Helene Segura, my organizing colleague (and friend) is launching her new book this week, ROAD MAP to Get Organized: Discover Your Thinking, Learning and Working Styles to Get Your Life Back on Track... and leading up to the launch, she is giving away stress-busting and organizing tips from experts around the country.

On May 9, 2013, her newest book will be offered at an incredibly low price for one day only on Amazon! (Paperback: $15.99  only 9.99!      Kindle: $3.99     only .99!)

While you’re waiting for these May 9^th prices to roll around, Helene invites you to sign-up to receive  free ROAD MAPs from 9 of her expert friends.

Visit Helene’s website page here to get all these goodies! (even if you don’t buy the book)

Top 10 Ways to Declutter your Brain and Lose 10 pounds of Stress

Are you ready to reduce stress, gain time, and lose the clutter? Get two weeks of free organizing consulting!

FREE ebook: The Fit School Diet Plan: 1 Year to a Nutritionally and Physically Fit Life

Fast and healthy lunch packing tips

Closet organizing and home maintenance guides

38 Easy Organizing Tips For Your Home Office

Choose an e-planner from hundreds of printable lists & planning pages to put your world in order

The 5 Simple Steps For Organizing Your Relationship

How to Achieve Powerhouse Success with Purpose, Passion & Productivity (Digital Toolkit includes ebook and audio program)

Visit Helene’s website page here to get all these goodies! (even if you don’t buy the book)

Ruth Davis

My favorite Mac guru, Ruth Davis, of Mac 2 School, is teaching a free Mac training webinar specifically for entrepreneurs:
REVEALED: Time-saving Mac shortcuts that every entrepreneur needs to know to feel less frustrated and more organized so they can spend more time working with clients and making more money!
It’s no cost and it’s tomorrow!! Wednesday, January 30th at 11am PT/2pm ET

Check it out HERE
(This is my affiliate code, so if you decide to register for her classes, I would get a few cents.)

If you like what she has to offer, or already know you need more mac training.  Ruth Davis, specializes in helping entrepreneurs create systems and master the skills needed to work efficiently with their Macs. She’s not a geeky techno-nerd–she’s an entrepreneur who understands all the things we need to do to keep our businesses running and growing.

See the full course HERE

Here’s what Grumpy Cat has to say about organizing:

Here’s is a taste of what she has in store for you:

Read more about developing a road map HERE 

• Establish a command center with a slot of your kids’ papers and the mail.
• Choose a spot for your kids’ backpacks.
• Post your family calendar, a dry erase board and a bulletin board in this area.   The calendar is to keep all the upcoming dates.  The bulletin board and dry erase boards are for reminders, invitations, and appointments.
• Your family chore chart can be added too.
• Host a family meeting and talk about where the backpacks and papers go.  Empty the papers out and put in the mom or dad’s slot, hang backpack back after homework, parent replaces paper each evening, and everyone is ready for the next day.

Do you want to get rid of your paper piles?
Elizabeth Hagen will talk you through the process in Get Rid of Your Paper Piles… Once and for All!
Elizabeth has tons of great articles for dealing with your home and office papers HERE.

This page explains how to set up a command center for your home office.

After you set up your files, here’s how to make it work:

Find out more about the Organize Your Life Webinar Series and sign up HERE

Here is some of what you will find:

For Kids:
A fun, silly book, called 365 Penguins. A family receives a penguin a day as a gift and they need to be stored. Kids learn when enough is enough.

Lego storage bins that look like giant legos. Fun!

For Parents:
Toy Storage activity mat, Lay-n-go,  that turns into a bag – with one pull, all of the legos, cars, dolls, etc are in the bag.
I personally got 3 of these to give to my relatives with little kids. But I want one for myself for taking to the beach.

For Readers:
I should say people who like to read paper books. With the finger-pointer bookmark, you’ll never lose your place on the page.

For the Gadget Guy or Gal:
Digits are little pins you attach to your own gloves so that you can use touch screens. Genius!

Folio is an iphone case that stores money, ibuds, and more.

For men and women – for tools, kitchen, crafting supplies:
The Drawer Decor system makes organizing really good looking! It makes me want to get organized just looking at it.

For the Paranoid:
The Identity Theft Guard Stamp. Roll over all of your personal account numbers and it becomes completely unreadable.
There are a few versions of this. I have a roller version and love it. It saves me from having to shred when I just want to cover a line of text.

For the Geek:
Magic Wand (Harry Potter Style) remote control. Nuff said.

For the Traveler:
Pocket Garment goes under a shirt and hides your valuables outta sight.

These are just a few and I’m adding to the board every day so check back if you need some ideas.

