Blogging break

I have decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from this blog. It has been so much fun to write about my organizing ideas and organizing trends over the past three and a half years, and I hope people will continue to use the archives as a resource until I'm ready to return to blogging.


Thank you for your loyal readership, and happy organizing!

The Burning House

In Parade magazine of all places I saw a mention of a book coming out called The Burning House by Foster Huntington. It is also a blog, and it documents through photographs of beautifully arranged objects what a person would take if they could only grab a few things and escape from their burning house. It's a powerful question and the images are also powerful, able to communicate what a person values above all else at a single glance. I find the blog fascinating and I'm sure the book is interesting as well.

What would you take?

Just put it down

I just read a fantastic post by Jeri Danksy of Jeri's Organizing and Decluttering News, titled Not Every Book is Worth Finishing. She quotes a number of writers and readers who give their cutoffs for when to put a book down. The main thing is to give yourself permission to stop a reading a book, and then give yourself permission to not finish it. I have a category I created just for these types of books on my Goodreads profile, since I do it so often. I love to read, and I just don't have time to finish books that aren't doing it for me.

Thanks, Jeri, for the wonderful reminder that not every book is worth finishing.

3 year blogaversary

Three years ago today I posted my first blog to Helping You Organize. It was about Vicky and Jen's podcast What Really Matters and their Monica Ricci-hosted Big O organizing series in particular. That series is still running, and still as fabulous as ever. There is no end to organizing topics that they can cover.

I'm really happy to have maintained this blog for three continuous years. It's been a wonderful outlet for me to share my ideas and to create conversations with my readers and colleagues.

Since I like numbers, here are some stats about my blog:
Total posts: 341 (including this one)
Average number of posts per month: about 9 1/2
Current monthly page views according to Google Analytics: about 700
Current monthly page views according to Blogger: about 2,500 (Not sure what that's about since they are owned by the same company)
Visits my first day: 7

I'm hoping to keep maintaining the blog as I get used to being a mom, but frequency of posts might go down! Let's see what the next year holds.

Organizational lifehacks

Lifehacker is a super fun blog that highlights all sorts of neat ideas, blogs and news about ways to make life easier or solve some of life's perplexing problems. Lifehacker's organizing category is chock full of fun organizing tidbits and a good place to go for a little organizing inspiration or just to waste a little time looking at stuff like Modify an Ikea Lack Table into a Dog Dining Table.

Image from Lifehacker.

Workspace inspiration

I love the blog Unclutterer, and they have a weekly feature called Workspace of the Week that highlights unique or exceptionally well-organized workspaces, usually home offices. I love looking at how real people have organized their workspaces, as opposed to the ultra-perfect spaces you tend to see in magazines. If you are looking for some inspiration for your own workspace, I encourage you to check out their archives.

Screenshot from unclutterer.com

Clutter Carnival

I'm so happy to be one of the participants in this month's Professional Organizers Blog Carnival, hosted by the very talented Janet Barclay of Organized Assistant. My classic post Common clutter areas and what to do about them is just one of two dozen helpful and insightful blog posts all on the topic of clutter presented in the carnival.

Read and enjoy!

Need a professional to help you clear your clutter?
Call Lelah at 818.269.6671
or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com
Get Lelah's News

Poll # 1: Disposing of clutter

I'm starting a new feature on my blog today - the biweekly poll. Every couple of weeks there will a new topic in the sidebar at the right. I would love it if everyone who visited this blog participated! If you have poll topics that you'd like me to pose to the readers of Helping You Organize, just share in the comments. I'm looking forward to hearing the responses of my fabulous readers. Many thanks!

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. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Your paperless business

Today I'm honored to be a guest blogger at Janet Barclay's excellent Your Organizing Business, a blog primarily directed at professional organizers. My post is on the reasons for moving one's business paperless. Click over to read how it can help propel a business forward!

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. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

A year ago: Happiness, freedom and empty space

Last year on Helping You Organize, I reviewed the book The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. The Happiness Project Blog is still one of my favorites and I've thought repeatedly about many of Rubin's tenants of happiness in the year since reading the book. The book is now out in paperback.

