tips to start seeing a difference. Once you’ve put some new ideas into practice show off your hard work! I’m sure your coworkers will be jealous! Put away projects you are not currently working on. The more left out, the less space for what’s important right now. Yes, you might be “visual” but all of what you need to be reminded of doesn’t have to be…

Are you a book collector? Here’s how to say goodbye to books. Buying a lot of cleaning products doesn’t make your home clean and buying organizing products doesn’t mean your home will be organized. The same goes for books. Having shelves loaded with books doesn’t mean you’ll soak up all that knowledge or be super smart. Sometimes keeping books shows us how much knowledge we’ve accumulated or how hard we’ve studied the material. Of course we’re proud of that. So giving them up would perhaps inflate that pride and prevent us from “showing others” what we’ve read and know. Other…

Must have products to build a successful filing system In this digital and electronic era, we are using filing cabinets less and less. Paper that has to be stored long term is not like it used to be when I first started organizing. As times have changed I’ve changed my stance on what paper makes the cut to be kept and filed away. Never the less, some clients still want to understand the basics of what I recommend for creating a good filing system. So here are the basics. Feel free to modify and simplify as you see fit. Not…

What to do with all that junk mail? Each day we open our mailbox and are faced with unwanted credit card offers, coupons, advertisements, solicitations for money and the list goes on.  Junk mail not only costs us beautiful trees but it wastes and eats up our time.  Instead of sitting back and doing nothing, we can take active steps to stop receiving so much junk mail and most importantly stop the waste. The Illinois Recycling Association tells us that Americans throw away enough office and writing paper each year to build a wall twelve-feet high stretching from New York City to…

8 Simple Steps to Sort through the Mail Who who opens the mail in your family? Who pays the bills and files any permanent paper? It’s best if one spouse or one person takes this job on. Dividing up the tasks leaves room for inconsistency and error. So if you or your spouse has a stronger organizational background give this job to whoever will have a a better handle on it. An organizing system is built around and set up for the family member who is responsible to sort and go through the mail. That person should be present during…

Organizing Your Home Office In a business setting, being organized makes a world of difference. Organization not only helps in common tasks such as meeting deadlines, retrieving information quickly for an appointment, or keeping your desk pile free for your client who’s stopping by- it makes you a trusted business professional. Clients, vendors, customers, employees, and others will be able to rely on you to be on time for a meeting, pay bills on time, follow through, keep your word, manage a project well, and store records or papers without losing them.  For me, it is crucial to practice what I…