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If you come to my house, you won’t see a perfect, magazine-ready home. But you will see a clutter-free, tidy space, unless the kiddos are having a LEGO-fest. Then all bets are off.

Want a more clutter-free home all the time? Take note of things that organized people do to keep their home organized.

1. Don’t put it down, put it away. Yes, everything has a place in my home, even if it isn’t always in its place. If piles form in places they shouldn’t be, we reduce, recycle, shuffle, store, or donate to make room for new items. This goes for mail and coupons, too!
2. Make time to clear the clutter. It doesn’t take much, but my kids know that we will wait for them to clear the toys out of the living room before they can turn on the TV. We occasionally will be late to events because they needed to put craft supplies away. It’s a small price to pay now for my kiddos to learn that they are responsible for keeping the house livable.
3. Make seasonal adjustments. Flipping the closets from winter to spring and from summer to fall takes just a few hours, but it’s a must-do. It’s not a glamorous job, but making sure there is storage space in the closets and dressers means that other things can be put away in the closets, and not end up sitting out, creating piles of clutter. (See point number 1 above.)
4. Use the downtime. I think the microwave is among the greatest organizing tools ever invented. Whenever  I am warming a cup of tea or prepping a meal, I use those 30 second and 2 minute chunks to quickly tidy one small area of the kitchen. A minute can be spent daydreaming out the window, or it can be used to quickly load or unload the dishwasher. Two minutes allows enough time to go through a backpack or toss junk mail. I can quickly clean the powder room while waiting for little ones to put on shoes and jackets. It’s amazing what little jobs can get done in 60 seconds or less, the average run of our microwave. Even upstairs, I use the time my children are playing in the tub to quickly clean the bathroom floors. While they are brushing their teeth, I can be putting away laundry. These little chunks of time really work for us.
5. Don’t buy extras. Because I don’t buy for “just in case,” I don’t have to carry home, store, clean, and organize extras. I try to buy just what we need, just at the right time. That of course, doesn’t include toilet paper. You can never have too much toilet paper.
6. Keep lists. My brain is full from the moment I wake up in the morning, so my brain is no place to keep important information (ha!). I keep a few lists for shopping, tasks, and events, and a very tight calendar to help me manage it all. Most of my lists are electronic, so I don’t have random papers floating on my counters.

While there are many more things that organized people do, these 6 things that organized people do might help you to stay more on track in your own home.

Organizing your beauty products will cut down on the time it takes to get ready in the morning and will start your day off on an organized, empowered note. Here are 12 easy ways to get started:

1. Keep only the items you use every single day in your medicine cabinet. Leave room for the basics like your toothbrush and skincare. At least that part of your routine can be simplified to just one product for each step, even if you have a million choices for color and finishing touches.

2. For beauty items that coordinate with your outfit or the season, like blushers, eye shadows, and lip color, group them together by category so you can see your choices at a glance.

3. Use clear acrylic drawer dividers or decorative boxes to hold groups of each makeup type in drawers or on shelves.

4. Use wall space by adding bins like those found in kitchens to hang utensils. Add magnetic or hook and loop (Velcro) fasteners to hang items in plain view on the back of the medicine cabinet door. The back of the bathroom door can offer even more storage space with the addition of a clear see-through shoe pocket organizer.

5. The under-sink space is super-high value real estate. Use a 2-tier sliding organizer to make use of all the room under your sink, and to reduce spills and messes.

6. Minimize the amount of beauty product in your tub area. Find a shampoo and body wash that the whole family enjoys using rather than tripping over multiples.

7. Most tubs don’t have much built in storage. Add racks that hang over the shower head and offer 2-4 shelves to hold beauty products and gear. Or suspend another shower rod on the inside back wall at eye level to hold baskets that can hold even more beauty items or bath toys.

