Anthony Bourdain on lists

This weekend I was glancing through a friend's copy of the Les Halles Cookbook by Anthony Bourdain. Anthony Bourdain has a really direct and entertaining writing style. I really enjoyed his memoir Kitchen Confidential. I also ate at Les Halles in New York City once. It was a delicious, memorable meal. In the cookbook, he was talking about how to start thinking like a chef, and I wanted to share his take on lists with you.

I'm a list fanatic. Write it down on a list, I believe, and there is far less chance that you will ever find yourself beginning a sentence with the pathetic excuse, "Sorry...I forgot to..."

The very process of writing a list clarifies and focuses the mind.

I love the phrasing...lists really do clarify and focus the mind on what's important. The power of the list cannot be overestimated, I feel.

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

How to organize camping meals

My friend Roslyn is a food innovator. She has a website where you can find nutritionally perfect recipes and she taught me a great way to keep meal prep organized when you are camping or staying someplace like a cabin or vacation rental where you have to bring every single ingredient with you. 

Choose your meals and do as much prep work ahead of time at home. If making corn bread for instance, measure out  the dry ingredients and put them all in a Ziploc bag. Chop up the veggies for the stir fry in advance. Then, place everything you'll need for that meal in a sturdy bag (like a paper grocery bag or the kind of reusable grocery bag that has a bottom). Put any specialty equipment in the bag, too. Label the bag according to the meal that's inside. Depending on how far you have to travel, put the highly perishable items on ice in a cooler, and label each one with a Sharpie according to what meal it will be used in. 

For example, the bag for a dinner of cornbread and chili might include the cornbread dry ingredients, a container of vegetable oil, cans of beans, a pre-measured mix of spices, chopped vegetables and a can opener. The right amount of eggs, butter and ground meat would be labeled in your cold storage. You could even slip the recipe inside the bag, or the pots and pans you'll use.

The beauty of this system is threefold:

1. You bring exactly the right amount of food. If you plan it out, you shouldn't have leftover cans or bags to schlepp home, and as long as you don't cannibalize from the bags, you won't run out of food, either.
2. It makes it super easy for people to help you in the kitchen.
3. You won't come in from a big hike and wonder what to make out of the hodgepodge of items you brought.

Give it a try and see how well it works for you!

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

A year ago: Blog milestones and Bento

Last year at this time I was trying to hold my life together as my wedding day approached inexorably. I didn't post much, but I did manage to celebrate my 100th post with a fun list. I sort of ignored my 200th post...it didn't seem as much of a milestone, and now this is my 220th! I also reviewed the FileMaker program Bento. I still use Bento daily to track all my business expenses, income, clients and mileage. It's a simple and reliable program.

Reminder: if you want to receive the latest news from Lelah, before it gets posted to this blog, sign up for Lelah's newsletter. I'll only send 1-2 emails a month.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Stephen Cummings.
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 

Reviewed: Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed is a web-based company whose website encourages you to "take the work out of paperwork" by letting Shoeboxed take care of all your scanning needs. You pay a monthly fee and you send documents, receipts and business cards to Shoeboxed in North Carolina, and they scan them and import both the scanned image of the piece of paper and extract the information on that paper into a database of contacts, receipts or documents for you.

I'd heard of Shoeboxed for years, but had never tried their service until I took a paperless office webinar with San Francisco-based professional organizer Joshua Zerkel, in association with Shoeboxed. He explained how the service works and participants were invited to do a free trial.



Since I'm interested in all things paperless, I wanted to see how the service worked first hand. I signed up for the free trial and sent in about 50 business cards. I have a desktop scanner, and I've found that with business cards, the scanning part takes seconds, but then going in and adjusting the fields in the software to accurately show the data on the business cards can be time consuming. I thought if I could avoid that, it would be great. It took about 4 days for them to receive the envelope in the mail, and slightly over 2 weeks for them to process the batch of business cards. I thought I had read somewhere that it would 5 days to process the items once they received them, but I wasn't really in a hurry. Once they notified me that my business cards had been processed, I visited the website to check out the results.

A view of one of my contacts.

I was really impressed. The information they extracted was complete and easily exportable. The scanned images of the cards were clear. That was important to me as I often write notes on a card to remind me when and where I met the person who gave it to me. Best of all, I realized I had all this valuable information digitally and I didn't really have to do anything. Sure, I had to collect the cards and take them to the post office, probably 15 minutes of prep time. But if I had attempted to use my desktop scanner, it would have been easily an hour of following up to make sure the data on the cards was all imported correctly.

In short, so far I'm a fan of Shoeboxed. I even signed up to be an affiliate for them, so if you use one of my Shoeboxed links to sign up for the service, I will get a small commission.

A few more notes: they have different plans you can join at. I joined with the "Lite" (ie: cheapest) plan, because the volume of things I have to scan is not that heavy, and I also have a desktop scanner that works well for me when scanning documents. I'll probably use Shoeboxed mostly for business cards (I collect a lot from various networking events). However, I'd recommend if you are interested you join at the "Classic"or "Business" level, and that you sign up for a year as you can save money that way. They provide you with prepaid envelopes and they will return your hard copies to you after they have scanned them -- if you want. I recommend that once you get your papers scanned, just let them shred the hard copies (your only option with the Lite plan).

