Tips and tools: Magazine management

I love to read and stay current in a few fields like music, movies and design. I also like to make collages out of colorful images and text. Magazines are a fun way to accomplish both tasks. However, between subscribing to them and also getting free alumni magazines, AAA and Costco publications, interesting catalogs and the Sunday paper's magazines, it can be easy to get overrun with so many magazines that you can't keep up with them anymore and they just pile up, a glossy pile of reproach.

Tip 1: Don't get them
The best way to solve this is to let your subscriptions to the magazines you don't read run out and request to be taken off mailing lists. I have only subscribed to one magazine every year since I turned 16, a biweekly magazine that I actually do read cover to cover (eventually). While buying magazines at the newsstands is hardly cost effective if you'll be reading a certain title every month, you can get so much information and so many of the articles online, there's really no reason to spend money and valuable coffee table space on more than your most beloved publications.

Tip 2: Contain them
If you do have more than one subscription, which is not uncommon (one member of my household has three separate car magazine subscriptions), you might be at a loss for what to do with the magazines before you have a chance to sit down and page through them. I recommend a sturdy, shallow basket or tray placed near where you go through your mail. The magazines collect there, and when that tray fills up, you're signaled that you need to read, recycle, or archive the contents.


Tip 3: Archive them
The same person who has three car magazines delivered to our home every month has every one of those magazines from the past fifteen years archived. He uses plain white magazine holders from Ikea, with cute labels pasted to the front made from the subscription cards that are stuck into the pages of the magazines to identify which title is stored in each holder.

If you must keep your magazines, I suggest you do something similar, if you have the space on shelves. Shallow plastic storage boxes area also a good option. The smaller the better, as a large plastic box filled to the brim with magazines becomes very heavy.

Tip 4: Reuse and recycle
Personally, I like to read the magazines, put them in a single magazine holder and when that fills up, make a project of flipping through them. I save a few notable issues every year, and the rest get turned into scraps for my collage projects and recycled. You can also pass on interesting magazines to friends, sometimes donate them to libraries or get rid of them on Freecycle. Magazines make great art project supplies, so ask at your local elementary school as well.

Don't feel guilt or anxiety at your unread magazine pile. Simply contain them and peruse them when it makes sense. No one will berate you for not reading the latest issue of Westways magazine, so just recycle it and be done (you can read back issues online anyway!).

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

Simplicity is revolutionary

One of the highest profile and most helpful organizing-related blogs around is Unclutterer. The editor is Erin Rooney Doland, and lately Unclutterer has been taking its web presence to the next level with the launch of Unclutterer Forums, an awesome resource for starting a discussion about a specific organizing problem, as well as the publication of an old-fashioned book: Unclutter Your Life In One Week. I haven’t yet read the book, but I have heard only good things about it. Yesterday, Unclutterer announced the opening of an Unclutterer store, to sell PDF worksheets to go with UYLIOW as well as t-shirts. Though my initial thought was why should a blog that encourages simplicity and less clutter offer stuff, particularly t-shirts, which the world has plenty of already, I realized that people like to support causes with money, and often by showing solidarity with graphic tees. And if you don’t want one, you don’t have to buy one.

The shirts come in two styles, each with a different phrase. One says "less is more," which is pretty self explanatory and meshes well with the Unclutterer philosophy. The other says "simplicity is revolutionary," which is a bolder statement, but after reflecting a little on what that means, I have to agree.

 In the contemporary United States, even in the wake of the great recession and the so-called “new frugality,” simplicity is still something that is foreign to many people. Our lives are overflowing with commitments, obligations, drains on our time, energy and resources. Many people feel that they are living their lives to the fullest by packing them with things to do, places to go and people to see. To take a stance on the side of simplicity, which can mean choosing to do without, with less or with fewer, is revolutionary. Our country is founded in part on the pursuit of happiness, on the American dream of rising above whatever station we were born to, which has come to mean an aspiration to owning things, to living a life complicated with stuff to a point where that which we thought would make us happy is instead weighing us down and causing us problems.

Simplicity, to me, just means that instead of an endless search for more, we take a step back, decide that not doing something or having something can be more valuable that doing it or having it. There must be a balance. Choosing simplicity implies we have enough, we aren’t needy, we have shelter and food and love, but we recognize that having enough means activity avoiding having more. Simplicity rejects dealing with excess which, perhaps fun to indulge every great once in a while, is a tiring way to live one’s entire life.

