Organize

In the coming weeks, organizational expert Justin Klosky of O.C.D. Experience (Organize and Create Discipline) will be giving practical tips for simplifying and streamlining your life.

Wardrobe Switching and Reorganization

If you live with a closet that may not be big enough to house all of your clothing then reorganizing your closet a few times a year might be familiar to you. The simplest way to do this is:

Organize: Remove everything that you won’t be wearing on a weekly/monthly basis. You can keep a handful of lighter sweaters for those chilly nights, but for the most part remove items and store them in Polypropylene Corrugated Textile and Fabric Boxes. I like these containers because you can still see your clothing in case you need to grab something in storage and they let your clothing breathe!

Create: Always, make a master list of what will be going into these containers and store your clothes with their friends. All like items stick together. Use canvas bins for harder to reach areas of your closet. This is always good for belts, scarves and sweaters to prevent a mess from occurring while picking items out. These items can stay put year round and will just need basic maintenance through the year to maintain organization.

Discipline: through the year discipline yourself to keep the closet from getting out of control. Put away your clothing immediately, toss dirty laundry in the hamper when you’re done wearing the item and always keep an eye out for items that you know you are not wearing and donate throughout the year.

O.C.D. Experience Switch Tip: during the seasonal switch go through your wardrobe and let go of items that have been worn out, have stains or holes in them or just don’t fit you anymore, period. If you have a hard time doing this bring in a trusted friend who you don’t mind being honest with you. Also, if your hangers aren’t uniform, now is the best time to switch them to the Slimline Hangers.

With April 15th just come and gone, you might be burrowing away 2011 receipts in a folder (or, like me, jamming their crinkled remains into a Sharpied envelope). Once you’ve filed your receipts—feeling 80% confident you got all of them and 90% sure the IRS won’t bust you—you notice other little pieces of important paper: business cards. Manually entering them into your contacts is a pain, so you make a pile and keep the ones you’re going to act on toward the top; those important ones stay on top until newer, more important cards replace them. Eventually, there’s an unintelligible, begging-to-be-tossed pile of paper.

For many of us, LPOIP (little pieces of important paper) is a big problem (figuratively speaking). We are unable to organize them well and can’t throw them away.

Enter Shoeboxed.com. The online service allows you to make digital records for receipts, business cards and several other varieties of LPOIP’s like bills and bank statements.

Users can mail, scan or use one of their iPhone or Android apps to make a record of the LPOIP. A high accuracy, OCR, human-checked scan is made and recorded on the site. The receipts are high quality enough to be accepted by the IRS and business card data is entered into a CRM file for easy uploading (note cool design or nice paper stock unfortunately).

There’s a free plan which features 5 monthly OCR/human scans; you can also use their web uploader, which requires a little manual input. Paid plans range from $10-50/month depending on the amount of documents scanned.

It’s easy to argue for holding on to some types of paper like old photos and love letters, but receipts and business cards are just pains–ones that accumulate over the years, requiring file cabinets and elaborate organization. Services like Shoeboxed allow you to save space, organize and simplify an otherwise entropic scenario.

image via Planet Receipt

Tag: Organize

Streamline Your Closet with Seasonal Switch Over

Wardrobe Switching and Reorganization

What to Do with Your LPOIP (Little Pieces of Important Paper)