How to choose a purse

If you want to be organized, choosing the right purse is a very important thing. After all, you take it everywhere. You have things in there that you use the most.

Here's what I have in my purse:

• money
• checkbook
  
• credit cards
• drivers license
• loyalty cards
• keys
• sunglasses
• cell phone
• Palm pilot
• pad of paper and pencil
• mints
• swiss army knife
• chapstick
• nail clippers
• earplugs
• asperin

Having an organized purse will save you time when you have to find something in it. The faster you can lay your fingers on what you are looking for, the more time you will save yourself.

Think about it. If you access your purse 5 times a day and it takes you 30 seconds to find something (when it should only take you 2 seconds), that can add up to 15 hours a year spent searching through your purse! It’s the pawing around, picking up the wrong thing, and feeling for the right thing that takes so long. The more objects rattling around together in a compartment, the longer it can take.

How do you choose a purse that will help you stay organized? It all comes down to one word—POCKETS. You want a purse with as many pockets as you can find.

I’ve found that if I have more than three items in a single pocket, it starts to be hard for me to dig things out. So for me it becomes like a mathematical equation. If I have 27 things that I carry around with me, then I know that I need…

27 divided by 3 = 9

…..nine pockets.

Now, do I actually go around and count all the pockets in the purses at the store? No. But you can bet that I don’t get the typical purse that only has three compartments. (Those three-pocket monstrosities are WRETCHED for organization.) No, I simply look for the purse that has oodles and oodles of pockets and compartments and zippers.

Yes, those purses can be a little confusing to use the first three days. All those pockets take some getting used to. But once you’re used to them, you know exactly where EVERYTHING is.

If you absolutely can’t resist a three-compartment beast of a purse, then do yourself a favor and get a purse insert that has plenty of pockets.

What are your criteria for choosing a good purse to keep you organized?

Image: http://www.petproducts5.com/2012/01/an-essential-fashion-accessory-purses/

What to do with greeting cards?

Sometimes it is hard to figure out what to do with greeting cards if you tend to get sentimental.

When I got married, everyone who gave me a wedding gift also included a greeting card. Some of them were really pretty. And of course, I was just plain starry-eyed about my wedding and so I wanted to save things that reminded me of that special time.

How did I deal with all those greeting cards? It took time--at least a year. I went through several stages, and I did different things with the cards at each stage.

Stage #1 For the first six months after my wedding, I wanted to keep ALL the greeting cards. So I did. And, to make sure that I continued to appreciate them, I taped them all up on the wall of our study in a big greeting-card-collage. I thought of it as our “wedding shrine.”

Eventually I got to the point when the greeting cards weren’t giving me the same happy emotional jolt of remembering my wedding as they first did. (I realized this wasn’t because anything was wrong with me, it was just that I had emotionally moved on to other things, like our actual marriage.) So, it was time to get a little more selective.

Stage #2. I decided I would take down any cards that didn’t fill at least one of the following criteria:

• They had to be pretty. Like knock-your-socks-off pretty.
• They had to have something meaningfully personal written to us. (“Meaningful” being defined as something that would not also apply to any other newly wedded couple.)

Cards that I took down were sufficiently boring to me by that time that I was able to just put them in the recycling bin without a pang.

Stage #3. After another few months, I was ready to decorate some other way, so I took down those greeting cards, recycled the pretty ones, and put the meaningful ones in a box. This reduced the stack substantially.

Stage #4. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what happened at stage 4, but I have a vague idea that I decided to recycle all the rest of the greeting cards. Knowing me, I told myself that I probably wouldn’t read them over again and I wanted the space to be free for other things. The shrine stage (stage 1) had already validated my sentimentality all that I needed.

So that’s how I dealt with the highly emotionally charged wedding day greeting cards. It’s about giving yourself time to savor them by display, and then getting more selective when you start to take them for granted.

How about letters from friends and family?

About a year ago, I went through a box of letters that I saved from back in high school from old friends. (Ahh, the good old days when people still wrote letters and put them in the mail!) I read through them all and looked for the extra witty or interesting ones to keep. Then I tossed the others.

The blog Small Notebook in the post “Organize greeting cards: the stack method” has some good suggestions for how to deal with greeting cards:

Once you’ve built up a stack, separate them into little piles according to who gave them to you. It’s easier to throw away a few Easter cards from your granny when you can see that you have six of them, and then you can pick your favorite.

Save the cards from the people who are closest to you, not every acquaintance who ever sent you a thank you note.

Image: http://enjoylifeandlove.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-card-saver.html

De-clutter by putting yourself back at the moment of purchase

I stumbled upon a blog called “Clutter Busting with Brooks Palmer”.

One fabulous technique I got from this site was from the post “Hanging on to Something that Hurts.”