One of my all-time favorite posts was from May of last year about how the best things in life aren't free. I'm talking about stuff you get for free from friends, relatives, businesses and the like. Most often these free items come with the steep price of figuring out where to put them, how to take care of them and how to dispose of them and you are better off not accepting the thing in the first place!

Another great post (if I do say so myself) was on the virtues of an empty box or shelf. Just because there is an empty space in your space doesn't mean you have to fill it up with stuff!

Creative Commons free junk photo posted to Flickr by cogdogblog

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. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Still helping you organize!

Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of this blog. The second year absolutely flew by, and I'm really happy with the quantity and quality of the posts this past year. Here are some of this blog's stats:

• This is the 229th post.
• The most-used label is "tips," used to describe 31 posts.
• The highest post-count ever for a single month was in July 2010, with 16.
• Facebook is my number one referral source of traffic, followed by Blogger.
• My single best day of traffic was due to my post Clutter-free gifts: Services being picked up on Stumbleupon.
• My personal favorite post from the past year might be January's Keeping stuff alive in 2011. Even though I wasn't able to keep all the plants alive that I mentioned in the post, looking at the pictures still inspires me.

Looking ahead to year three of this blog, I hope to keep up the frequency and encourage more commenting. Do you have any particular topics you'd like me to write about in the year ahead?

More tips.

Creative Commons nail tips photo posted to Flickr by lisa bentley
Creative Commons cake decorating tips photo posted to Flickr by Anne Hornyak
Creative Commons felt tip photo posted to Flickr by www.planetofsuccess.com/blog/

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. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Paring down Google Reader

You all know how much I love Google Reader. I check it nearly every day to stay on top of my favorite blogs. I have a folder titled organizing that I use to compile the feeds to every regularly-updated organizing blog I come across. I know there are many more that I haven't seen and added yet, but so far the number of blogs in this folder is 154. That's a lot. It can take me quite a while to scroll through the dozens of additions every day. I do this because I like to stay on top of what's going on in my industry, and I learn something new from my colleagues all the time. Plus, since I have an organizing blog, I like to be involved in the larger online conversation by reading and commenting on other blogs.

However.

I do find myself skipping over posts more and more, trying to get to those blogs that reliably have the most relevant information for me, and trying to glean the best posts from usually at least 60 new posts a day is extremely time consuming. It's not a good use of my time. So, I've pared down, and shuttled the majority of the blogs in the organizing folder to a second folder. They are still there if I ever want access to them, and I can still add blogs to that folder just to keep track of them, but I'm putting only a few of my favorites in the primary folder which I will continue to check daily. I'm hoping this will keep my time focused on the high quality posts that are really valuable for me to read.

A few of the blogs staying in my organizing folder:

• D.E.C.I.D.E. to be Organized! by Lisa Montanaro. Lisa Montanaro, a former lawyer, always has an interesting perspective on the organizing industry and approaches to organizing.
• Jeri's Organizing & Decluttering News by Jeri Dansky. This blog has some of the most original organizing products out there, but I really love Jeri's book reviews and posts about organizing challenges.
• Clutter Coach by Claire Tompkins. This blog always has well-written and interesting posts about everyday organizing problems and solutions.

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: color-coded to-do lists and photos!

Last year on helping you organize, I debated the merits of using color in organizing systems, waxed eloquently about my love for to-do lists and shared some pictures posted to Flickr by a few organized souls.

Speaking of to-do lists, L.A. pro-organizer Beth Zeigler, whose business is called Bneato, has a new weekly series called to-do list tuesdays. This week she shares a list from local networking scenester and accountability coach Dyana Valentine. Very cool, in this list-junky's opinion.

If you, too, like lists and order, check out the outstanding blog Penelope Loves Lists. There are more "Penelopes" than you'd think out there.

Creative Commons to do list photo posted to flickr by tracitodd

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: working clean, emergency preparedness and organizing myths

Last year during the first week in May I posted about the idea of "working clean" as applied to any workspace, with some thoughts on David Allen's GTD concept of the productive state.