Simplicity is revolutionary because people don’t understand it at first. They think you’re missing out or unambitious or perhaps stingy. There’s nothing wrong with being careful how you spend your time. It’s the one thing you can’t get back. In this season where excess is all around, and people decry it every year even as every year they participate in it, think about being revolutionary. Think about simplicity and how it can be applied to your life. But don’t think about it too much. You have better things to do, like spending time with your significant other, reading a book for pleasure or just taking a walk around your neighborhood.

Image from unclutterer.com

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

Tips and Tools: Electronic information

Receiving, storing and finding information that is printed on paper is a constant struggle for all of us. Most of the problem stems from our worry that if we get rid of something, we won't be able to get it back again. Yet much of the paper we are bombarded with we are likely never going to look at or need, but we have a hard time giving ourselves permission to get rid of it for good.

It is time that many of us realize how much information there can be had online. Not only can you stop paper statements and get your billing information online, but you can access so much more. There is no reason to a keep a paper copy of something that you *think* you *might* need at some point down the line (and probably won't) if you can get it electronically on demand when that mythical day should come. I'm talking about manuals for appliances, restaurant menus, contact information for businessess, maps, directions and those fat prospectuses and quarterly reviews that investment companies send you and you never look at but feel guilty throwing away. Yeah, you can get all of that stuff online. Why use your precious resources to store these items when you can use the magic of the Internet to let someone else store it electronically? And since it's "in the cloud" you don't even have to worry about backing up the data. Plus, information changes so quickly that most of the printed stuff is out of date very quickly. When you look at a piece of paper and ask yourself if you could easily get the information on it should you need in the future and the answer is yes, send it to the recycle bin.

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

Preparing for every day: Gift wrap station

Even though we don't wrap gifts literally every day, the same way we use our purses, freezers, desks and glove compartments nearly every day, many of us still have occasion to wrap something in pretty paper and put a ribbon on it a few times a year, if not more often. To make those times more pleasant, it pays to keep a gift wrapping kit assembled and stocked at all times, so you aren't scrambling around to find tape and scissors half an hour before you are supposed to be at a baby shower or your child's friend's birthday party armed with a gift.

I hardly ever actually buy ribbon or wrapping paper, instead I save the good stuff that I receive from birthdays and holidays. I find the recycled stuff looks just as good as new, and I've saved myself the expense. Ribbons, in particular, if well-made, can be reused over and over again. My recommendation is to keep one box worth of wrapping paper and one box of ribbons, bows and tags. To make large wrapping projects easier, look into getting a box long enough to hold tubes of wrapping paper. Vertical tube holders don't work well in my experience. I recommend long, flat, clear plastic boxes to hold the following items.

The 9 things that should be in every gift wrapping kit:

• Transparent tape, the kind that comes in an open, weighted dispenser rather than a disposable dispenser as it is easier to use with one hand.
• Good quality, large scissors.
• Tissue paper in various colors.
• Wrapping paper in various colors.
• Ribbon in various colors.
• Gift tags or card stock for creating tags.
• Single hole punch for threading ribbons through tags.
• Sharpies, of course! I recommend at least black, but silver Sharpies add a festive touch at holiday time.
• Post-its. I like to use Post-its to remind me what is inside a wrapped package and who the recipient is if I am wrapping several items at once and might mix them up, or if they are awaiting tags or cards.

It's also a good idea to keep your gift wrapping boxes near your greeting card stash, as you often need one with the other. I find wrapping a bunch of gifts at once is made more enjoyable by putting on a good movie to play while I do it. Also, the most important thing to remember is to label everything! You don't want to end up at the end of the day with a bunch of beautifully wrapped packages and no idea what's inside them or who they are for!

Creative Commons tape dispenser photo posted to Flickr by House of Sims

Creative Commons gifts photo posted to Flickr by mrskyce

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

Tips and Tools: Feed readers

I've written about Google Reader on this blog a few times before. I use it to keep track of all the other amazing organizing-related blogs out there, and there are a lot! I'd wager than most people use feed readers to keep up with blogs that they like to read, not just blogs that they have to read for work or to keep current in their field, but here's a quick tip to make reading through your feeds less of a chore. I like to salt mine with blogs that I know post quick and funny entries. In the morning when I fire up Google Reader and I see 66 new posts in a single folder, I know that at least one of them is going to make me laugh. Flipping through and scanning the other posts until I get to the fun ones keeps me informed and the funny posts are little rewards for staying on task.

My favorite fun blogs: Cake Wrecks, The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks, The Happiness Project Blog (also very useful and interesting), and There, I Fixed It. What are yours?

Also check out my posts about how to use Google Reader and a few other Reader tips.

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