In a nutshell, this technique for de-cluttering is simply to pretend that you are at the store trying to decide whether to buy the thing you are looking at. Brooks uses the example of a pair of high heels. If you wouldn’t buy those high heels again now, you can let them go. I love this paragraph from the post:

I remember working with a client in her clothes closet. She was complaining about how certain of her shoes were painful to wear, at the same time she said she liked how good they looked on her. Rather than say she should just get rid of them, I asked her to try them on. She did. She put on a pair. She stood up. She grimaced. I said, "We're in a shoe store. Take a walk around and see if you'd like to buy them." I kept it neutral because I wanted her to be as open as she could be. She walked a few steps and said, "I can't wear these anymore." She did the same with the other shoes that hurt her and she let them go too.

The beauty of this technique is that it helps you realize that you still have the same power now over your stuff to accept it or reject it as you did when you first decided to buy it. It is as if you turn back the clock to the moment of purchase and make the decision again, knowing what you know now after having owned it for _____ years. It helps you realize that you can make different decisions.

To return or not to return?

One of my friends asked me how to deal with the sheer number of receipts that she accumulates and keeps just in case she has to return one of her purchases. I have several thoughts on this.

First, if there are a lot of things that a person plans to return, I would be inclined to stop blaming the store for bad merchandise and start honing decision-making ability to make wise purchases.

Returns happen for one of two reasons, (besides wanting one’s money back):

--The merchandise is defective

--The purchaser changed their mind and doesn’t want the merchandise because they were uninformed as to how it would fit their needs or they were misled as to how it would fit their needs.

Having a large amount of merchandise that one wants to return is a drag because it uses time and energy that could have been used on other more productive pursuits. It gets in the way of actually living life.

In an ideal world, we would not need to keep any receipts because all our purchases would be so thoughtfully made that bad purchases would be avoided. However, occasionally products are defective and sometimes we change our mind, so this isn’t quite practical. So instead, the goal is for us to hone our decision-making and information-gathering abilities so that we will learn before making a purchase that the new gizmo really is going to meet our needs. Good businesses try to make it easier for us to make good decisions by providing products for us to test ahead of time so we can see how it works. It is to our advantage to use testers so that we avoid wasting our own time and energy returning what we could have avoided buying in the first place. It is to our advantage to do some prep work before we purchase.

Purchasing prep work includes:

· Measuring dimensions to make sure there is room for our purchase to fit. (For example, before I bought a new fridge for our home, you can be sure I measured the space in the kitchen so that I would not buy something too big to fit. I was able to find a fridge that fit perfectly.)

· Scanning the internet for possibilities. (It’s no fun to buy something and then find something better later that you could have found with just a little research.)

· Calling stores ahead of time to make sure they have items in stock. (It’s no fun to go on the hunt for something specific and then have the energy sucked from your body gradually when you have to visit four more stores to find what you want because no one has it.)

· Experiment with in-store testers. Try the clothes on. Try using the computer. Use software trial periods. Sit on the furniture. If possible, play with the toys. Listen to the music.

Second, it is helpful to set an arbitrary dollar cost below which we will not bother to return a product. (If your time is worth $30/hour, it is not worth it to take 30 minutes to drive to a store, stand in the customer service line, and drive home just to return a $5 purchase. It’s like spending $15 to get back $5.)

What kind of receipts are worth keeping?

• Furniture purchases
• Software purchases
• Technology purchases
• Expensive repairs (car, house, computer)
• Gift receipts (usually without dollar amounts)
• Business expense receipts (These should have their own file folder)

Where should these important receipts be kept?  How about in a file folder called "Important Receipts!"   (Yes, brilliant, I know!)  You can also make it easy to remember what each receipt is for by writing what it is for clearly at the top, rather than having to decode store-receipt-ese.  (Store-receipt-ese is their abbreviated codes of what things are, which requires you to stare at it for a minute before you realize what they mean.)

How to conserve your emotional-mental energy when de-cluttering

De-cluttering takes up a lot of emotional-mental energy. Why? Because of all the decisions that have to be made about what to keep and what to let go of. One way I’ve found that can help conserve emotional-mental energy is to try to deal with the same category of things all at one time. For instance, if you have to de-clutter your closet, focus all your energy on your clothes and don’t get distracted by anything else that happens to be there.

The goal when focusing on one category at a time is to come up with some quick and easy criteria by which to decide whether to keep or get rid of something. Making up good rules make it so that you don’t have to consult your feelings and memories and agonize for 5 minutes over every little thing.

If you can’t keep focused on one category, it makes it hard to come up with hard-and-fast rules by which to make decisions to keep or give away. Going from a pair of jeans, to a basket, to a piece of paper, to a Christmas ornament, to a kitchen utinsel, to a piece of jewelry would be hard for ANYONE to make decisions about. Every decision becomes harder and slower because you have to make up new rules over and over and over again!

When I was helping my mom de-clutter, we focused on the boxes and boxes of clothes that she had stored away. Previous to this, my mom’s rule had been “keep everything,” so she had to come up with new rules by which she could sort through all those clothes.

The first rule my mom made for herself was: I will keep my favorite clothes. So, she was able to discard a lot of clothes that were not her favorites.

She made piles of different sizes and different seasons of her favorite clothes so that she would be better able to find clothes that fit.

