How to organize your voting materials for election time

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  It’s getting close to election time, which means your mailbox will be deluged with election ads and you may get some booklets with candidate statements and proposition arguments.  What do you do with this stuff?

First, I recommend that you toss any ads you get that have significant mudslinging and accusations on them.  We don’t want to encourage that kind of political discourse. 

Next, make a politics/election file and put all campaign ads and election booklets and ballots in it.  Keep it near the front of your filing drawer during election season so it's out of the way but accessible.  Continue to add to it as you get election mail.  A few days before the election, start pulling these materials out and look through them.  Prepare a sample ballot so you'll know who to vote for at the polls.

Finally, when the election is over, you can empty your politics/election file and put it at the back of the drawer until.. the next election season arrives!

Do you need extra help with organizing and de-cluttering? Hire me! Go to www.phoenixhomeorganizing.com for more information about my services! Did this article help you? Be sure to share it with your friends!

Organizing project: product manuals

Everybody has product manuals for their appliances and gizmos. It gets annoying when you have so many that if you ever have to check them you have to sift through the whole stack to find the one you want. And then, when you find the manual for the dishwasher, you have to find the part that is written in English.

This insanity must stop.

The first thing to do is to go through all your product manuals and remove the parts that are not in English. Lots of times each language will have its own section, so you can just tear those out. On some of my manuals, I actually cut down the middle of the booklet with my heavy-duty scissors and then stapled the edges of the English part, then discarded all the rest.

The second thing to do is look to see if there are any manuals that belong to appliances or devices that you don’t own anymore. You can get rid of those.

The next thing to get rid of is manuals for things you use that are pretty self-explanatory. Do you need a manual for your hair-dryer? No. Do you need a manual for your mouse? Well, that depends on how computer-intimidated you are. (If your mouse is a fancy-dancy thing with 50 million buttons, then you will probably need a manual to learn how to use them, or at least to learn how to install the software drivers for it, but if it is just a normal mouse, most computers seem to recognize them right away without any bother, so you really don’t need a manual for that.) Do you need a manual for your computer keyboard? Again, if it is a normal one, probably not, especially if you are already using it. You probably will never need to look at that manual ever again, so why keep it? Do you need a manual for your toaster? Probably not. Do you need a manual for your blender? Mmmmmm, probably not; it’s pretty self-explanatory. Don’t keep those manuals that insult your intelligence by being obvious.

The next thing to do is sort your manuals. Like goes with like. This can sometimes be tricky because there may be different ways of sorting them. Do you put all the manuals for kitchen items together, or do you put all the manuals for food prep appliances together? The point is to make categories that capture a fair number of manuals, but not so many that it will be agonizing to sift through them all.

If you’re curious about how I sorted our product manuals, had manuals for kitchen appliances and food prep appliances together in one folder. I could have put the manual for our home phone in there too because our phone is in the kitchen, but I also had a manual for my cell phone and a manual for our walkie-talkies, and those are all communication devices, so I made a folder “phone/communication” for them.

The following are other categories I made:

• Camera/web cam
• Entertainment—music/video (mp3 players, TVs, DVD players, tablet computers, and any other devices that make music or play video)
• Organization (PDAs and label makers, etc.)
• Air/water stuff (humidifiers, HEPA filters, AC units, water headers)
• Car accessories (after-market radio, GPS, etc.)
• Bedroom (bed stuff, CPAP machine, clock radio, etc.)
• Tools—garage/outside (power tools, yard maintenance tools)
• Computer (hardware)
• Computer (software)

You may have other categories such as:

• Sports equipment
• Craft equipment

If a particular device you have has multiple manuals, then it should probably have its own folder. Our printer has its own folder. Each computer will need its own folder. Network equipment needs its own folder as well (external hard drives, routers, hubs, external backup servers, etc.)

Some people say that the best thing to do with manuals is to scan them all into the computer. Maybe I will do that someday, but I don’t know that I’ve reached that point quite yet. Maybe if the manuals could be downloaded from online I might consider keeping the soft copy rather than the hard copy.

To be honest, we really don’t use our product manuals. The only time we go looking for them is if something isn’t working and we need to find out why and what to do about it. The other time we need them is when we want to learn how to do something with the device that we can’t figure out by ourselves. When the time comes that all that information can be found online, we’ll know that we really don’t need to keep our paper product manuals at all. But until then, organizing the product manuals can make it a lot easier and faster to find them when we need them.

Why are you saving your old bill statements?

There are those of us who save our old monthly statements for all our bills that we have paid. We’re not sure why we do it, but we do it anyway. We have a vague feeling that somehow that information is important and that we may need it someday.

That fuzzy feeling of “I might need it someday” is your ENEMY. The vague feeling of discomfort and uncertainty needs to be confronted and banished, and the best way to do that is with hard facts about what information on the statement is useful and what is not.