If you have more questions about Shoeboxed, let me know!

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

Los Angeles Organizing Awards Gallery

Some absolutely wonderful photos from January's 2011 Gala Industry Exchange and Los Angeles Organizing Awards are now available. The galleries are linked to from NAPO-LA's website, but here are a few that are worth sharing.

The Awards event volunteers, including me!

The event committee chairs Robyn Reynolds and Donna Rosman.

The awards.

Mark and Trish of Clean House with Donna Rosman.

The beautiful Starview Room at the Sheraton Universal.

Lisa Ann Walter hosted the evening.

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

A year ago: Common clutter, calendaring and Martha

Last March I published one of my favorite posts. It's about what to do with three common kinds of clutter. They are electronic clutter (still one of the most common issues I see in my clients' offices), plastic shopping bags (please get in the habit of bringing your own reusable bags!), and used ink cartridges. Staples now offers just $2 in credit per cartridge, but you can recycle up to 10 a month, which adds up.

Last year's "mark your calendar" post is a bit out of date now, but still be aware that Daylight Saving Time starts this Sunday, March 13, and we will be moving our clocks forward an hour.

Martha Stewart is amazing, but sometimes the things she recommends can be overkill. In this post, I analyzed her video about closet organization. What do you think?

Creative Commons ink cartridge photo posted to Flickr by kennymatic
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 

Checking in: Lelah's plants

So, I have good news and I have bad news. In January, I wrote about my goal of keeping some new plants alive this year. Well, the succulents were as hearty as advertised and seem to be thriving. Yay!

But, my rosemary bush burned to a crisp. I didn't water it enough and it was getting too much sun. It seemed like all of a sudden it just turned crispy and I tried to move it to a more shaded area and give it more water, but it was no use. Sad.

I'm not gifted with plant insight. However, I do feel that I have learned from this experience and would do a better job of tending a rosemary plant in the future, should I get up enough nerve to try it again.

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: Camping reservations

Camping is a wonderful way to take a break from the routine, and to take a break from the always plugged-in lifestyle we have come to embrace. I grew up camping in California, and the state is blessed with extraordinarily beautiful and varied regions to explore. My husband and I have long wanted to make camping more of a priority, and until yesterday we had everything you'd need to go car camping except a tent. After a trip to REI, we now have a tent and are raring to go.

So, we had our gear. We had a couple of free weekends blocked out on the calendar. All we needed was a campsite. Since we both like to have things arranged ahead of time, we decided to use the online registration systems provided by both the state and federal governments so we could be assured of a spot in the campgrounds we favored. From experience, first come-first served sites fill up extremely quickly on the weekends. Apparently, the reserved sites also fill up extremely quickly on the weekends. We were hard-pressed to find anything free for the weekends we wanted that wasn't in a place likely to have snow covering it. Eventually, we found something suitable, but we learned a lot in the process.

1. If you have a favorite campground and want to camp on the weekends, mark your calendar about six months in advance of your dates to check the online reservation system. That's when most reservations open up for a given campground. It really pays to plan ahead.
2. If possible, plan your trip during the week, when campgrounds are much less busy and you'll have more options and more privacy. However, in summer, even this won't always guarantee you'll be able to get in at the campground of your choice.
3. If you do want to attempt to get in at a first-come-first-served campground, have directions to some nearby alternatives in case you aren't successful at the first place. 
4. Be sure to read the online descriptions carefully for a given campground before you make reservations, and be totally sure of your dates. You don't want to arrive and find out that pets aren't allowed, or that you booked a tent spot but you have an RV.

I'm counting the days until our first trip, and am marking my calendar to remind me to block out next year's dates early!

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

Video: Lelah at the 2011 LA Organizing Awards

I attended the 2011 Los Angeles Organizing Awards at the end of January, and recorded this little video about my business while I was there. What do you think?



Thanks to Lisa Suchesk for her help recording it!

 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

A year ago: Reviews and resolutions

February just zipped by, didn't it? Here's a selection of past posts from around this time last year.

A year ago today I reviewed Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Rooney Doland of the blog Unclutterer. This book is out in paperback now, and a great, simple approach to restructuring your life in a more streamlined way.

I tend to use and reuse plastic bags. After my trip to the Burbank Recycle Center, I'm even more conscious about bringing stuff into my house that will ultimately end up in the garbage, no matter how many times I reuse it, so I've been buying less and less over time.

Last year, still in my old apartment, I undertook a major rearranging of furniture. It was sort of the last attempt to make a space that I had been slowly outgrowing work. Now in a new apartment, it's fun to look back at the pictures from this time, but I'm glad I made an even bigger change by moving.

And, belatedly, my Valentine's Day post from last year in which I talked about the things I love, including being a professional organizer. Awww. It's still true, and as I continue with my third year of organizing, I'm grateful that I'm able to grow along with my business.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by suavehouse113
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