I was talking to a friend about this particular transformation, and realized it had never made it to the blog, so here you go. For those of you who work at home, you can have a super-functional and pretty office, in just about 30″ of space (deep).
Before:
After:
If I had a nickel for everyone who told me they wanted to go paperless, well, I could buy several reams of paper. The truth is that our society is nowhere near going paperless. In fact, our actual individual consumption of paper is up in the past decades! But we can all take one or two free or easy steps to have less unwanted paper in our lives. The less that comes in, the less you have to organize. Take a few minutes and do just one or two of these steps, and have less in your life:
1. Stop your newspaper, or subscribe to only one day a week.
2. Get off direct mail lists at the Direct Mail Association site.
5. Let magazine subscriptions expire if you didn’t read them last month.
7. Display kids’ artwork with clever front-loading storage frames from DynamicFrames.
Read the rest of this excerpted article where it was originally published on ShopGetOrganized.
Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos
I recently took a trip to a recycling facility. Field trips were the best days when I was in school. Usually just the break in routine was enough to get me excited, but field trips were usually fun, too. This was all of that and good for you, too. If you want your kids to have their own recycling adventure, you can check out this recycling curriculum, designed for elementary school-aged kids by a national recycler.
My township went to “single stream” recycling a couple of years ago. Homeowners get to throw all of their recycles into one bin, and they get sorted out at the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF). Apparently, that increases recycling rates by 50%.
from Allied Waste/Republic Services, applies to Radnor Township
You can take your own Waste Management recycling tour via this video. My initial impression when I saw this was that the process moves super fast, just like our exuberant Waste Management PR host for the tour, Patty Barthel. It’s hard to find people so excited about trash! If you go in person, you’ll get to wear those super sexy hard hat, safety glasses, earplugs, and safety vest, just like I did. (Sorry, I’m not giving up that picture!)
My big aha moment was that recycled materials are not just trash to avoid, they are an industry. An industry! It produces jobs. It generates millions of dollars in raw materials. It is highly automated. It is continually evolving. Oh, yeah, and it keeps our stuff out of landfills.
This state-of-the-art facility is only a year old, built in November 2010, but I’m wondering why we don’t have one of these in every neighborhood. This relatively small facility was very impressive. It processes over 20,000 tons of material each month: glass, metal, plastics, and paper. I don’t really know what 20,000 tons looks like, but I do know what a Boeing 757 looks like, and this facility processes the weight of two hundred sixty-one Boeing 737’s each month.
Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos
Recycling is mandated by the state, but controlled by counties or municipalities in Pennsylvania. It turns out there are lots of MRFs in our region, but they don’t all operate exactly the same. You need to dig a little to know what to put into-and keep out of-your bin. Go to your township’s homepage, and there’s probably a link for Trash & Recycling. It’s worth checking out, because there are plenty of things that go through the line that shouldn’t. Patty said she’s seen these kooky things, among others, on the recycling line:
Bowling balls do not belong in recycling.
When I was there, I saw these non-recycles on the line:
An umbrella???? Seriously?
The entire facility is a series of conveyor belts that look a lot like the rides at Sesame Place. Patty called it an amusement park for your water bottle.
At the end of the ride, everything is baled and sold as a resource for new materials. There are bales of rigid plastic, other plastics, paper, and metals. Less than 10% of what comes in leaves as trash.
Single Stream recycling is highly automated through disk screens, optical sorters, magnets, and air flows in addition to the facility workers, but it only works when dissimilar materials are separated from each other. If you buy something that has a cardboard liner inside a plastic wrap, remove the cardboard from the wrapper, otherwise the whole thing ends up in the landfill.
Speaking of plastic bags, they don’t belong in curbside recycling at all. Shopping bags, dry cleaning wraps, and trash bags can be dropped off at many local grocery stores. They literally gum up the works. Don’t use plastic bags for your recycles, or they end up caught in the gears and screeners, like this.
What can you recycle at this facility? Do you need to wash, sort, or separate into your bins? In part two of this post, I’ll spill the beans.
Um, you compost beans. They don’t recycle well.
There are three questions everyone wants to know about my projects:
It’s the New Year, and everyone wants a fresh start, so I thought you would just love to see this little project that a client and I completed between Christmas and the New Year. His goal was to clear out the space so he could do something with it, maybe create a much needed home office office down the road.
Knowing that paper takes the longest to organize, we contracted to go through the paper and purge unwanted furniture and items.