I’ll tell you what I have found through experience about what info is useful and what is not.

I used to save all our bills that came in. When I finally got to the point that I and my husband were ready to make and live by a budget, those bills came in handy for determining average amounts that we should put in each of our bill categories each month. Because I had saved our bill statements, I had a history of bill charges that I could use to make a realistic budget. In fact, I went so far as to put all those charges for each month into a spreadsheet which added them all up and found the average for me. Once I put the amounts in the spreadsheet, I could shred my bills.

One other bit of information I put in a spreadsheet was usage information. For water, I put the amount of gallons we used. For electricity I put in the number of kilowatt hours we used. For telephone, I put the number of long-distance minutes we talked. This made it so that I could tell at a glance if there was anything strange in our patterns of usage. When we developed a bad water leak in the sprinkler system of the house that we were renting, I was alerted not just because the charges were higher, but because the water usage amount was three times higher than our usual water usage. (Disclosure: There was comparison information on my bill statement too about usage from a year ago, so I didn’t really get this info from my spreadsheet. But I could have.)

After I collected the dollar amounts and usage info from my bills, I shredded all our old bill statements. YES. I SHREDDED THEM! SHREDDED. Into little. Pieces. Of. Paper. I shredded them. (Insert triumphant cackle of laughter here) It was very satisfying to free all that space up in our files.

In short, the only reason a file full of old bills is important is if you are going to collect dollar amounts and usage amounts out of them for building a budget. But even if you DON’T record that info somewhere, ultimately, there will be no negative consequences to you if you decide to get rid of them anyway. The phone company will not break down your door and haul you off to a little chain-link fenced compound out in the desert if you get rid of your phone statements. Your power company will not charge you extra if it discovers you have discarded your old electrical bill statements. Believe me, it won’t. No consequences!

If you want to know, you only need to keep your most recent bill statement which has your account number information on it and any phone numbers you would call if you have a problem. And heck, if you were to record that information on a spreadsheet with the charges, you wouldn’t even need to keep that statement.

Oh wait, I forgot. Sometimes your city landfill will require you to show a most recent utility bill in order to drop off a load of stuff there, so maybe you should just keep ONE statement, if you take loads to the dump. But if you don't, don't bother.

Now.. if you are thinking about making a spreadsheet and putting years of your bill information on it, but you are intimidated by the size of that project, let me give you a tip. Doing a spreadsheet like this is pretty close to “being too organized” because it adds an extra layer to a work flow that disorganized people find onerous to begin with.

If you have troubles getting through this series of tasks, then don’t bother making a spreadsheet:

· Bring in the mail

· Sort out the bills and discard unneeded mail

· Put bills in a place that they will not be lost.

· Pay bills when they are due.

· File bills.

If you tend to put the bills someplace and then have troubles finding them so you can pay them on time, then making a spreadsheet for your bills is NOT something you should do. In fact, if you have troubles losing your bills, I am telling you now, THROW AWAY ALL YOUR OLD BILL STATEMENTS WHENEVER YOU FIND THEM. They only confuse you. Your concern should be making a consistent home for your unpaid bills so that you will always find them when you need to pay them.

The goal is to be organized enough that you pay your obligations. Anything after that is just extra credit points.

The importance of a good file cabinet

I have a good friend who told me she had trouble dealing with her papers. She said that she considers herself a paper hoarder, hanging onto papers for far too long. She said she also tends to bury them somewhere until they no longer are valid. She saves receipts in a box and doesn’t know what to do with them. Because she doesn’t know what to do with her papers, she boxes them up and stacks those boxes in growing piles.

I went over to visit her and help her with organization and while there, I noticed that she didn’t have a file cabinet. All of a sudden, the problem came into focus. She had a paper problem because there was no good place to put the papers that she needed!

Everyone is going to have important papers they have to save and reference from time to time, and a file cabinet is the most efficient way to do that.

How to choose a file cabinet in the right size

When I was a college student, I kept my important papers in a plastic accordion file. I really didn’t have many important papers to keep. I had some bills, bank statements, check stubs, resumes, rental agreements, my car title, and novelty items (like directions for how to play a diatonic harmonica and an application from the Treeclimbers Association). I have this tendency to give things pretentious names, so I labeled my accordian file, “FilE 4 tHe puRsuiT & cAptUre (not to mention AbDuctTiOn) of TriViA & otHeR niTpiCkY dEtAilS.”

When I got married, my husband had his important papers and we merged them together, though not completely at first. They no longer fit in my accordion file, so we got two mobile file boxes. His papers went into blue hanging files, and mine went into red hanging files. In time, we outgrew those two mobile boxes and this was when we bought our first metal file cabinet with two drawers. We kept the file boxes, and they held all the papers associated with our computers as well as instruction manuals for all the technology we owned.

