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Why do we have so much paper? People have been talking for years about the “paper-less society”. When will it actually happen? Here are some observations about paper and our habits surrounding paper to help get it under control.

Well, I am not sure that we will ever be able to achieve a “paper-less society.” In my previous role as a Project Manager for Software Implementations, I heard that term quite often. However, I have never experienced it myself or even witnessed this phenomenon. Why? Among the many reasons are: that we, as humans, prefer to read text in a paper format. In addition, once we are able to automate some functions, we gain more options. For example, once we are able to capture data we can then create reports to display the data in more ways than we can imagine. There is also the possibility that the electronic version of the information will not be available when we need it.

Finally, I have found that the printed-page fills another need. Papers act as reminders for tasks we need to complete and ideas that we would like to implement. We trust that if we hold onto the paper that it will act as a trigger and help us accomplish more. Unfortunately, when we are overwhelmed by piles of paper we end up feeling frustrated and over stimulated by all that we need to do. We are often unable to find the information when we need it. Believe it or not, 80% of what we save we never refer to again.

That is why it is important to have a Paper Management System to make the task of processing paper more productive and efficient. To start, here are a few habits that you look at:

An ounce of prevention… Analyze what is sitting in your piles of paper. Are there catalogs and magazines that you don’t ever read? Do you have to print every e-mail and web page?

Weed your garden continually- if you sort and weed through the paper that is coming in on a regular basis you can eliminate the bulk of the piles before they even occur. You decide what kind of time frame is right for you and whether you need to do it daily or if weekly is enough to stay on top of it.

Relocating piles- some paper management experts will tell you to touch each piece of paper only once. While I agree that moving paper from stack to stack is not productive, sometimes it is necessary to touch a piece of paper more than once. The key is to have a consistent process for moving paper.

Lauren Halagarda is a Certified Professional Organizer® and Jacksonville, NC-based member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), it’s local North Carolina Chapter and currently serves as the NAPO Website Chairperson. Her local involvement includes the Jacksonville/Onslow Chamber of Commerce and Jacksonville Chapter (In-formation) of Business Network International (BNI).

To ask her a question or find out more information on organizing your belongings, space or time, e-mail Info@2OrganizeU.com or visit The Organization Connection web site at http://www.2OrganizeU.com

You can sign up for her FREE organizing eZine simply by visiting her website: http://www.2OrganizeU.com

One thing about being organized is that you know exactly where the item you are looking for is, at the time you need it. This is exactly what happens with an organized drawer, but it is usually not the case with a junk drawer. It is just too easy to just dump items in drawers, because they are out of site. Over time, as this dumping continues, the drawer becomes an absolutely disorganized mess — hence the term, “junk drawer”.

Drawers should never be stuffed with gadgets and utensils. They should be purposely organized, storing items that are easy to access. Your drawers need to be labeled with a name besides “junk”. They need a real purpose like: utensil, silverware, knife, office accessory, and so on. Everything in the drawer should be used on a regular basis (at least once every two to four weeks) and should be easy to access.

Is your drawer up to the test? Let’s see:

One of the questions most frequently asked of a professional organizer is “How do I deal with the papers that need to be filed in my home?” An example is an email I received today from a lady asking for me for help with her filing. She stated that she had taken the day off to catch up on her filing at home, which was sitting in piles on her floor. When she emailed me, it was 6:00pm and she still hadn’t touched the filing. She told me she didn’t know where to start.

I suggested that she break the task into manageable bits and use a simple system. The easier the filing system, the less you will resist using it.

1. Buy a file cabinet. Having a filing cabinet that uses hanging folders is the first step toward managing your home files. Most families can file all their necessary papers in a two drawer file cabinet.

2. Choosing filing supplies. Buy a box of hanging file folders and a box of single file folders in your choice of colors. Choosing a color you like will make filing a bit easier.

3. Simple filing system.

• Sort papers in piles according to categories – for example, all health/medical related papers together, all insurance papers together, all warranties and manuals together, etc.
• Determine how many main categories you have and label a hanging folder tab for each.
• Hang your hanging folders in alphabetical order.
• Your sub-categories should be manila file folders inside the appropriate hanging folder. For example, a main category would be Insurance. Subcategories might be labeled Automobile insurance, Homeowners insurance, and Life Insurance.

