Project Smile collects stuffed animals for emergency responders to distribute to frightened children after fires, accidents and natural disasters.
projectsmile.org

Cell phones for Soldiers collects old and broken cell phones and sells them to a company that recycles them and uses the money to buy calling cards to give to soldiers stationed abroad so that they can call home for free. Go to cellphonesforsoldiers.com to print a free prepaid shipping label.

Onesight accepts prescription glasses, bifocals and nonprescription sunglasses at Lenscrafters, Pearle Vision, Sunglass Hut, Target Optical and Sears optical nationwide. Just look for the marked bin. The Organization provides used glasses as well as free eye-exams to those who can’t afford them. onesight.org

Computer equipment The National Christina Foundation will match your used tech equipment,computer, printer, software, fax machine, monitor, mouse , or any other parts-with and organization near you that needs it. Many are nonprofits that provide training for at risk student or people with disabilities. cristina.org

Furniture The National Furniture Bank Association will pick up and distribute your furniture to families in need. Most accept beds, dressers, nightstands, tables, chairs, sofas and lamps. nationalfurniturebank.org

Medications disposemymeds.org lets you search by zip code for local pharmacies that have take-back programs to help keep potentially harmful pharmaceutical waste and personal -care chemicals out of the environment.

Paint, Tools and Building Supplies Drop them off at your local Habitat for Humanity Restore. Each Restore is different so contact them to find our what they take habitat.org

Sports equipment Gently used sports equipment can help underprivileged children enjoy the fun of sports. Sports gift will refurbish your items and send them to needy children in the United States and abroad.
Sportsgift.org

Shoes Soles 4 Souls provides shoes for those in need around the world. Visit soles4souls.org and enter your zip code to find a donation site near you soles4souls.org

Need extra cash? Here are great ways to lighten your load and fatten your bank account.

Replacements.com buys china, crystal and silver in more than 360,000 patterns.

Gazelle.com buys a wide aray of electronics. from cell phones to Blu ray players.. Simply visit the site to see how much your item is worth and request a prepaid mailing box. Super easy!!

Media exchange 123 buys blu ray discs, CDs, DVDs and video games Simply enter the UPC number to see how much they’ll pay. MX123.com

Recycling Visit Earth911.com to find recycling centers near you.

Determine your priorities in life: It is impossible to know what you don’t need if you haven’t determined what you do need. For example, I need more time. I had to take a look at my time wasting habits. I have decided that I don’t need to tear out and save pages of things I want to buy from magazines anymore. If I tear something out of a newspaper or magazine it becomes a to-do. I don’t need anything else to do. And if I really need that thing so badly then I won’t forget to get it. It has been so liberating to flip through a magazine and enjoy it without feeling the need to tear and manage all that paper and to make a trip to the mall to get the thing I thought I had to have in the magazine. This small tweak in my habits has saved precious time, mental energy, and, most likely, a lot of money.

Determine your priorities and what you are willing to spend time on and what you’re willing to give space to in your home.

Clutter is a delayed decision: Take a look at any cluttered areas in your home and you will see that each item there is really a delayed decision. Maybe you just didn’t decide where the item should be located in your home or maybe you haven’t decided if you will ever wear something again or use something so it has been relegated to a spare closet until a decision can be made. Make decisions on the things in your home right away. Choose if it stays or goes and, if it stays where will it ‘live’. If you have given thought to what you really need to support your values and priorities this becomes very easy.
Make a Plan

Choose a charity: For many of us, it is easier to let things go if we think it is going somewhere where it will be appreciated and put to good use. However, sometimes finding the right place can be paralyzing so you stay stuck in your stuff. Charitynavigator.org can help you find a charity in your area you can to be good stewards of your things. Set up a donation receptacle to make it easy to unclutter your home on a daily basis.

Schedule regular decluttering sessions: whether you are drowning in clutter or just a little it is important to assign a time each day or week that you will devote time to relocating items and clearing clutter. It could be 10 minutes a day or 1 hour each weekend. Whichever works for you, it is important to be consistent with the commitment.

Create a landing spot: Organization is about everything having a place. A landing spot is the place where you unload things as you come in the door. Clutter happens when we put things down in random places and then become too busy to go back and put them away. Your landing spot should be located near the entrance you most often use. It needs a designated place for mail, purse, wallet, keys and an area for any shopping bags or other things you may not have time to put away at the moment. In having it all in one spot-it is easier to go back and clear it as time permits. Caution: don’t fill up your landing spot and then make a new one. Take time each day to process what has accumulated there.
New Habits
Set goals; Daniel Hommer M.D., is an expert on brain imaging and motivation. He shared in Real Simple magazine that there is a phenomenon called delayed discounting. If it takes a long time to reach a goal we value that goal less then one we can reach quickly making it harder to get started at all. The solution is to make projects small and rewards immediate. For example, if you clear off a surface, dress if up with something you love keeping in mind that eventually your entire home will be that orderly and beautiful.