This is a third floor bedroom/dormer space that was already finished, but being used to store tubs of paper and household cast-offs. This picture shows just half of it.
Here’s the other half.
So how long did it take to get this organized? Remember, there are five steps to getting organized (as always, with a nod to Julie Morgenstern’s great book, Organizing From the Inside Out):
We planned on spending about 8 hours, and we spent about two hours longer than that. And that is only because we went shopping, bought a new desk and file cabinet, and put them together. The client got way more than he bargained for! Here they are, on day 2, the final day of the project.
And the other side of the room. You can see the new file cabinet hiding back in the corner. Yes, the client went through all the paper that you see in the before photos, and what didn’t get shredded or recycled got divvied up into the three small but sturdy drawers. There was a lot of recycling out at the curb the next day.
And to help with containerizing, we added two bookcases,
and we reset the bookcase that was already there.
Now this office really works. And we did all of this, just the two of us, in just a few hours over two days. So that answers the first question.
Will he keep it fabulous and organized now? Probably. He now has places to put household papers, his own personal paper retention guidelines, and a real desire to use this space for work instead of storage. Most of all, he has systems with the file cabinet, the bookcases that store books, and the one bookcase that holds his office and teaching supplies.
And how much did it cost? Well, in round numbers, it was around a thousand bucks for the services and the new furniture. My organizing projects themselves start at $350. This guy will probably deduct all of this as a business expense. Smart move.
He said to me, “We got more done in 4 hours than I have gotten done up here in the last 5 years.”
Aw, shucks, that’s what I love to hear!
I hope this gives you some real inspiration for your winter organizing project.
Near the end of the year, you may be thinking about clearing out your medical savings account, organizing medical paperwork for tax time, and scheduling year-end medical appointments. Do you know the rules?
Read the full article on how to use these seven tips to organize medical records and expenses.
Not sure of the answers? Read the full article on organizing medical records, originally published in About One.
Photo Credit: Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos
There is a lot to get excited about this time of year, but losing your sanity over mail overload shouldn’t make the list.
Quick, do you know the best way to save passwords? How to store passwords? How to remember passwords? Here are some of my favorites for offline, online, or on your computer.
If you want to save passwords offline, I like the On Line Organizer. It is about the size of the Hallmark calendars that many people still carry in their purse, and inside it has tabs A-Z. On each page you can store a company or URL, User name, and Password. The size and the A-Z indexing make it very easy to use at your desk or carry it with you. I use and sell these lovely babies for $10. They come in a two pack, so you can carry one and keep one at your desk, or give one to your honey or best friend. Click here to order and make saving passwords easier.
The Best Way To Save Passwords
Save Passwords from A to Z
Online, there are many programs and apps that allow you to save passwords to an encrypted site. LastPass is the one I’ve been trying out for the past few weeks, but since it has limitations when using iPad, I’m not able to recommend it for iPad users just yet. I want something that works as seamlessly as Evernote. But at my PC, LastPass does a great job of capturing login and passwords from every site I visit, and then auto-populating it when I return. You don’t need to remember passwords, you just need to remember one password. Because the data is encrypted, it truly is about as secure as anything gets on the internet. Oh, and it’s free. You can look into other password manager programs here.
I recently learned that some of the newer browsers are able to store passwords, too. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of letting Microsoft hold all my passwords, even with encryption. I’m pretty sure Bill Gates isn’t going to try to hack my PayPal account, but it gives me the shivers nonetheless.
The last option to store passwords is on your computer. Before you go this route, be sure that your system has the latest version of a strong security/antivirus program and that the program is doing auto-updates often. This would be McAfee, Norton, AVG (which has both free and paid anti-virus software), or similar. If this works for you, then just type up a simple document or spreadsheet to remember passwords, and then encrypt the file. You can find encryption programs like EncryptFiles, which is another free program. My thanks to Jim at HelpDotNow for passing this along. I do not personally use this approach or software, but it would be pretty simple.
If any of these options helps you, I hope you’ll let me know. And remember that you can order your own 2-pack password keeper for $10 right now. Ten bucks is a pretty small price to pay for your sanity. (They also make great teacher’s gifts.)
**Please remember to always consider your business and personal needs and consult with an advisor before making business decisions. HeartWork Organizing accepts no responsibility from any actions you may incur from this or other advice.
It’s so appropriate that on the day I start a tech series, my iPad misbehaves. Actually, it misbehaved so badly that the Apple “genius” replaced the entire unit. So now I’m on my third iPad in just under 12 months, and I’ll spend the next day downloading settings and getting it to work with me again. Grrr. You’ll hear more about on what I love and don’t love about my iPad later.