• File the papers in the new folders and place in the appropriate categories.

4. Use the 15 minute method for filing maintenance. Once you have your filing system in place, maintaining your filing system will only take about 15 minutes once a week.

Beryl Westby is an organizing consultant and the name of her business is No More Chaos You can get a free Idea-Kit, filled with tips and ideas on organizing, a free newsletter and tips, articles and ideas to create order out of chaos by visiting her website at nomorechaos.biz

In January of this year, A-list celebrity Hillary Swank announced: “My New Year’s resolution is to get rid of some stuff because I bring it in and I can’t get rid of it.” If you were like Hillary Swank and you also placed organization on your list of New Year’s resolutions, then you were not alone. “To get organized” was one of the top 10 New Year’s resolutions for 2007, according to about.com and myGoals.com.

While many individuals decided organization was a high-ranking item on their ‘To Do’ list for the beginning of 2007, it may fall to the bottom of the list by the end of the year. Research illustrates that the percentage of people who maintain New Year’s resolutions falls sharply as the weeks go by. After all, it is easy to set goals, but it does take a level of determination and dedication to see those goals to fruition.

If you decided in January that organization was a priority for this year and have since let your objective slip, then it is time to re-energize your resolution decision. You have already taken the first and arguably biggest step of all because you recognize that you have a need for organization. There are a few more steps to the process, and they are equally as easy as the first.

• Start now, start somewhere! If you are still reading this article at this point, then you must have problems getting motivated to organize. Well, your time has finally come! Not sure where to start? Pick the spot that annoys you the most. Want to finally park a car in the garage? Start there. Tired of messy kitchen counters? Start there. If you still need some encouragement, picture how harmonious your life will be when your hard work is done.
• Set general goals and specific sub-goals. Think of it as a puzzle - each smaller, specific sub-goal meshing together until a larger, general goal is completed. Finishing one small area will motivate you and propel you to the next! This eliminates the “I never can get organized!” feeling because you are constantly accomplishing your goals, one step at a time. I believe Confucius said it best - “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”
• Set a time limit. It is more likely that you will prioritize with a looming deadline. Set long-term closing dates for general goals and short-term closing dates for specific sub-goals. If it helps, have a friend or a spouse hold you to your sub-goals. Then, reward yourself with something really enticing after each is achieved.

Now that January is far behind us, I wonder how Hillary Swank is doing with her organizing goals…is she super-dedicated and doing it herself, is she paying someone else to do it, or is she perhaps letting her resolution slide? I will probably never get an answer to my question, but Ms. Swank’s resolution does spur me on a bit. If a busy, Oscar-winning actress can put some time aside to organize, then I can too!

© 2007 Clutterbugs, LLC - offering solutions for the organizationally challenged!

Carmen Coker is the owner of Clutterbugs
and author of Operation Organize. You can receive a FREE “Get
Organized” Tip Kit comprised of more than 50 ideas to increase your
organizing savvy, a FREE weekly Clutterbugs E-zine newsletter, and dozens of
FREE organizing suggestions and tools by simply visiting
http://www.organizeclutterbugs.com.

These are few of my steps to be more organized:

1. When you finish watching TV, put all the remote control near or above the TV. Don’t leave the remotes control in the couch.. trust me!

2. If you have a desk with a computer and lot of paper arround the desk. Trash the paper you don’t need, if you have small notes in differents papers write down everythinig in ONE PAPER, trash the rest again. Keep your CDs organized with some kind of storage CD.

3. In your room, Do your bed EVERY MORING! Looks better that way. If you have dirty cloths, put them in a basket, so when you see the basket almost full you remember to do laundry.

4. Bathroom; Just leave you handwash soup on the counter, everything else needs to go in the cabinets or the storage units. When you need to use something, you take it out and you finish you put back where it was.

5. Garage; Kepp your tools in place, again, If you use something then put it back were i t was. Trash or maybe seel everything you don’t use anymore. Everything that is broke, needs to go.. you are not going to repair it.

6. In your car; Have always a small plastic bags for your trash. Keep extra stuff like cables (for cellphone charger), papers, etc in the glove compartment.

Those are my simple steps to be just a little more organized, if you need more details/help you can download this guide.

How to organize your home, office and file and keep that way! (Click that link!)

THANKS FOR READING!