Don’t bring it home: Walk away from bargains. Just because you can buy three for the price of one doesn’t mean you should. Ask yourself: Where will I store it? Will it expire? If you find yourself accepting a freebie there’s nothing wrong with putting it in the donation bag straight away.

Put it away immediately: We all have good intentions to do things later. The problem arises when “later” creates piles all over our home. Put things away right away or, at least, the same day. Remember it’s all contained in your landing spot.

Give yourself time: If organizing doesn’t come naturally to you putting things back where they belong is not going to happen overnight. According to Charles Duhigg New York Times reporter and author of the book ‘The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business’, habits are hardwired into our brains. They are our brains way of simplifying our lives, saving us stress and energy. The trick is not to focus on undoing the habit but to replace the bad behavior with a better one. If each time you walk in your kitchen you drop everything you are holding on the counter think of the better habit of putting things away where they belong or using your landing spot to hold them until they can be put away. The reward: clear kitchen countertops.

Each organized person I know has developed habits that result in a clutter-free home. Here are a few to consider for yourself:
• Put things away as soon as you get home. When you bring something into your home whether it be groceries or anything else you have acquired take the items out of the bag and put them in their proper place. If an item doesn’t yet have an official home, put it in the room where it will be used. Eventually you will have organization just by developing this simple routine.
• Group like things together. Organized people have the habit of keeping likes with likes. When you do this it’s very easy to keep track of what and how much you have. Start doing this in small steps. For example: choose a place you are going to keep something and then whenever you find a like item in a different place you can start to group it in it’s new home.
• Use labels. Organized people use clearly labeled containers that are easily identified. Start organizing your home by getting rid of all the cardboard boxes and paper bags you are using as containers and replace them with clear bins. You can do this a little at a time. As you swap containers, purge any unwanted items.
• Throw away or recycle unwanted paper immediately. Pitch your junk mail before it hits a hard surface in your home. Throw away envelopes and any junk paper that come with your bills or other correspondence. Have a stapler on hand to connect anything with more than one page. Pare down to just the essential paper.
• Clear clutter on a continual basis: Organized people have the habit of letting go of excess on a continual basis. This doesn’t mean that they don’t live in abundance. It simply means that they don’t wait for one day to go through the house and decide what to donate-they have a donation receptacle handy and they do it continuously. They have a natural eye for elimination and usually don’t like the look of visual clutter.
If you incorporate these five habits you will be on your way to an organized life. If you start to group things together, put things away in the room where they are used, donate often and take the phrase ‘I’ll do it later’ out of your vocabulary you will be surprised at the change in your home this time next year.

A 1″ binder. I like the binders that you have a a pocket style cover for labeling.
Scrapbook paper (optional) cut to fit the pocket on the binder’s cover and spine. The picture to the right is the cover of my holiday binder.
A three hole punched zippered pouch. This is a great place to keep all the receipts for your holiday purchases. If you need them for returns you’ll know right where to find them.
CD holders. I keep all my holiday music in my binder. No more hunting for the elusive holiday music.
Page protectors. I keep a few page protectors in my binder to hold things like Christmas carol lyrics, poems and prayers.
Photo pages. I like to take pictures of my decor so I can remember how I set things up the previous year.
Binder pockets. You can find these at any office supply store. I always shop at Office Max as they have the Peter Walsh line of organizing products that I love. The pockets come five to a pack and each hold up to 70 sheets of paper. Use a labelmaker or simply write with a sharpie to assign a category to each pocket. Here are some of the things you can keep in your binder pockets:

Christmas card list
Decoration inventory Assign a number to each one of the bins you use to store your decorations and then list the contents of that bin on a sheet of paper and keep it in your binder. When you go to decorate next year you’ll know which bin to grab first.
Entertaining ideas. This pocket is for everything you tear from magazines. It’s great to have all your ideas in one place before you decorate.
Gift ideas. This is by far my favorite pocket. I tear pages from magazines and catalogs all year long and tuck them away in this pocket. When I start my Christmas shopping I am always thankful for the reminders.
Recipes. I keep all my holiday recipes separate from my other recipes so they can be easily located when I need them.
Tips. things pertaining to the holidays that I don’t want to forget (like this newsletter).
Travel. A great place to keep itineraries of friends and family that will be visiting for the season.
Anything that you need to keep at your fingertips during the season

I keep my binder with my cookbooks in the kitchen so I can easily add to it throughout the year. Choose a place in your home to keep the binder where it will not be forgotten and enjoy the gift of a holiday with a little less stress next year.