But it is so lovely when technology really does simplify your life. I’m on the hunt for tools that really save you time or aggravation so I can share them with you this month. I think I’ve found a solution to one of my worst clutter monsters…business cards. My great system for filing business cards worked, but it always seemed so passive, separated from my MS Outlook that I depend on so much, and it started growing out of the box this year. Is there a way to eliminate those cards once and for all? Is there a slick way to email trusted vendor contact information directly to clients when they need great painters, electricians, and other great resources that I work with, information that is stuck in my business card box in my office?
I am infatuated with my new NeatDesk. This isn’t some organizer slang, but an actual brand name. You might know that I am not always the tech specialist in the room, but ever since I saw the NEAT scanning capabilities about two years ago, I realized the power.
NeatDesk
The solution looks like a scanner, but the magic and power is really in the accompanying software. Setup took me about 25 minutes. Not bad considering most of that was trying to figure out how to temporarily disable security software on my desktop. I also took another 20 minutes to watch some very informative videos. You’ve gotta love when a software company provides great instruction to make the power of their tools completely obvious.
Paper Be Gone
“Clutter represents delayed decisions,” (Barbara Hemphill) applies to lots of types of clutter and almost any decision.
A friend asked me to write about the choosing an energy supplier in Pennsylvania, where state residents have now been able to choose their electric supplier since January 2011. This deregulation and the marketing blitz that comes with it causes trouble for those who aren’t so good at or who hate to make decisions.
Not making a decision is, in fact, a decision. Sure, you can stay with your current provider, the lights will stay on, and you’ll still get a bill. No harm there, and if this is your choice, move on with your life without guilt. Of course, the problem with this is that you are leaving money on the table. It’s not a lot of money, in my case between $10 and $15 a month, and you can simply chose to keep paying that.
I started working at one of the big phone companies in the 1990’s not long after one of the biggest deregulation cases in history, upgrading customers to more economical plans to keep them from jumping ship to a competitor. Customers were saving money and had the same service no matter who they went with. I don’t mean they had similar service; in many cases (not all) they had the exact same service that I was selling. The same thing is going on in the electric industry today, as most of the companies marketing to you are reselling power and not producing it, so you’ll receive the same exact service no matter who bills you.
In a few cases, you’ll also have another decision about whether to buy sustainable power from your chosen supplier. The sustainable power is still usually less expensive than your current default provider, but it is a teensy bit more expensive than a reseller’s base option so they can invest in alternative energy, like wind and solar farms.
One friend told me she hadn’t made a choice on energy suppliers because when she had chosen providers before, her first two choices had gone out of business a few months later. There was no harm done, since the service always reverts to the default provider, but she lost a little confidence about her ability to chose this time around. Our country learned a lot when we deregulated the phone company in the 1980’s. As a result, all of the offers you’ll be seeing in the mail will have competitive rates that may or may not be guaranteed for some period, contracts that last about a year, billing that is pretty easy to understand through the default provider (PECO in my case), and maybe a promotional gift involved. The one I received in the mail today offers a $50 VISA card, but I only looked at the letter for research, not because I’m interested in switching.
I switched providers back in January to my energy co-op. (Full disclosure: I will earn a token gift if you sign up and mention my name, but even if you don’t, they are worth checking out. This is not a paid post and I do not sell energy services.) They’ve provided my home heating oil for years and, like a credit union, I like that they are working for the community and not investors. They aren’t digging the coal or drilling the oil to provide my electric; they are providing the business that I interface with, and they offer sustainable solutions. Like Target and Wal-Mart don’t manufacture their products (not even the ones with their brand!), they simply aggregate the choices so I can make one trip to the store.
Compared to the PECO rate of $.1042, I’m paying $.0928 per KWh for now, but I can always make a different decision. PECO’s rates to compare and those of other companies do change several times a year, but for the small amount of money involved, I’m not going to spend a lot of time checking and rechecking my current deal. I’ll probably check into it once a year, like when I renew my oil contract or maybe around tax time. I’m not locked in, but I am saving about $10 each month, and I don’t have to ever open another envelope marked, “Save on energy” if I don’t want to.
So if you haven’t made your choice yet, talk to the very next friend who tells you they are reselling energy solutions, or send back the reply card for the very next company who asks you to switch. If they are offering rates below $.11 or so, you’ll make a bit of money now and you’ll still have choices in the future. And you can finally recycle all of those other mail-in energy offers you’ve been hoarding to review when you had a bit more time, which we both know is never going to make it to the top of the to-do list.
