Who doesn't love Anne Taintor?

Here are two of my favorite organizing related products, from Anne Taintor's Modern Office Revisited line:

These come as magnets, notepads and notecases. Check out all of her hilarious, funny-because-it's-true caption art.

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.

Gifts for someone who "wants to get organized"

Occasionally, you'll hear a friend or relative say that they've had enough with the chaos of their life and they "want to get organized." But what does getting organized mean to that person? They might mean they'd like to put all their stuff in a dumpster and start over, or they might mean they'd like to be able to find their keys in the morning on their way out the door.

So, here are some gift ideas for folks who've expressed the urge to get organized.

For the self motivated person, I recommend the book Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui by Karen Kingston. This is the book that got me into organizing in the first place and I'm a pretty self motivated person. It's inspiring and sensible and can help them really get the energy moving.

For the visual person who loves color and texture, colorful boxes or folders can be a fun way to inspire some office organization.

For the tech-savvy friend, gifting a year's pro account on Evernote might be much appreciated.

For parents whose kids' toys are driving them crazy, I recommend soft bins like these to contain toys and stuffed animals.

The only instances where giving a session with a professional organizer is appropriate, in my view, is when the person has expressly asked for it. If they say, "Gee, I'd really love to have a session with a professional organizer soon to help me organize my home office for the new year," then it would be okay to try to arrange for such a session. Otherwise, hiring a professional organizer is a personal thing, almost like finding a dentist or any other specialist that you would really trust and want to work with.

If you have a friend or family member who wants to get organized, and you want some more gift ideas, feel free to email me at lelah@lelahwithanh.com for a little free advice, or ask in the comments!

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Lisa Clarke

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

Your filing system won't work if you keep everything

In my home office, I have three file boxes, one for personal business, one for my professional organizing business and one for my creative writing projects. Yesterday I blasted through the first two, letting go of a bunch of papers I no longer need to hang on to. I hadn't done it in a while, and it took about an hour, but I felt confident when I was done that the items I had left behind were essential to my life right now and will be easy to find when I need them.

I'm not going to go into a big post about the best way to organize papers or set up filing systems, as that is different for almost everyone. I will say, though, that there is no filing system in the world that will work if you keep every piece of paper you come across. No filing system can support all the paper that comes into our lives.

The vast majority of the paper we come across is not essential. Most information we can track down if necessary. Haven't you ever wanted to just pitch all the piles of paper that are on your desk into the trash and be done with it? I don't advocate doing that, unless you are sure there are no checks or birth certificates in the pile, but if you constantly recycle and shred superfluous paper (remember Always Be De-cluttering?), your filing system will be able to function and you will be happier.

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by BLW Photography

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 5

Check it out! Here are some of the best of the best organizing-related blog posts I've seen lately.

Brandie Kajino, the Home Office Organizer, has a guest blogger this week, Jeri Dansky, who finds amazing and beautiful organizing products on her blog Jeri's Organizing and Decluttering News. Jeri's post talks about the ten best office organizing products, and boy are they great. This is a must read! I especially love her straight line filing method and the mention of an in box. My in box is a huge part of my organizational system.

The Bneato blog has been running a series about key clutter all week. Definitely a good idea to take a look at your key ring and take off any that don't open anything you own anymore (such as a car you sold three years ago). Here's one of their posts on recycling your old keys as scrap metal.

Mandi at Organizing Your Way has been covering a really important topic this week: digital clutter and the best way to organizing your computer files. There's lots of great info there, but I particularly think her post on backup solutions is a great overview of the options out there. Read it, then go backup!!!

Cool Creative Commons line drawing posted to Flickr by 10ch

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: Desk drawer

Part of leading an organized life is being prepared for life. Having what you need means not having to spend extra time and money scrambling to be ready for some event—whether the event is planned or unforeseen. The trick here is to be prepared appropriately, trying not to be overprepared (which can cause overspending, clutter and stress) or underprepared (which can cause overspending, clutter and stress). Of course, since, we can never know exactly what the future holds, we just have do our best to hit that sweet spot of preparedness. I’ve written about the things you should do to prepare for an emergency. Here’s a slightly smaller list, the first in series, of things that will help you be better prepared for the eventualities of every day.

This drawer is pretty organized and has a bunch of the recommended items.

The 12 things that should be in every top desk drawer:

• lip balm
• Emery board
• scissors
• binder clips
• pencil sharpener
• ruler
• staples and stapler
• tape and tape dispenser
• scrap paper and Post Its
• glue stick
• calculator
• permanent marker

These are the things we use all the time, need almost every day, and are real time savers when we have them at our fingertips. Trying to keep only those items we use every day will make it easier to find things . I’m sure there are other tools you swear by in your desk drawers. Feel free to add more in the comments.

Creative Commons desk drawer photo posted to flickr by Mickelodeon

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