A year ago: a stocking filled to the brim with posts

Last year I blogged a lot in December, so here's a recap of the best posts from that time. The holiday-themed ones are useful once again this year.

Just after Monday's post on Google Reader I rediscovered this one about salting your feed reader with your favorite blogs as an incentive to get through them. Not sure if that is as relevant if you start to be picky about what feeds you include in your most-often read folders, but it's not a bad idea.

Here are nine things that should be in every gift wrapping station. Wrapping gifts is one of the highlights of the season for me, and I've wrapped almost everything there is to wrap this year already.

Some musings about the idea that simplicity is revolutionary.

A fantastic post (if I do say so myself) on managing your magazines. Best way to do that...don't subscribe to them.

Last year's Organizer's Blog Digest on Christmas prep. Lots of good tidbits of information. Plus, a post on what to do with the holiday cards you will be receiving this year. So far, I've only received one, which makes containing them pretty easy.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Randy Pertiet.

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

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: storage units, photo organization and Google Reader

Last July I was returning from a lengthy trip to the east coast, where I had undergone a large project of slimming down the contents of a large storage unit. The following posts were reactions to that project. The longer I organize people professionally, the more convinced I am that storage, particularly long-term, paid storage, is not a good option for dealing with your stuff. I believe the possessions we have should be used, displayed and if they are no longer good fits for our lives, should be passed on to someone who can use them better. There are very few reasons that storage should be an imperative for anyone.

Anyway...

On the joys of the "Mark All As Read" button in Google Reader.

Of yard sales and storage units and on the problem with storage.

And on a different topic: photos, my organizing kryptonite.

Have a fantastic weekend!

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

Social networking frenzy

Having worked in the Internet industry and as a side effect being somewhat web-savvy, I find it helpful to stay current with trends, especially as an entrepreneur with a marketing budget of roughly $0. You may or may not find uses for the following sites and services, but here's how to find me on them in case you'd like to connect. Connecting, after all, is the point of social networking, to find a commonality with someone else through a shared niche love of a random Mexican restaurant in Hollywood or Julia Quinn novels. Sometimes these connections result in more than a passing bit of information on a news or RSS feed and can lead to business referrals, opportunities for new experiences and sometimes even friendships.

So, here's me as seen through various portals - connect me up!

The usual suspects:
Twitter: @lelahwithanh
Facebook: Lelah Baker-Rabe, Professional Organizer
LinkedIn: Lelah Baker-Rabe
Yelp: Lelah Baker-Rabe, Professional Organizer
YouTube: My channel
Google: My profile
Google Reader: My shared items

Business networking:
MeetUp
Biznik

For fun:
Goodreads
Flickr
Yelp: My personal profile
NaNoWriMo

Creative Commons image posted to Flickr by SocialGrow
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

Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to read it

I'm getting back in the swing of things at home and with my business after almost three weeks of traveling. Having a break from the normal routine always helps me gain perspective about my life and what is important to me. When I got back, I was thankful that I'd taken the time to clean my house thoroughly before I left, including laundry and refrigerator, so that even though I returned home with a suitcase full of dirty clothes I had some clean ones in the closet and even though I had to go out and buy the essentials almost immediately, my refrigerator wasn't moldering with food gone bad.

I had a lot of great organizing moments during the trip that I look forward to sharing with you. While I'm getting my photos organized and settling back in, I wanted to share one quick insight. I follow lots of blogs through Google Reader, and in my "organizing" folder I follow 79 blogs alone! I love reading what other professional organizers are writing about (and share some of them with you in my Friday Blog Digest feature), but after twenty days of not scanning the feeds, I had over 500 to-be-read items waiting for me. Though I'd like to be able to go back and read them all, I forced myself to scan just today's and yesterday's. I'm using the genius "mark all as read" feature to give myself a clean slate. I know I don't have time to read all of those 500 posts, and I'm not going to put extra pressure on myself to do it anyway. It's amazing that I have all of that information at my fingertips, but sometimes its worth remembering that just because we have access to so much, we don't have to actually access 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

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.