If this post didn’t answer your questions on how to chose an energy supplier, please comment below and let’s talk about it.
April is the month for spring cleaning events. No, not those that take a mop and a sponge. You can make a real dent in your household clutter by responsibly disposing of old papers, electronics, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and household hazardous chemicals.
Paper shredding events are very common in the weeks following April tax filings. Immediately after filing your tax return is a great time to clear out your oldest records that your CPA recommends you destroy. Most people should keep the past seven years of financial records and shred earlier ones, but check with your personal advisor. If you aren’t sure what to keep and what to shred, consider implementing a filing system that tells you what to keep and for how long. For those without a personal home shredder, these outdoor events are very handy. They are often offered by banks, municipalities, and community service organizations. Usually the sponsoring organization hires a professional document destruction company to bring their shredding containers or trucks on site, and usually the shredding is done right in front of you. These are usually offered to individual consumers, although many small business owners can make use of the service if their volume is small. The sponsoring organization may have certain guidelines for the event, such as proof of residency, a limit on the number of bags or boxes that can be dropped off (usually two to four), the types of material accepted (staples and paper clips are ok; hardback books, binders, and computer disks are not), and a minimum fee or suggested donation (usually under $10). You can find one of these events in your area by doing a Google search for “shredding event” and your town, zip code, or region name.
Electronics recycling events are a little harder to come by, although they have increased in the last five years. Also called e-waste, all types of electronic gear can and should be properly recycled. According to www.earth911.com, a reputable source for information and recycling locations, “While e-waste only accounts for two percent of the U.S.’ garbage in landfills, it accounts for 70 percent of overall toxic garbage.” Old TVs, computer monitors and CPUs, mice, keyboards, cell phones, cords, chargers, even fax machines and standard phones can all be recycled. But if you are planning to attend an event, be sure to check in advance what they recycle. There are fees (usually $10) for some items like monitors, and some items are accepted at one event but not another. If you are turning in a computer, be sure to remove the hard drive and crush it before sending it to a recycler in order to protect your data. Simply erasing it isn’t enough since forensic efforts can recover almost anything from old drives. This is especially important if you are sending it to a center where they may chose to refurbish your gear rather than breaking it down for raw materials.
Prescription and over-the-counter drugs have been historically hard to dispose of properly. For years the advice was to mix drugs with coffee grinds or kitty litter before tossing in the trash or to flush it down the toilet. Not only are the fish and other marine animals being affected by our Viagra and Lipitor, but we make it more challenging to have clean water for ourselves. So now the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is doing the right thing. The DEA announced the second nationwide prescription drug take-back for April 30. Last September, Americans turned in over 242,000 pounds-121 tons-of prescription drugs at nearly 4,100 sites operated by more than 3,000 of the DEA’s state and local law enforcement partners. This year’s event will take place Saturday, April 30th, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. local time when DEA and its partners will hold the second National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day at sites nationwide. The service is free and anonymous, no questions asked. You can find collection sites closest to you by visiting www.dea.gov, clicking on the “Got Drugs?” icon, and then entering your zip code.
Finally, if you are about to clean out the garage, don’t mistake those half-empty bottles of paint, lawn feed, and lubricants for trash. Those are hazardous materials (hazmat) that need to be properly disposed of. If you wouldn’t drink it, don’t pour it down the drain. Most counties, townships and other municipalities have designated hazmat collection sites that accept household chemicals several times each year. Usually the events are free, but to ensure they are not collecting industrial waste they are limited to residents, so be prepared to show your ID. Do a search on your municipality’s website for their annual collection calendar. It may mean you have to make a separate trip on a future Saturday, but it means a lot to those of us who drink the water. Thank you.
Note for PA and NJ residents: These events are easy to find. I was able to turn up shredding events for this coming Saturday 4/16 in Malvern, Paoli, and Ambler. NAPO is also hosting one at the Conshohocken IKEA on April 30. There are electronics recycling events at EZPCRecycling.com (610-621-4944) in Ambler, PA this weekend as well. In South Jersey, Goodwill Industries loves to have your old computer gear any day of the week; you can drop it off at any retail or donation site. Almost every major police agency in my area seems to be participating in the DEA event on April 30, so take-back sites are easy to find. Hazmat collection sites might be a bit harder to find, but start with your town, township, or county site searching for “household hazardous waste.” In PA and New Jersey, the counties are the collection sites.
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