Home office organizer skills are one of the most important traits you can possess as an entrepreneur. Quite simply, your income and overall success in business lies in your ability to keep your belongings organized and where you can find them

If you can’t, you will find yourself spending hours of needless time searching for something you should have on the tips of your fingers. Here are some tips to help you achieve your business goals with an organized home office.

First of all, make sure that the only items you keep on your desk or in your home office are essential to your everyday operations. You most likely have many paperwork piled up that you no longer use; if that’s the case, discard them immediately.

Your natural reaction when finishing up paperwork is to simply put it back on your desk, even if you will no longer use it. Everyone has that fear-throwing away something that they will genuinely need down the road. Therefore, nothing ever gets put back.

Unfortunately, this mindset does not lend itself to good organization. In order to get your office organized for maximum effectiveness, you need to go through and trash everything that you no longer use. This is not an easy process, but it is by far the most important step in getting your office organized now.

Now, that you’ve done that, the only papers remaining should be the ones you really need. Don’t keep these on your desk. In order to truly get organized, you need to establish a repeatable system that you can put your papers in every time you are done with the ones you really need. Piling them up on your desk in not the answer.

More than likely, you probably have a cabinet or another piece of furniture in your room that can serve as a home office organizer. If not, find a cheap one you can put in your office. It will be worth the small expense-here’s why.

Now that you have this home office organizer, pick a different drawer for each type of papers. For instance, your current bills that you need to pay should go in one drawer, your business information (ex. business name, sales tax ID) should go in another drawer, etc.

Use a label and mark what each drawer contains. When it comes time to locating a file you really need, you won’t burn useless minutes (or hours) searching for paperwork you should have right at your fingertips.

Don’t just stop with papers; clear all your unnecessary items away from your desk at once. Books, magazines, or anything that doesn’t relate to your business need to be discarded immediately. That doesn’t mean that they should necessarily be thrown away, simply removed to another part of the home.

If you follow these simple home office organizer tips, you will quickly find your effectiveness at work increasing dramatically as a result. Most people don’t realize it, but when you add up a few minutes here and there searching for lost items, by the end of the year you likely have spent literally days searching for items, and thus losing out on all that important productivity.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When you establish a proven system to organize your belongings, your productivity and income will skyrocket in a hurry.

For more great organization tips, try visiting
http://www.organizelifetips.com, a
popular site that teaches how to
organize your
closet as well as home organization tips.

Have you ever met someone who was totally disorganized in their life and totally ineffectual, that told you to be more organized? Well, you must beware the Disorganized One who suggests Organization as the solution. When they tell you that you need to be more organized what they are really saying is that they need to be more organized to even function. Indeed, look at a disorganized person sometime and listen to what they say?

So often the disorganized person completely contradicts themselves, sometimes if you listen closely you want to have a digital recorder just to play back to them. Of course the most fun is to screw with their heads in online dialogues on Blogs or Forums, because then you can really see the results. When they make a statement you think okay, fine, whatever? But then a few posts later they will totally contradict themselves or better yet tell you how to do something or how to think or act and then do the exact opposite.

Never allow a disorganized person to be in charge of organizing anything for you. Their brains work differently and what seems like a likely way for them to organize will not work for a perfectly sane person. This is not to say that all disorganized people are insane. Many are not, but the truth is unless you see their homes or desks, you wouldn’t know that anyway. And most people do not go around in hypocrisy telling others to organize when they themselves need help. Think on this.

L. Winslow is an Economic Advisor to the Online Think Tank, a Futurist and retired entreprenuer http://www.worldthinktank.net . Currently he is planning a bicycle ride across the US to raise money for charity and is sponsored by http://www.Calling-Plans.com and all the proceeds will go to various charities who sign up.

Being unorganized has a negative effect on the self-esteem of a lot of people. It is able to make an underlying feeling of issues being out of control, priorities not being centered on and a fault-finding sense of ineffective fulfill. It is subtly and you may not observe it, but disarrangement is something that has really a worrying undertone.

On the other hand, becoming organized commits you a program, a system of rules to work from and usages that appreciate your life instead unscramble it. A peaceful surround is really helpful for the business life of someone, the family life and personal life. Your plans are not messy, you become less cranky and you find your time is applied very well. You will get a good sense of achievement and not a sense of dreadful that is part of your plans.

