Paperless tips

Here are a few paperless tips in preparation for my paperless organizing workshop, Take the Paperless Plunge, which I'm teaching Saturday, February 4, in Sherman Oaks, CA, through the Professional Organizer's Learning Academy of NAPO-LA.

• Don't have time to enter a business card into your contacts, but don't want to keep the card around until you do? Take a snapshot of it with your digital camera or the camera on your mobile device and save it to Evernote, or extract the data later at your convenience.
• Getting too many catalogs in the mail? Catalog Choice is a free service that can help you easily unsubscribe from catalogs.
• Paperless doesn't have to mean high-tech. Stop printing things. It will make a huge difference. 

Get a professional organizer's expertise!

Call Lelah at 818.269.6671

or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com

Get Lelah's News

Tax season special!

Tax returns are due on April 17, 2012. To celebrate the unique organizational opportunity that filing one's taxes creates for us every winter, I'm offering a special organizing rate to help you get ready to file on time.

Lelah's 4 Hour Paperwork Prep Special: $239

I can help you sort your paperwork, find your receipts and assemble the documents you need to file your taxes. This will make you and your accountant extremely happy, and save you time and money. Invest in your sanity. I can help you get this done!

Details: One 4-hour office organizing session with an emphasis on getting your tax documents together is normally $300. From now until March 1, this rate will be only $239! Applicable to new and returning clients in Glendale, Pasadena and surrounding areas. Applies to one 4-hour session. Additional sessions may be needed and regular rates may apply. I am not a tax professional, but I can get you organized before you see yours!

Call or email today for more information and to schedule your session. Don't wait until the last minute. Get this off your mind today!

www.lelahwithanh.com    818.269.6671    lelah@lelahwithanh.com

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Ken Teegarden: www.seniorliving.org

Wrapping paper leftovers

I love wrapping paper. I think beautifully wrapped gifts are one of life's great pleasures. But I feel wasteful when I buy expensive paper that just gets torn off and discarded. So most of my paper gets used over and over again. My family doesn't mind when I harvest the best scraps of leftover paper and save them for the next occasion. I tend to keep bits of ribbon, too, and am able to use them again and again. The paper can take on new and more beautiful forms after being wrinkled and folded and combined with different types of paper for different gifts. And when I use up a lot of paper all at once and need more, I turn to paper bags and other found wrapping papers. It makes me doubly happy to see a gift beautifully wrapped with reused and reusable paper!

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Katherine

Need to get a handle on your own wrapping paper collection?

Call Lelah at 818.269.6671

or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com

Get Lelah's News

What does paperless really mean?

When we say we're "going paperless," what does that really mean? It certainly doesn't mean that we'll never touch another piece of paper again in our lives. It also doesn't mean that a person who wants to be less bogged down by paper doesn't enjoy paper in certain situations. Being paperless, like being organized, is not an absolute destination, but something to work toward and use as a tool to live a simpler life.

To me, paperless means not printing stuff unless it's absolutely necessary, including recipes, directions and especially emails.

It means asking people to send me information electronically rather than hand me a piece of paper with the information on it.

It means reducing my paper mail by signing up for paperless statements and bills and taking myself off catalog and junk mail lists.

It means thinking twice before picking up a piece of literature or a business card.

It can mean lots of other things, but those are good start. What does paperless mean to you?

Creative Commons photo posted to Flickr by Bert 23

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.

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

Upcoming workshop: March 12th, go paperless

I'm teaching a workshop. If you live in Southern California and would like to get detailed and inspiring instruction on how to get away from the tyranny of paper, come learn in person!

The (Almost) Paperless Office Workshop

March 12, 2011

Are you drowning in paper, do you lust after a high tech scanner, did you think that getting an iPhone would help reduce the amount of paper piling up on your desk? Do you want to increase your productivity in the office and decrease the time you spend wrestling with paper piles?

