Better in theory

Here are some organizing purchases you think will be great, until you get them home:

• Colorful cord labels. If only you could figure out how to get them on the cords and look nice. Use a silver Sharpie and write directly on the cord instead.
• (Gasp!) A label maker. Label makers are awesome if you have a thing about neatness. Otherwise, they just cause you to lose time making the label, lose space by having to store it, and lose money to buy incredibly expensive label tape.
• Fancy storage boxes with pretty designs. It's one thing to get a nice looking box for a desk top or open shelf. It's another to spend money getting perfectly matched boxes just to store things in your garage or attic. For utilitarian storage needs, get something basic - a clear, sturdy, stackable plastic box.
• Almost anything in the checkout line at The Container Store. They have tons of cute little products beckoning you from your place in line, but it's all clutter.

Storage box from organize.com

When cleaning contributes to clutter

One of the best reasons to get your home organized is that it makes it easier to clean. Without piles of stuff on the floor and on your surfaces, it's simply easier to do routine maintenance and keep a clean home.

Some people hire help to clean their living space. Whether you have a one bedroom apartment or a five bedroom house, if you have a regular (or not so regular) cleaning person or cleaning team in your home, they may get the floors, windows and surfaces clean, but they often contribute to disorganization and clutter. How can this be? Well, unless they live with you and are intimately acquainted with all your drawers, cupboards and storage spaces, they aren't going to know where things live. They are going to see a pile of objects on your dining room table and instead of finding the specific home for each item (assuming you actually have a designated home for each item), they'll sweep them all up and stick them in the nearest cabinet for you to sort out later. Your dining room table will gleam, but you'll be frustrated when you are trying to find the scissors and they are not in the pencil box by the phone but somewhere your cleaning person stashed them.

 

I see this all the time in clients' homes. They will often have specific spaces for their things, but if they haven't communicated those spaces to the person putting the things away, they inevitably end up someplace else. This doesn't apply just to cleaning people. It's all well and good if you know where to find things and put them away, but what if your spouse needs the label maker and you aren't around? Plus, you don't want to be a position of having to tell people where things are all the time, or worse yet, getting things for them. Speaking of label makers, the solution to both the cleaning person problem and making it easier for everyone in the family to coexist with an organizational system is labels.

If you label where things go, it makes it much simpler for everyone to find things and put them away. Your cleaning person will thank you, and your time can be spent on other things beside locating items for your family members.


Creative Commons Old Hi-8 Tapes by bredgur, on Flickr.

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 

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 

Improvised nametags

I don’t often use label makers or computers to create labels or signs. A lot of my clients do as they like the uniform look it gives to their files or other organizing projects. Fair enough. I simply don’t have the patience for it, when I could hand write a label in less time and move on. (Luckily, I have neat handwriting.) However, sometimes it does pay to use these aids when creating a large file system or many duplicates of the same thing. On Tuesday, I’m hosting a business mixer through the site Biznik, of which I am a member. As the host, I provide nametags, and Biznik provides a handy nametag template, which I downloaded with the intention of printing out some easy nametags. However, when I went to Office Depot and found that their selection of printable nametags is limited to packs that cost upwards of 50 dollars, and since I only needed about 25, I decided to improvise. I chose 2''x4''  Avery Multi-Use Labels; I’ll be able to use the extras with my clients and they happen to be almost the exact same size as standard nametags. I downloaded the template that goes with the labels from the Avery website in about three seconds, had the Biznik logo pasted in after 30 seconds more. I was a bit doubtful that the entire thing was actually going to print properly, but, to my surprise, they came out exactly as promised. The entire thing was done in a few minutes and I had a low cost nametag that I’m sure the guests at my mixer won’t mind not comming on a large sheet.

Technology wins this round. Of course, we’ll hand write our names on the tags at the event. My trusty Sharpies are at the ready!

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

The Great Label Maker Search of 2009

I'm a professional organizer. I don't have a label maker. Those two sentences may seem like an impossible contradiction, but it's true. I've never owned a label maker. The experience I have with them was from the year I worked at a bakery in West Hollywood and had to label the little plaques that advertised what those yummy looking treats were, and it wasn't a pleasant experience. (The treats, yes, the label making, no.) We used an old, clunky machine that tended to spit out tape whenever it felt like it and get jammed and in the end, it always took several tries before we got it right. Then came the task of putting the label on the plaque straight!

Creative Commons line drawing from Flickr posted by bradley j

Anyway, I think it's time to bite bullet and get a label maker. Or at least think about getting one. I figure I'll start the process now, do some research, get some recommendations, and then find the one that works for me.

My hesitation up to this point on getting a label maker is partly the expense. I've heard that the label makers themselves aren't such a big investment, but you have to keep buying the tape and that adds up. Also, I think it's faster to handwrite labels, and sometimes it's reassuring to know that you can just change a label as fast as you can write one, rather than programming it in. Homemade labels can also turn into mini areas to express your creativity, with color and design choices, if you are into that sort of thing.

On the pro-label maker side, there is definitely the neatness factor. Many people's handwriting is barely legible to themselves, which is where the uniformity of label maker labels would be nice. Also, in an office environment machine-made labels look more professional. If you have to program the label in and wait for it to spit out, then you'll likely think harder about the label you really want, and your filing system will benefit from the extra thought.

So if you have any label maker opinions, recommendations or stories, please share them in the comments. I will keep you posted on any progress I make!