I also offered a few ways you can prepare for an emergency. These go beyond merely stocking up on bottled water and refilling your flashlight batteries. Last year the impetus for the post was a wildfire in Santa Barbara. Since then, we've had more wildfires in Southern California as well as earthquakes. There's never a bad time to get yourself better prepped for an emergency situation.

 

Last, I countered the organizing myth that organizing takes up a lot of time by sharing some way you can improve your organization a few minutes at a time. This is how I keep myself organized, in small chunks here and there throughout the day, week, month and year.

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 on Helping you Organize

Now that I've been writing this blog for a year, I'm going to introduce a new type of post, the "a year ago" post. Unclutterer does this, as do some other organizing blogs, and I think it's a nice way to remind readers of the backlog of content that's available here.


So, last year at this time I was posting about:

Vicky and Jen's What Really Matters podcast featuring Monica Ricci - still one of my favorite resources for organizing inspiration.

My search for a label maker, only very recently acquired.

A review of the book Organizing for Your Brain Type by Lanna Nakone.

A rumination on the organizing challenges faced specifically by Angelinos.

And a list of reasons why one might want to hire a professional organizer.

Happy reading!

Creative Commons line drawing from Flickr posted by bradley j
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: Earth Day

From time to time I like to highlight great content found on other professional organizers' blogs. Here are some of the best recent posts on Earth Day, which is tomorrow, April 22.

Christie at SOS Organize gives some statistics on why junk mail is so bad for the environment, and advice on how to stop it from cluttering up your home.

Lorie at The Clutter Diet Blog exhorts us to dispose of hazardous waste properly, and to donate and recycle the waste that gets exposed when we clear clutter. She says "Organizing exposes a lot of waste in our own personal environments."We can all learn from that and try to make a conscious effort not to purchase items that are going to create a lot of waste in our own lives and for the Earth as a whole.

The topic of waste ties in to Abbie at Organizing-Life's recap of her packaging series, in which she examined everyday household items for wasteful packaging. Her conclusions and recommendations are well worth a read.

Vicky and Jen of the podcast What Really Matters post about compost. Composting is an easy and rewarding way to cut down on the amount of organic waste heading to landfills. If you live somewhere with access to a garden, you should compost.

If you want a whole avalanche of "green" themed blog posts, just check out this month's Professional Organizer's Blog Carnival, the topic of which is green organizing.

Creative commons Earth Day photo posted to Flickr by Beverly & Pack
Creative commons raw compost photo posted to Flickr by stevendepolo
Creative commons compost dirt photo posted to Flickr by wisemandarine


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 

Post #100

This is my hundredth post to this blog. I started helping you organize about eleven months ago as a way to share things I learned through the course of being a professional organizer with a wider audience. It's been a pleasure to explore my own organizing theories and discuss the theories of other pros in this forum. From time to time, lists about oneself get popular and float around email and Facebook, so here's a list of 14 things (my favorite number) about me to celebrate this blogging milestone.

1. I finally got a label maker for free by redeeming otherwise unusable United mileage points. I haven't used it yet.
2. I love good smelling things like candles and incense and baking cookies.
3. I'm getting married in 22 days. I'm sitting here trying not to hyperventilate at how small that number is.
4. My favorite thing to organize is my bathroom cupboards. I absolutely love throwing out expired/never going to be used/wrong colored stuff.
5. The best thing about owning my own business is being able to take full responsibility for and pride in the work that I do.
6. My three least favorite chores: dishes, dusting, cleaning floors.
7. My three favorite chores: laundry, putting away groceries, putting away dishes. (Probably because everything has somewhere to go!)
8. Best organizing-related book I've read this year so far...this is tough...Throw Out Fifty Things by Gail Blanke.
8. Best non-organizing-related book I've read this year so far...Chocolat.
9. I've made progress on three out of four of my 2010 resolutions.
10. Consumable gifts that are always welcome in my house: soap, cut flowers, Champagne and fruit.
11. I love to dance, bike ride, swim and hike.
12. Publications to which I subscribe: Real Simple, Los Angeles Magazine, Rolling Stone.
13. Three favorite professional organizers at the moment: Brooks Palmer, Monica Ricci, Lisa Montanaro
14. I'm attending two reunions this year: my 10 year high school reunion and (technically not a reunion year for me, as it'll be my 6th, but my fiance's 5th) college reunion. Two more big milestones in a year full of them.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by norwichnuts