I tell this story not to bore you but to show you that our file containers grew as our needs grew. The amount of important papers in one’s life grows and changes with our circumstances.

My friend decided to take my advice and she bought herself a filing cabinet. (I have yet to see what it looks like.) Although she was a novice to the experience of creating files and filing, she went at it full tilt and called me to tell me about her progress in this and her other organizing efforts. She was using a label maker to label her files and going through her boxes. I commended her aesthetic approach, but let her know that she should never allow herself to feel unable to create files if her label maker ever breaks down. Large, neatly written labels are just as functional as beautiful ones printed by a $100 labeling machine. The important thing is to have labels, period.

For any of you who have never used a file cabinet and who may be wondering in what circumstances it can be useful, I will share times when have a file has been handy.

Example #1: I file my paid bills. Every year or so, I go through my file, and file a spreadsheet with dollar amounts and usage amounts for the year. This helps me keep an eye on the amounts in our budget. If unexpectedly high bills come in, I can refer to my files and compare it to the past to see what the problem is. Every year I purge my files of the previous year’s bills.

Example #2: I keep my resume and job search materials in a file folder. When I have to go looking for a job, I use that information often. When I get a new job, I add information to my file on where my job is, who my supervisor is and how they can be reached, what my wage is, and what my duties are. During the course of each job, I try to add to my file accounts of special projects I completed and skills I used and acquired, and any quantifiable data about my achievements. (For instance, when I worked as a writing tutor for ASU, I was able to gather data from ASU’s computers that over the course of three years, I had tutored over 400 students on their writing!) When leaving a job, I try to get a letter of recommendation from my supervisor, and I add that letter to my file. Information from my file helps me craft my resumes, cover letters, and even my thank you letters.

Example #3: We make charitable contributions to our church throughout the year and also contribute to a few other charities. Any time we get a receipt for those, they go in a file folder. Around the beginning of the year, all our W-2s and 1099s and interest statements are filed in the same folder. When tax time arrives, I pull out that folder and start adding up how much our charitable deductions will be. The file steadily accumulates all the paperwork that we need to do our taxes. Why use a shoebox for receipts when a file folder will take up so much less space?

How to organize your files

Hanging files usually come with several sheets of cardstock labels that one can tear out as needed. The labels are usually printed on one side with letters of the alphabet or months of year, just in case that happens to be your filing scheme. However, these pre-printed labels are more misleading than useful to the filing novice, who may make the unwarranted assumption that everyone must file their papers in alphabetical order or by the months of the year. * The reality is, you would be best served by ignoring the alphabet and the months and making your own categories that make sense to you. If you go by the alphabet, you’ll get confused about whether to file your car’s title under A (for “auto”) or C (for “car”) or T (for “transportation” or "title") and then it will be even harder to find it when you want it again. Instead, just make a label for “car” and put everything relating to your car in there. For another example, you wouldn’t want to file all your bills by month because if you wanted to look at pattern of charges on a single utility, you would have to open twelve folders instead of just one to get to what you needed, and then you’d have to put them back in twelve folders instead of just one, which means there are twelve chances of mis-filing something in the wrong folder! Having to open only one folder is much more efficient than opening twelve folders.

File subdivisions

Hanging folders should be for only the most general of categories. Then, manila folders can be used within that folder to get better organization.

Car (hanging file)

• Title
  
• Insurance policy (manila folder)
  
• Repair records (manila folder)
  

You can file bills for car payments there too, but I personally think it is easier to put all regular bills in their own manila folder in a larger hanging folder marked “Bills.” If all bills are together, it is easier to file them after paying them because they will all go to the same hanging folder.

Bills (hanging file)

• Electrical (manila folder)
  
• City/water (manila folder)
• Phone (manila folder)
• Credit card (manila folder)
• Car payment (manila folder)
• Car insurance payment (manila folder)
• TV (manila folder)

Yes, the Bills hanging file can become large over the year, but that makes it fun to purge it every twelve months.

Finally, put the hanging folders in an order such that the files that you access most often are easiest to get to. For instance, the folder you put tax deductible receipts in should be more accessible because you’ll likely add to it throughout the year, but the folder that holds your past year tax returns can be in a much less accessible spot (i.e., the back) because you only open it once a year.

For more detailed information about filing, you can read Sally Allen's article "Organize Your Filing Systems: A Four-Step Formula That Really Works."

Happy filing!

* If you wonder why folder manufacturers provide alphabet labels and month labels, my best guess is that they are for businesses who have to keep a folder for each of their clients. Alphabetizing would make sense in that context. Or, if they may want to collect all their receipts and invoices from a single month together, having labels with the months already on them would make sense. But for us, they are useless.

Image: Overstock.com, http://www.overstock.com/Office-Supplies/Office-Designs-Metallic-Charcoal-colored-2-drawer-Steel-File-Cabinet/5853265/product.html