Organizing Hacks & Tools Archives - Page 3 of 3

More Sanity-Saving Skills Every Busy Person Needs

This post is part 2 in the series Sanity-Saving Skills Every Busy Person Needs.

In the last 5 months, have you been mastering these 9 essential skills for busy people? If so, you’re now able to . . .

Sketch out a plan for every day.
Automate components of your life.
Estimate the amount of time you need to accomplish a task.
Delete, diminish, delegate, and delay non-urgent and non-essential items on your list.
Motivate yourself by matching activities to goals.
Optimize your time by double-dipping in your goals.
Batch like tasks.
Work with your energy levels.
Adapt to intrusions.

If you still feel too busy, focus on these five additional skills for seizing control of your time:
[Read more…]

Touch It Once

What’s one of the best ways to waste your time?

Handling things repeatedly.

Here’s an example:

You grab the mail from your mailbox as you’re arriving home from work, and you dump it on your coffee table. Later, you open up the mail, scan it, and drop it back in the pile. Another time, you realize it’s time to pay some bills, so you sift through your pile to pull out the bills you need.

You return to the pile the next day to dig out your friend’s wedding invitation so that you can R.S.V.P. Finally, company is on its way over, so you grab everything off the table to tidy up and dust. Maybe you recycle the junk mail . . . or maybe you hide the papers under your bed until your guests leave.

(You might forget about them at that point.)

With this method of handling your family’s paperwork, here are just some of the problems you’ve inadvertently created for yourself:

You’ve had to refamiliarize yourself with the contents of your mail every time you touch it.
You’ve set yourself up to miss or forget about important communication.
You’ve started a moving pile of clutter that invites more clutter.

So what’s the solution? [Read more…]

5 Amazing Kitchen Tools That Make Healthy Eating Easy

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Read my policy here.

Is your greatest obstacle to healthy eating the effort required to do it?

Washing, chopping, cooking fruits and vegetables . . . eating a healthy portion . . . keeping it all fresh — how do you do it?

These handy kitchen tools are just what you need to make storing, preparing, and eating healthy foods even easier: [Read more…]

Sanity-Saving Skills Every Busy Person Needs

This post is part 1 in the series Sanity-Saving Skills Every Busy Person Needs.

Thumb through your dictionary to the word “busy,” and you’ll find a tragic photo of your weary-looking face.

Work, home, family, bills, committees you were suckered into, that broken doohickey you’ve been meaning to fix for a year – there’s no escaping the constant call of responsibilities on your shoulders. It’s time to fight back the mayhem and carve out some downtime for yourself with an arsenal of easy-to-learn skills that you can start using today. [Read more…]

A Buffet of Organization Tips

Are you sick of the clutter and desperate to get organized? Instead of sifting through bits of advice here and there, drink directly from the fire hose by getting a ton of tips all in one place. Here we go! [Read more…]

Favorite Products for Banishing Kitchen Chaos: Part 2

This post is part 2 in the series Favorite Products for Banishing Kitchen Chaos.

Check out Part 1 of this series! Note: This post contains affiliate links. Read my policy here.

Big Containers

Baking is a breeze with these babies. A bag of flour fits with room enough for a scoop into a single one of these 5.5-quart containers. They’re great for storing your flours, sugar, rice, and more. Smaller containers are handy for confectioner’s sugar, coffee, pastas, dry beans, etc. They’re attractive enough — with a small enough footprint — to leave on the counter. [Read more…]

Favorite Products for Banishing Kitchen Chaos: Part 1

This post is part 1 in the series Favorite Products for Banishing Kitchen Chaos.

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Read my policy here.

Cooking can be a refreshing and relaxing experience . . . but not when you’re pulling out your hair trying to find everything you need. Digging through a vat of pot lids, hauling everything out of the freezer to find tomorrow night’s roast, and trying to get everything away so that your kitchen doesn’t look like a war zone can make the process something to dread.

A disorganized kitchen is stressful and wastes your time every minute that you have to do battle with it. I’ve discovered and come to love the following tools for keeping my food and equipment organized, which in turn saves my time and sanity. [Read more…]

4 Ways to Pack for a Trip at Lightning Speed

Note: This post contains affiliate links. Read my policy here.

How familiar is this scenario? It’s 10:00 at night, you’re leaving early to travel, and you haven’t packed a thing.

Back when I was single, my less-than-ideal approach to packing would involve miming my way through each day of my vacation to figure out what I needed to take and packing each item as I went along. Mentally walking through a long weekend though was incredibly time-consuming, and I’d still head out in the morning muttering, “I hope I remembered everything.” It was often the daily essentials I didn’t think about — comb, razor, toothpaste — that would be most likely to be forgotten.

Now with a husband — who seems to require more accessories than I do! — and a kid, I definitely can’t stick with the old approach. To keep my sanity and save a massive amount of time, I’ve whole-heartedly embraced the following tips for getting our family’s packing done in a snap: [Read more…]