It may be helpful to determine if you are able to out source or depute a couple of your works. For example, for your business this could signify someone making your billing. For your home life, it may stand for having a person get along to do some house cleaning. This can be really liberating as you do not have to have your thumb in every pie however are now having your task done and also getting other people finished through out sourcing. You have to answer the major question to yourself, what is the most beneficial usage of your time? Are there mechanical tasks or repetitious projects another people are able to do for you?

This information on the secret of getting organized was brought to you by Diane Winter. Try visiting also her website about The Secret of Self Improvement to get more tips and ideas on a Goal Setting Tip To Achieve The Dream Of Your Own and to discover how to Improve Your Self-Confidence.

Procrastination on a project, goal or dream is often the result of feeling overwhelmed when we are considering the final accomplishment. Trying to lose weight? We don’t think about losing 5 pounds this month then 5 pounds next month…we can only think about how impossible losing 10 pounds seems! I don’t even consider just doing one corner of the garage. It’s all or nothing!

Sometimes objectives and goals are so far off they seem out of reach and impossible to accomplish. This immediate feeling of hopelessness often prevents us from ever starting at all. A quarterback is not thinking of the goal line every time he makes a play. He is trying to move the football down the field 3, 5, 10 yards at a time. Breaking up an overwhelming goal or large project gives us more immediate and approachable goals.

Don Greene had been a high school athlete but had been inactive for many years before beginning his marathon training. At 37 he hadn’t even been walking regularly for fitness much less running enough to consider himself a marathoner when he entered into a training program to run a marathon in 16 weeks. He took it slowly (literally) and broke the training into small amounts of reasonable mileage. Each week he focused only on the long run for the week not even looking toward the next week’s mileage amount. Slow and steady training, taken a week at a time, prepared him to run and finish his first marathon!

A task list with several 10 minute to-do’s on it might seem daunting. Broken up into 1 or 2 at a time, the tasks become small blips on the radar. Rather than take the all or nothing tactic remember that we’re shooting for the divide and conquer method. Do a little bit this week, another portion next week. Time will pass and the insurmountable project will be done!

Here’s the thing: Success at anything can only come by taking it one step at a time. A marathon is 26.2 long miles but even the lowest mile marker needs to be passed before we can cross the finish line. Inevitably, all projects and goals have smaller milestones to accomplish before completion, but so often we don’t set those apart as goals in themselves. The energy and push needed for each of these milestones will often carry us to the next goal.

Discover more tips to overcoming procrastination and getting your life better organized at http://www.frozenintheheadlights.com

I can’t move. I can’t think. I can’t even manage to do the usual day-to-day routine. I’m frozen in a state of procrastination. We often find ourselves paralyzed because of a project that looms large in the near future. I know I’ve got to get started. Surely getting the project done can’t be worse than this state I’m in!

Some tasks we face are simply too overwhelming to face alone. Find someone with the same goals as you, someone who’s already been in your shoes or even just someone interested in the same topic will give you an advantage. I don’t like working alone on a long, difficult project. Having someone to commiserate with who understands where I’m coming from makes the work easier. Procrastination is often not an issue when I approach the task as a joint project instead of an individual lonely one.

That loneliness we all seem to suffer through, often makes being on a project feel like a lone survivor on a desert island with no resources in sight. Isolation can be prevented in many ways. Pull out all those business cards you collected at that last seminar or convention. You know those folks have all been where you are and are more than likely happy to offer advice, assistance or a clearer view of the prize at the end of the ride. Can you delegate even just a part of the project you’re working on? Let the kids bring order to the chaos that is the sports gear in the garage; purchase pre-made calorie specific meals to help keep your nutrition on track or is it possible to delegate the whole thing to an accountant, a landscaper or a professional organizer?

Best selling author Joe Vitale started asking for help as a young man. He wrote letters to legends like J.Edgar Hoover and Jack Dempsey. They gave him advice and encouragement. He developed relationships with the small list of customers he started with and has maintained them to this day. He often asks them for input and stories to include in his latest authoring.

For tasks that are overwhelming and endless in scope, finding someone who can offer advice, support or a partnership will make your life easier. A nudge in the right direction, a pat on the back and an ear to bend with your grievances often serve as the very thing you need to complete the task at hand.

Discover more tips to overcoming procrastination and getting your life better organized at http://www.frozenintheheadlights.com