Goal setting is an important component of time-management. A goal is a destination. If you don’t know where your going it’s impossible to make a plan to get there. If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels perhaps it’s because you’ve lost sight of your goals or not set any at all.

Once you have established your goals, short and long term, the most important thing to remember about managing your time is to PLAN. A plan is the roadmap you’ll use to reach your destination. Remember plans are not written in stone. They are guidelines for accomplishing the things you need to do in an efficient manner. Make it a habit, once a week, to plan for that week. If you work Monday through Friday, a good time to assess the things you want to accomplish for that week might be on Sunday night. There’s a saying, “On paper, off your mind”. The act of writing things down frees your mind of mental clutter and relieves the nagging anxiety that you’re forgetting something. Each day, using your weekly plan as a guide write a to-do list for the day. You can do this in the morning or the evening, whenever your mental clarity is at its peak. If you write your list at night you’ll experience an added benefit, a better night’s sleep.

Your weekly plans and your daily to-do lists act like your very own personal assistant, reminding you of the things you need to get done. Below you’ll find tips to keep in mind while making your plans.

• Avoid writing your lists on small scraps of paper. they’re easily misplaced. Be consistent by keeping your list in a notebook or pad kept in the same location whether it be a designated drawer, your fridge, purse or wallet. I keep my list in my planner so it’s always with me.
• If you’re away from your home or office and want to remember something when you get there, call yourself and leave a voicemail. You can also send yourself reminder emails.
• Prioritize your lists.
• When possible schedule large projects at the beginning of the week and, if necessary, break them down over a period of days. We all tend to procrastinate if something seems too overwhelming. But, you’ll find if you schedule a specific time each day to work on large projects you’ll have the peace of mind that there will be an end. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
• Get the things your dread out of the way first, you’ll feel less stressed throughout the day. So many times we take care of little tasks first and feel overwhelmed when the day is ending and we still have a large project looming in front of us. Smaller tasks are easily rolled over to the next day.
• Group similar items together by day of the week or time of day. You might make all your phone calls on Monday morning or each day between the hours of 9:00a and 10:00a.
• Group errands by geographic area to save driving time.
• Consolidate your errands; back and forth trips are a waste of time. When you go to the supermarket, get gas for the car, get the car washed, stop at the post office and take care of any other quick errands all at the same time.
• Bring the things you have to read with you. If you have down time, at the car wash, a doctor’s office or on a commute you can get the things you need to read out of the way.

Planning is nothing more than thinking before you act. Plan your tasks, your weekly meals, your routes, your schedule and so on. A little bit of planning goes a long way. You’ll waste less time and enjoy more productive, stress-free days. Remember to plan some free time for you!

You deserve a relaxing routine to get ready each day, but if your bathroom is awash in excess products, jumbled towels and unidentified clutter lurking in the deep recesses under your sink its time to tune up your bathroom and shave precious minutes off your daily routine.

Start with a deep clean: Take everything out of your cabinets and take stock of what you have. Let go of expired products, unused bath salts, potpourri and anything else you haven’t looked at in months or years. Here are the lifespans for common bath products:
Anti-aging and acne treatments: Three months to a year. Be on the lookout for any changes in color.
Body lotion: Two to three years, particularly if it’s in a pump container.
Shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel: About three years.
Bath oil: One year.
Sunscreen: Check the package for an expiration date.
Mascara and liquid eyeliner: Three to four months.
Eye and lip pencils: Three to five years.
Lipstick and lip gloss: Two to three years.
Foundation: About two years.
Perfume: About two years.
Nail polish: One year.
Hairstyling products: Three to five years.
Bar soap: Up to three years.
Shaving cream: About two years.
Deodorant: Up to two years.

Dispose of expired medications properly: expired meds and vitamins should not be flushed as they can contaminate the groundwater. Instead, empty them into a ziplock bag filled with coffee grounds, cat litter or sawdust and then throw them away. Controlled substances should be flushed to avoid accidental ingestion. Visit www.fda.gov or www.smartdisposal.net for more disposal details.