Other rules that my mom came up with were:

• I will keep favorites that are also in fashion. (This meant that she let go a lot of clothes that were not timeless classics.)
• I will keep favorites that are in good repair. (This meant that she let go of clothes that had holes, were frayed, or mildewy.)
• I will keep favorites that look good on me. (This meant that if she didn’t like how she looked when wearing them, out they went.)

When you go to the trouble to make up good rules that help you de-clutter a certain category of stuff, it is to your advantage to make all those similar decisions at the same time. It really IS easier that way. When my mom finished with the clothes in the basement, she went through the clothes in two other closets as well. She was able to make a lot of progress very quickly and easily because most of the hard work happened at the beginning when making her rules.

Image: http://www.tw3ptheclan.com/tw3p-clan-rules/

Prevent clutter by FINISHING

Never underestimate the power of FINISHING as a means to prevent clutter.

FINISH the task of bringing in the mail by:

• Sorting out the junk mail and putting it immediately in the trash (or recycling).
• Paying bills or putting them in a spot just for bills.
• Filing correspondence

FINISH the meal by:

· Clearing the table

· Doing the dishes

· Putting leftovers in the refrigerator

· Cleaning the kitchen counters

· Cleaning the kitchen sink

· Sweeping/vacuming the floor

FINISH the laundry by:

• Folding it
• Handing it up
• Putting the laundry hamper in its place
• Putting the laundry baskets in the laundry room
• Doing any mending

FINISH the project you are working on when you have reached a stopping point by:

• Putting away the materials/tools
• Throwing away the waste material generated
• Putting away the project

FINISH your shopping trip by:

• Recording your purchase amount in your checkbook register or budgeting software
• Cutting off tags
• Filing the receipt (if item is returnable)
• Putting the purchased goods away where they belong
• Throwing away (or recycling) shopping bags
• Putting your purse/wallet where it usually goes
• If purchases are replacing something, put the old item immediately in a give-away box in the garage
  

FINISH your pleasure trip or vacation by:

• Unloading the car
• Unpacking your suitcase and putting clothes in laundry
• Putting away travel gear and suitcases
• Cleaning the car

FINISH a day of school by:

• Hanging up coat
• Doing homework
• Putting books and papers back in backpack
• Putting backpack away

Why toss out expired items?

I’m one of those weird people who likes to read organizing books and one thing that I noticed a number of organizing books consistently say across the board is to throw out stuff that is past its expiration date. This always puzzled me. I thought it was wasteful. The organizing books never give any reasons for this seemingly arbitrary rule.

I am happy to report that I now can give the reason behind that bit of advice.

“Throw away everything past its expiration date” sounds arbitrary because it IS arbitrary. But it serves several useful purposes. Organizing experts have dealt with many people who have farrrrrrr too many of everything that they have been holding on to for farrrrrrr too long, and it would simply take too much time and emotional-mental energy for their clients to painstakingly determine what stuff was still good and what stuff isn’t. In these situations, you draw an arbitrary line in the sand and just say, “Everything that doesn’t fit these requirements must go, no matter what.” This allows you to make lots of progress de-cluttering with little emotional-mental work needed to make decisions.

When I helped my mom de-clutter her medicine cabinet, we adopted this rule of tossing everything expired. De-cluttering then became a matter of checking the expiration date on the bottle. Too old, out you go. Easy-peasy, mac-‘n-cheesey.

This expiration date rule can also be used for make-up too.

What kind of steward am I?

If you are just learning about the principle of stewardship in order to try to improve, it is helpful to ask yourself the following questions that may help you pinpoint where you need to focus your efforts.

What kind of steward am I?

1. Am I in a hurry to get what I want?
2. Am I extravagant?
3. Do I waste?
4. Do I try to ignore what’s wrong?
5. Do I put off fixing things?
6. Am I ignorant of how to take care of anything I own?
7. Do I have lots of things in storage? Can I remember what exactly I am storing?
8. Do I have a hard time letting go?

If you are in a hurry to get what you want, then you will know that you need to focus your efforts on improving impulse control and purchasing according to plan.

If you are extravagant, then you will know that you need to focus on identifying your spending priorities. If you know what is most important to you, then you will gain reasons to save in areas that are less important to you. Just remember, if EVERYTHING is important, then NOTHING is.

If you waste, then you will know that you need to focus on finding ways to plan your usage better so that things get used up. There are two ways to do this. You can find ways for yourself to use things, or you can give to others so they can use it up.

If you know that you try to ignore what's wrong, it helps to look at things as if you had a guest coming to visit in order to try to see things as an outsider would. Then, in order to not get overwhelmed, it helps to make a list of issues that need attention and put them in order of priority.

If you put off fixing things, realize that when too many expensive issues pile up, it makes it very expensive to take care of them all at once. This is why it is preferable to deal with breakage when it happens, rather than putting off fixing it. If you have already put off fixing things, it may be easiest to let things go rather than fix them. Or, you can make a list of problems, prioritize them, and start working through them starting from the highest priority.

If you are ignorant of how to take care of your things, seek out training and information.

If you have lots of things in storage and you don't know what you have, you'll know that you need to work on labeling and listing, if only for insurance reasons.