Organizer’s blog digest 3

Lots of great stuff going on in organizing land this week. Everyone's excited for summer weather, vacations and some of the larger organizing projects you can tackle when you've got longer days, warmer nights and extra hands around the house. Here's the best of this week's posts from around the Web:

Unclutterer posts this week about outfitting a kitchen with the essentials. This post is a wonderful companion to the posts I've been doing on "preparing for every day." If you are wondering what essential kitchen tools you might be missing, these are great suggestions, and the comments have valuable information as well.

One of my newest favorite blogs, Organizing-Life, has seven tips for less stress today. Stress is often caused by putting things off that we know we need to do. Actually doing the things is almost never as hard as the mental and emotional strain of thinking about doing it!

The always helpful Lorie at The Clutter-Diet Blog gives us Ten Essential Closet Maintenance Habits. When it comes to closets, maintenance really is the name of the game.

This week several other professional organizers and myself participated in a "Blog Carnival" put on by Your Organizing Business blog. I chose to share my post about emergency preparedness, and you can catch more awesome posts from other organizers and business people there.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com

Organizer’s blog digest 2

It’s time to take a look at some of the other great stuff being written about organizing. I use Google Reader to organize all of my blog subscriptions. Here’s some of the best stuff that was posted this week:

From Pigpen To Paradise highlights the Hipster PDA, by reprinting Wikipedia’s surprisingly witty entry (Wikipedia is usually irony-free in my experience) and posting a list of templates you could use with your own hPDA. I posted a picture of one of these tools last week.

Abbie Park at Organizing-Life posts about Summer Organizing Reminders, including ordering sunscreen and summer clothes online and getting a family pool pass at your community pool. Abbie also had a great series of posts about when to throw out stuff like food, makeup and paper. Check out her guidelines!

At organize.com, Mrs. Organized interviews Julie Morgenstern, the organization expert who talks about her Organizing from the Inside Out and SHED Your Stuff philosophies. There’s a lot to learn here. I especially liked the distinction she made between shedding stuff, which is “what you do when you don’t know where to go, but where you are isn’t it,” and organizing, which is “what you do when you know where you want to go but don’t know how to get there.” Good stuff.

And finally, Lorie Marrero at The Clutter Diet Blog talks about a new idea of hers that she first called Simultasking but now is calling Duotasking—the idea that you set a task in motion that goes on while you are doing other tasks, such as installing software while you are doing something away from the computer, or having laundry going while you do the dishes. This is something that we all do naturally sometimes, but perhaps trying to employ it more mindfully could increase our productivity.

Mrs. Organized screenshot from the organize.com website.

Organizer’s blog digest

If you are like me, and spend a good amount of time online during the day, either for work or play, you know that there are a lot of really amazing blogs and resources on the web for almost any topic you can think of. A lot of us use feed readers to organize our RSS subscriptions so that we don’t have to visit each individual blog we’re interested in all the time to see new posts. If that last sentence read like Greek to you, or if you haven’t figured out how to use a feed reader, take a moment and set one up, now. I recommend Google Reader, since pretty much everyone already has a Gmail or Google account and it is very easy to use. Here’s a nifty How To on the subject to help you get started: How to Use Google Reader

Anyway, I made a folder to hold all of the organizing blogs I’ve come across, and I catch up on these posts every day. There is always something new to be learned in the world of organizing, as well as new ways to get inspired. Here’s my own version of a mini feed reader, the best in organizing blogs over the last week or so:

Unclutter is a great blog, full of good advice and an amazing network of readers whose comments are often inspiring and insightful. This week they mention the Butler Bag, a nifty line of ultra-organized handbags that I am a big fan of. Check out their post and the Butler Bag website.

Monica Ricci is a favorite of mine, and this week on her blog she asks readers to tune in to her new Vicki and Jen podcast edition of The Big O, which airs this week. Read her post, and then my post about the same awesome podcast series!

Lorie Marrero at the Clutter Diet Blog always has the best advice and a really clear way of explaining things. This week she wrote about what we can learn about organization from bees among other interesting topics.