Create a warehouse for bulk purchases: a shelf on a nearby linen closet works great for this. (yes, it might be time to let go of excess linens too). If you don’t have a linen closet available consider a shelf in a spare bedroom. If this isn’t available then bulk purchases might not be a good fit for you. Unclutter your cabinets by only keeping one of each product you use in the bathroom. When you need to replenish, visit your warehouse. When the warehouse is getting low, it’s time to shop.

Discard bulky packaging: store like things together in labeled bins

Create more horizontal surface space: Use containers that fit around the pipes under your sink to coral things like towels, bath tissue and an products that you have to store under the sink. If you can pull one container out instead of several different items it will make cleaning and storage so much easier.

Keep everyday essentials handy: when you’re standing at the sink the things you use daily should be at arms length. Move your medicines and vitamins from the medicine cabinet to the kitchen or a nightstand, (the bathrooms high humidity and heat can affect potency, especially that of antibiotics). Use the medicine cabinet for your daily products like deodorant, skincare and toothpaste.

Use drawer dividers to keep drawers neat. You can separate a lot of bathroom necessities by dividing and conquering. i like individual drawer organizers that customize the drawer to your needs. To keep them from shifting use museum gel, (found at The Container Store)

Create caddies for things that may be used elsewhere: This works well for manicure tools and nail care.

Keep daily makeup convenient: separate the makeup you use everyday from the make up you use occasionally. If you travel it’s easy just to grab the bag and go. Check out the uniipalette at www.uniipalette.com. Easy and Fun!

Use magnets: Attach magnets to the inside of your medicine cabinet to hold nail clippers and tweezers to the inside of the door.

Use over the door shoe bags: these are great for hair accessories like headbands, flowers, large clips. Great if you have young girls in your home.

Once you’ve defined your bathroom the key is to maintain it. The first rule, don’t overbuy!! If you do switch brands, get rid of the old brands rather than let them expire unused. Throw away expired products and medicines at least once a year.

Take the time to really think about the things you need to save. Remember if the paper doesn’t come into the home it doesn’t have to be processed. Resist printing information from the computer for future reference. Instead keep a journal of your favorite websites to refer to as needed.

The second most important thing is to create ONE central place to process all incoming paper and assign the task to one family member. If more than one person is in charge of bringing in the mail it is easy for systems to disintegrate.

Once paper is brought into the home make a decision on it immediately if possible but always within 24 hours. Get rid of unwanted paper immediately. I throw my junk mail away that is addressed to ‘Valued Customer’ or ‘Resident’ at the mailbox garbage. Keep a shredder close to your paper processing center to deal with identity theft concerns. Staples has a great tabletop shredder that is small and efficient. A stapler is also needed to attached multi page documents. Recycle envelopes and inserts.

There are three categories of paper that exist: Action, Reference and Trash. We have discussed the trash, the tips below cover the action category.

Using table top shelves create an action center to define a space for priority items and items that are not time sensitive but still need to be done. You can see the shelves I use on my desk by linking this paper management video . You can buy the shelves at Office Max. They come in silver and black. They are not the most attractive but they are the best thing that has happened to my paper.
Check high priority items on a daily basis and process as needed. This group can include bills to pay, permission slips, RSVP’s and anything else that is time sensitive. If you check it daily, you won’t forget anything.
Check the lower priority items, the “to do later” category, weekly. You can put items in this category that you want to do six months from now. If you check it weekly you will not forget them. Each week, make a decision on these papers. They might stay in the category, they could be moved into the higher priority shelf to be processed or they might become trash if they are no longer relevant.

Reference papers are those that are saved for legal reasons, tax reasons, warranties and certain receipts needed for proof of purchase and should be filed. Resist filing articles you have printed or torn from magazines. They are rarely referred to and clog up filing cabinets making filing more of a chore than it needs to be.

The other type of paper that tends to migrate to piles are notes to other family members and phone messages. For phone messages I love to use spiral journal to capture the info. I date the pages and refer back to them as needed. Consider creating a message board to relay information to your family. If you have enough wall space you can have a board for each family member. If space is limited use color coded post-its to stick each family members notes on the board. I love Office Max’s In Place post-its. They are super sticky, (so they won’t fall off) and come in five colors. Assign a color to each person in your family and let them know where to look for their messages. Ask them to take the messages off the board when they have received them.

I also love the idea of a central family calendar. Family members can sync their electronic devises to match the central calendar if that is how a particular person handles their schedule.

It is very important to have a family meeting and decide on a system that everyone understands.