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: Christmas

Okay, two weeks until Christmas and I'm not sick of it yet. That's a good thing. I've been trying to do Christmas in small doses this year, as my love for the season and the holiday can make me go overboard with the cookies, gingerbread houses, tree decoration and Christmas music too early. This year I've had a more measured approach. I don't even have a tree this year because I won't be home on Christmas day. I haven't missed it, and a string of Christmas lights around my windows and a pine-scented candle is enough to get me in the spirit. This is Southern California, after all. We've always had to use our imaginations at this time of year, when people in other parts of the country are actually able to expect a snowy, picture-perfect holiday.

I've been inspired to enact more simple season by my fellow professional organizers and organizing-minded blog friends. Here are some of their best holiday preparation posts, many of which are part of a series, because having a successful, organized Christmas usually takes some guidance.

One of my favorite new blogs is D.E.C.I.D.E. to be Organized by professional organizer Lisa Montanaro. She always has really well-written, thoughtful posts. Here's one called Managing the Chaos of the Busy Holiday Season: A Survival Guide. In it she talks about setting goals and dealing with an overloaded schedule. She also advocates re-gifting, a controversial policy, but one that I agree with, if the item is new, or almost new, and is something the person you are giving it to really wants. Chaos to Order blog also think re-gifting is fine, and posts some guidelines here.

SimpleMom has an entire series of posts on Christmas called 12 Weeks to a Peaceful Christmas. While you could probably get away with less than 12 weeks of preparation for a single day, the posts contain really useful information. This one on food gifts has tons of links to great consumable gift ideas and recipes for a healthy dose of holiday gifting inspiration.

Paula Constable at Organizing Tips and Thoughts for Moms blog has a Countdown to Christmas series chock-full of good ideas and useful tips. I love her tips for getting your holiday cards and packages ready to send and dealing with shipping them. I've spent my share of time in lines at the post office this month, so it pays to think ahead.

Finally, Aby at Creative Organizing Blog, whose posts are always inspirational, has a lovely post about getting into the holiday mood, putting the holidays in perspective, and the joys of drinking hot chocolate.

Creative Common photo posted to Flickr by tedmurphy, part of a set called Christmas Lights

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

Organizer's blog digest: back-to-school

I don't have kids, yet. I don't live with any school-aged kids, and even though I always get that rush of anticipation and possibilities every time I step into a Staples and smell the perfume of binders and pencils, I haven't prepared for a school year in a long time. Also, the second week of August has barely started and I refuse to believe that summer is transitioning into fall, and the school year, so quickly. But apparently it is for many families, so here's a round-up of some great back-to-school advice, tips and organizational know-how for those of you who might need it:

It's good to be back! blogger Melissa Searcy writes about how best to organize your child's closet in preparation for back to school, but the advice is great year-round. So easy to forget that if they can't easily reach the bar, they won't be able to hang up their clothes!

Always-inspiring Aby at Creative Organizing Blog gives some great tips on setting up an organized homework station. Having the right tools might not help homework get finished, but it will help it get started!

Monica Ricci has seven awesome tips for back to school season on her blog Your Life. Organized. As a child I always laid out my next day's clothes before I went to bed...maybe it was sign of my future profession?

As far as school supplies go, Organizing Solutions "Clear the Clutter" has the brilliant idea of checking to see what you have before you go out and buy new. Aby posts about too-cute lunchbox notes, both store bought and homemade.

Finally, here's a breakdown of how to plan your time in the weeks leading up to the first day of school from Shaina at Food for My Family via Mandi at Organizing Your Way. Best tip: start getting your child into the bedtime and wake up schedule that they'll need to be on once school starts a few days early so they will be ready.

Hope this information will help ease your transition from summer to school!

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Merelymel13

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