Your House In Order

Did you join a gym in January?  If you’re like me, you have high expectations of working out several times a week. You plan to take some classes, learn how to use the weight machines, and get yourself in shape.  But after a month or two, you skip a week, then maybe two, and you…

Here I am, in the business of organizing home offices, and I felt like the cobbler’s child.  I’ve been working out of my own home office for years and there were problems in my set-up I could no longer ignore. I needed to treat myself like a client and re-define my workspace.  Other posts have…

There’s no way to get around it – re-doing your home office is work.  I estimated it would take a week to complete the job. I had a list of what needed to be done. I determined which I could do alone and when I would need help. It was a challenge, and sometimes a…

When I decided to re-do my own home office, my goal was make the room feel more spacious.  I thought I’d move some furniture around, replace a standing bookcase with a wall-mounted shelving system and that would be that.  Ha!   Shelving After I made a floor plan, my first step was to buy the…

1. Purge your 2012 files Take a look at your file drawer.  Can you easily slide files back and forth? Or is it so full that papers are bursting out of folders? Critically evaluate what you are keeping in your paper files. Ask yourself these questions:  Is this information available elsewhere?  What’s the worst that…

I like Facebook.  I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to and viewing their photos. What I don’t enjoy is scrolling through posting after posting of game play or other activity to get to the updates I want to read.  Or, finding out later that a friend posted pictures that somehow never made it…

Are you starting to feel a little stressed now that we’re already in the second week of December?  Have your good intentions of getting all your holiday planning done early flown out the window? Holidays should be a time of joy and celebration, and they don’t have to be perfect.  Reframe your expectations – it’s…

You’ve written the holiday letter and it’s ready to go.  How are you going to send it to your friends?  You could enter your friends’ emails one by one in the “To” box, or you could simply click on a pre-arranged group containing all your holiday recipients. First, you need to have your friends and…

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – time to write the holiday letter!  Here are a couple of tips to make it easier: Scroll through your facebook timeline (I know, you hate timeline) to see what was important to you throughout the past year If you keep a paper calendar, go through it…

Last year, I decided to re-do my home office.  I knew what worked and didn’t work in my current set up and what my limitations were. My primary limitation was the size of the room.  It is tiny, barely 10’ x 12’ and also doubles as a guest room. The first step was to make…