I've never been a fan of leaving house keys hidden in the yard. But I've come to realize that having backup keys around are a good idea. Our next door neighbor has a key to the house, as does our former nanny. I thought this was good enough to prevent me being locked out. Turns out I was wrong.
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I followed Flylady for many years. And felt guilty for not being able to make it work. It was a struggle for me. Was I not doing it right? Flylady would tell me the problem was me. Here are the ways Flylady doesn't work for me:
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A friend of mine, struggling with organization and an insane schedule, has been balking at setting up basic routines to help her out. "They will limit my freedom and creativity" is something I have heard more than once. But I believe that having routines actually frees up and creates pockets of creative time...creative time I never seemed to have before I implemented routines.
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I am big into the idea of menu planning. Besides allowing me to limit my shopping time, it takes off the afternoon pressure of trying to figure out what we will have for dinner.However, there are days when the planned menu just doesn't work. It could be because we have already eaten all the leftovers, schedules are in conflict, or because the cook (read: me) is ill. Fast food used to be the only option, but we discovered that it is easier and more healthy to have a few backup pantry meals on hand.
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Not everyone can maintain a filing system.
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The secret to any organizational system is that like items should be stored together, be it by type or by purpose. But in order to see what needs to be organized, you have to know what you have. Gathering is simply a fancy way of getting information into one place so it can be stored together.
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Just about everything you buy comes with some sort of paperwork. Appliances, software, window accessories, even furniture comes with a stack of paperwork. While most of that information is simply the manufacturer's way of avoiding liability claims, there is occasionally times when you need to put your hands on that information. If you had to find the papers for a purchase, would you be able to do so? Today we will look at how to control owner's manuals.
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Childhood is precious, and it passes quickly. The souvenirs of childhood - the papers that mark the gain of skills - can become a jumbled mass if not handled well. Without the context of child, age and year, many of the milestones can disappear. Today we will talk about a method to manage children's papers. Children are rightfully proud of the work they create, and they want to share it with their families. The amount of paper, though, can be overwhelming, with art projects, spelling tests,worksheets and more. If you have more than one child, it can take over. With a simple system, you can manage the paper so you don't lose the context of who did what when, but…
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My mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her cleaning system wasn't going to work for me as a working mom. But the one system that seemed to work stopped working when we moved into a bigger space. Here's how I stopped doing marathon cleaning sessions and got it under control.
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I've been buying Amazon books since 2009. That's a whole lot of books. And while writing a recent article on backlogs, I realized that I have built up a huge backlog of unread books on my Kindle.How many, exactly? Well, there's no easy way to tell.Because Amazon doesn't have a way to export your purchased book lists from their system.That annoyed me. So I wrote a tool to help.