My favorite all-time gift that works for just about any age:
A label maker. Kids love ‘em. Mom’s need ‘em.

For the person who likes to write their own labels by hand:
A set of Sharpie markers and some pretty sticker labels. Check out the Martha Stewart collection at Staples for some good looking labels.

For the person who has just about everything and maybe a little too much of everything:
The gift of organization. Many Professional Organizers offer gift certificates.

Disclaimer: I recommend that a gift certificate for organizing is NOT a surprise gift.
In my experience, many people can be offended. Others accept the gift but aren’t really that interested and never use it.
If you want to give someone some organizing time with a consultant, be open and ask if it is something he or she would want.
 

Plus every week I will have a give-away a door-prize to one of the registrants.
Some of the items to be raffled off:

• The JOYS  filing system from Just Organize Your Stuff (complete and great looking file system)
• A Behance Action Method Dot Grid Journal
• Ziploc Flexible Totes
• A Kassett box from Ikea (green)
• And Smead  six-pack of side close envelopes (colored) for storing all kinds of paper and projects.

Elizabeth Hagen

One of the strategies she teaches is to use a tickler file system for your action items.
Here is a recent article she wrote on the subject explaining the set-up:

More information and registration for the Organize Your Life Webinar Series HERE

This question was sent to me today by my cousin Suzanne (thanks Suzanne!)
She liked the answer and suggested I share with my blog readers.

Question…my mom has a bunch of recipes on 3×5 cards. Any suggestions on how she can reorganize them. She’s not a computer person!

Google+ photos (formerly Picasa) is free and easy to use. It is certainly easy enough for the average home user. The interface with Picasa desktop photo organizer is a little overwhelming at first. But if you can get used to it, it makes for easy syncing. The program automagically uploads your new photos to the web.

Flickr is free for limited use. Sharing is easy via links to other social networks. Privacy is easy to set. It’s doesn’t provide enough free storage for an avid picture taker but you can go pro for only $25 per year.

Linea is free for limited use. Sharing is beautifully designed for ipad and mac desktops. It is still new and adding new capabilities everyday. The big wow factor is the ability to create photo books on your ipad. I’m testing out this product now. It took a little time to figure  out how to edit the photos on the ipad, but once I did it was pretty exciting to be able to do on the fly with photos taken on the ipad.

Snapfish is free and unlimited. The site allows downloading in full resolution. It has tons of products to buy and cheap prints  which you can pick up instead of shipping if you prefer. I’ve been using this one since my kids were babies and have always been happy.

The other kind of photo site stores your high resolution photo, but doesn’t give it back to you as-is.  There is often no option to download it. You have to buy a product or download the low resolution, compressed image you see their screen. These sites are usually connected to retail stores (Walmart, Walgreens, Target) or camera companies. Shutterfly also falls into this category.

Use these sites for photo books and other products, but I do not recommend them for true back-ups.

I’m pretty skeptical about all website companies as they keep getting eaten by bigger fish. So in my opinion, you want to save your best photos on an external hard drive or flash drive as well as a copy on your computer.

1. Scan your receipts if you need to save them, or want to use them as reminders of where you stayed, ate, shopped, etc.

2. Scan your memorabilia such as ticket stubs, brochures, information guides. Just snap a quick photo or run through a scanner and add to your photo collection.

3. Upload your photos from your camera to your computer, and then to an online site for printing. Put photos into albums or folders for each event.

4. Use a program to organize your photos if you are not already. Iphoto (mac) and  Picasa (google) are some of the easiest ones to use.

5. Label your photos with location, date, names of people, event, etc.

6. Tag photos online. Photos online can be tagged for future searches. Tag is like a label for the search engine. Enter who, what, &, where as tags. This way when you want to find all the photos of “Cindy” you can search for “Cindy” and they will all come up in a search.

7. Finishing touches – if you want other people to enjoy the photos:

• Print them and put into a photo album
• Put them onto a photo card and into a digital frame for viewing
• Put them into an online album for sharing (Picasa, Shutterfly, Getlinea.com, etc)

Here are some recent pins worth mentioning:

1. Mark the tops of your USB cords so you put them in right-side-up the first time. The chances are 50-50 you would put them in the right way, but for some reason I average about 70-30 putting in the wrong way on the first try. This may save you that little bit of frustration.

2. Organize your medicines - clever use of drawers usually found in the office supply area or bathroom organizing area.

3. InfoGraphic  of Office Hoarding  - interesting stuff

4. Crafty? Turn a cereal box into a fridge file with scrapbook paper and magnetic backing.

5. Think about it - there are tons of these “thoughts” on Pinterest so you have to be careful not to pin every single one, or pin the same one twice (oopsie).
I like the message here: Collect Moments not Things.