The dream of the paperless office has been around for a while, but how many of us have been able to achieve it? Lelah Baker-Rabe, professional organizer and expert in both paper and digital clutter control, will teach you how to make the paperless office a reality with a comprehensive three hour workshop designed for the technology beginner or intermediate who wants to make the transition to a life independent of paper.

This workshop will do more than help you figure out what paper can stay and what can go. It will help you stop paper clutter in the future, and will help you avoid trading paper clutter for electronic clutter. You can go paperless without going completely high tech and Lelah will show you how.

Why almost paperless? Some of us still enjoy paper. It's okay to be mainly paperless and still use paper. After this workshop, paper will no longer be an enemy, it will be another tool in your organization toolbox!

Less paper. More life.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

At Lelah's own (almost) paperless office

Glendale, CA

$75. Space is limited. 

Register by March 10, 2011.**

**Register by March 1st and bring a box of stuff to shred - Lelah will shred it for free!**

Field trip to the recycling center

On Saturday I went to the Burbank Recycle Center on a field trip with my neighborhood group from the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers. (What a mouthful!) We met with Craig, one of the recycling experts who works there and he gave as an overview of how recycling works at this recycling center and lots of information about what can and can't be recycled and why.

I had about a million mini-epiphanies during the two hours I was there, but I'm just going to list a few of the major take-aways that I absorbed.

• A lot of things count as hazardous waste, including anything that has electronic parts like circuit boards. These cannot be put in the trash or the recycle bin and must be taken to a special collection site. Los Angeles County has various collection points for their S.A.F.E. program. They are mostly just open on the weekend, but they are free to all residents of L.A. County.
• Individual cities have individual rules for what materials they will accept to recycle. For instance, Burbank doesn't take plastic bags, but the city of Los Angeles does. This is because each city has different facilities with different equipment as there is little standardization. The Burbank Recycle Center is owned by the city of Burbank and operated by a private company.
• Obviously the best way to avoid waste is to reduce your consumption in the first place. We talked a lot about refusing things like plastic bags at stores, and also about putting pressure on companies to take responsibility for the waste their products create. Some companies already pay for the recycling of their products, such as computer batteries, but many do not. Sustainable package design is a large part of this.
• In order to get companies to realize that consumers want to be able to recycle or avoid using extra packaging, Craig recommends you take your plastic bags and wrappers back to the grocery store you bought them from and put them in the recycle bins they have at the front of the store. That way the store and the manufacturers can see how much there is and that consumers want them to be accountable for it. You can also call the customer service numbers on products and let the companies know your thoughts directly.
• At the Burbank Recycle Center 90,000 to 100,000 tons of material come through every year. 70-80% of that is paper, which gets bundled and sent to China to be made into paper again. 10% is not recyclable and gets sent to the landfill.
• Items made from multiple materials are not easily recycled. For instance, the cardboard/foil/plastic combo of antiseptic boxes that hold chicken stock and soup and the like are not recyclable. Buy tin cans instead, as they are much easier to recycle.

• I think if you are interested in being a responsible member of the community, visiting a landfill and/or recycling center is a great way to get a vivid picture of the waste we create as a society. It's really clear that what we've been doing for the last hundred years isn't sustainable. 
• It makes you think about the economy in different ways. I feel good when I can reuse something. I like getting more use out of clothing I buy at a used clothing store, and I certainly donate as much of my used items as I can. Buying used appliances makes me feel great - they have lots of wear left in them, and I'm not creating waste by buying something that comes in a lot of styrofoam and cardboard packaging. But how does that affect our consumer-based economy? I'm not sure, and there are obviously lots of things I still buy new. Something to think about.

Recycling is important, and it's important to know what is recyclable and what is not. But getting to a point where what you are sending the landfill and recycling center is drastically less due to refusing, reusing and composting, is probably the most sustainable model of all.

Creative Commons photo of bundled paper posted to Flickr by Derrick Coetzee

Creative Commons photo of tetra paks posted to Flickr by Tetra Pak

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