If you have neglected your paper for a long time and have piles everywhere. Gather them up into one large bin, making sure that the time sensitive paper is separated, then make a commitment to process the paper for 20 minutes a day until it’s gone. Set a timer if need be.

Shredding is cathartic especially when done with your favorite beverage. Try it.

If you live out of piles of paper and your file drawers are full it’s time to clear out the clutter and create a simple system to take control of your financial future. Suze Orman is a firm believer that orderliness begets wealth. I’m not so sure about that (I should be a zillionaire), but I do know that you will save quite a bit in late fees and have a much better idea what is going in and out of your bank accounts if your statements and bills are in order. Organizing paper is completely overwhelming for most of us I’ve tried (along with advice from Suze Orman) to take the overwhelming feeling out and make it as simple as possible.

What you’ll need: a crosscut shredder to prevent identity theft, a garbage can to toss non financial paper and an a few boxes of hanging file folders and a table designated for sorting. If you can borrow a banquet table for this process you can work on it over a period of days without feeling like it’s in the way. If you don’t know anyone with an extra table to share then try to designate an area of your home for the purpose of this task.

Sort all your papers into six piles:

§ Monthly bills, bank statements and pay stubs

§ Investment statements

§ Tax returns and support

§ Deeds

§ Warranty and User Manuals

§ Forever Docs such as marriage licenses, wills and birth certificates

If you have a file cabinet in your home, label one drawer finances. I am a huge fan of filing bills in a twelve month system. Label one hanging file folder for each month and sort bills that you have paid into the month they were paid. The reason I like this method is that you can go back to any month and see your total expenditures. I also store my bank statement into the same file. Basically you will have a snapshot of your finances for any given month at your fingertips. At the end of the year you can pull out anything you need for tax back-up from each month and the rest can stay in the self purging system. When January 2011 comes around you shred the contents of January 2010 the same with February, March etc. You will always have a year’s worth of financial documents at hand.

The other option, and it’s not one that I recommend is to make a separate folder for each bill you pay. The caveat here is that you have to remember to empty the folders on an annual basis. If you don’t have the discipline to do this your files will soon by overflowing with paper you no longer need. For those disciplined souls this method is fine.

Edit the Piles

For all the paper you are eliminating from your piles, I highly recommend running through a crosscut shredder. The FTC estimates that up to nine million Americans a year are victims of identity theft. A good shredder will help protect your financial future.

It is important to know what to keep and for how long. Suze Orman has a great cheat sheet on her website www.suzeorman.com/financialcluttter Here are some of her suggestions for financial papers:

Bills: one year’s worth. Put tax deductable bills in an accordian file by month so they will be ready when you do your taxes.

Pay stubs: one year. When you receive your W-2 make sure that your last check stub matches then shred the stubs.

Bank Statements: One year at least. If you are planning on applying for a mortgage or car loan it is better to keep up to two years. Again, check with your personal accountant if you have any questions.

Investment Statements: save all monthly and quarterly until you receive your end of the year summary and then shred the others. Save the documents for any trades you make during the year for three years.

Tax returns and supporting documents: The IRS has three years to challenge anything on your returns. Keep three years at all times. If the IRS suspects you haven’t reported income it can challenge returns up to six years. To learn more about IRS record keeping guidelines, see Publication 552 on their website (irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p552-pdf)

Warranties: Keep only active warranties and toss the rest. I suggest tossing all user manuals you don’t actively refer to as manufacturers have downloadable versions on their sites. You can also visit www.usersmanualguide.com or www.manualnguide.com.

Documents to Keep for Life: there are some documents you just can’t throw away. These include marriage Licenses, divorce decrees, wills, trusts, estate planning documents and death certificates. Suze Orman also suggests you keep a permanent record of all major loans you have paid off such as homes, cars and so on.

Tips for going Paperless

Of course, if you hate paper as much as I do, you can easily take care of almost all your financial to do’s online. If you’re worried about cyber-safety just make sure you are logged onto a secure network. That means no bill paying at wi-fi hotspots. Check out your banks website for automatic bill paying, accounts alerts and more. This should all be free, if it’s not, switch banks. You can also go online to check out things such as Social Security benefits. Toss all those green and white sheets once you have verified the current one is up to date. Go to www.ssa.gov and click on estimate your retirement benefits.
The most important thing to remember is to edit your files on a regular basis. If you really need to dig out from your piles of paper, take it a little bit each night, sit in a comfortable chair and sort. I think you’ll be surprised at how little you need.

Wishing you all skinny file folders….

My home was recently featured in The Arizona Republic. Click on each image to see the article. Hope you Enjoy!