8. The 80/20 rule applies to most beauty products. We usually use 20% of our products 80% of the time, and most products get used barely at all. Decide which items are your favorites, and pack the rest away for a month. If you don’t go back into the box to retrieve any of those items, you can probably do without them altogether.

9. Repurpose whenever possible. Use mason jars, wooden boxes that were original packaging for nicer beauty products, and small tin pails from the garden department to help you sort items together and make them look nice.

10. Even simple plastic bins from the dollar store can look great if they are in the same color scheme and labelled nicely.

11. Update your light bulbs. It’s hard to organize what you can’t see.

12. If you are updating your space, ensure there are plenty of drawers to store your beauty products in. Most basic vanities don’t come with drawers. With drawers, you can easily separate your beauty stash and keep your counters clear so you have room to prep each morning.

There is a weird magnetic field between my garage door and the stoplight half a mile down the road. So often I get pulled back to my garage five minutes after leaving to gather some forgotten item. Sometimes it happens more than once on the same trip!

Do you often leave the house more than once?

Yes, I’m organized, but it still happens. Hey, no one is perfect.

I recently started investigating why this happens and whether it can be fixed.

Harold Taylor, a noted time management expert, told about how he takes a daily walk, after which he sits down to write an article or two. One year his kids got him a portable music device for his walks. He enjoyed the music, but he found that when he reached his destination, the articles wouldn’t come. What changed? His brain needed the quiet time during his walk for him to consistently write articles.

Many people today just don’t have any quiet time in their day. Certainly, those five minutes between the back door and the garage are hectic, and hectic is where chaos happens.

Hectic is where things get forgotten, accidents happen, and commitments are missed.

Unfortunately, my brain thinks the five minutes after I get in the car are my quiet time. After I’ve cleared the kitchen counter, grabbed my bags, and made it out of the clutches of little hands who want just one more hug — sitting in the car IS quiet time. With all of the household and family duties behind, my mind is captive in the car and starts planning the details of events I’m heading to and the commitments in the rest of my day.

That is when forgotten details pop into my head, usually right around the time I reach that first stoplight.

If this happens to you more often than you’d like, there is an easy fix. Actually, two fixes:

1. Checklists — Similar to notepads that some people hang on the doorknob to remind them of things to take out of the house, I have one inside my car that I check before leaving for an appointment. Going through the checklist forces me to switch gears before I leave the driveway, and at least I don’t forget the obvious items. For a client who often has a dead battery because she leaves her car lights on, I created a checklist of what to do before she exits her car with 3 things on it:
•  Turn off headlights (her car doesn’t have automatic shut off)
     •  Check teeth and lipstick
•  Grab purse and lunch bag
Could you make a checklist like this?

2. Breathe — Give it a moment, maybe in the front seat while you are still parked in the driveway. It’s easy to stay on the go, not miss a step in your day, but 60 seconds with your eyes closed, mentally running through the task coming up next might be all you need. Picture what you’ll be carrying, where you’re going, who you’ll see, and your essential items will pop into your head more times than not.

So simple, right? Simple, but not easy. If you do one of these fixes, you’ll be more less frantic and more organized. If you do both, you’ll be an organizing rock star. I think I hear your band warming up now!

The NAPO Annual Conference & Organizing Expo is the professional development event for organizers who wish to further their education, discover industry advancements, and form lasting friendships with fellow organizing professionals. It is held in various cities throughout the country each spring and consequently can be a costly investment for our members. Through the replica watches generosity of our first NAPO-GPC scholarship partner, Marty Ingram, iphone 6s remplacement écran owner of PhillyJunk.com, a scholarship fund was created in 2012. Since then, the Scholarship fund has enabled three NAPO-GPC chapter members to attend the annual NAPO Annual Conference & Organizing Expo. In order to be eligible, the member must currently hold a volunteer position within the chapter and attend regular meetings. Covered expenses include conference registration fees, airfare, dining costs, and hotel accommodations – a tremendous benefit to our dedicated members who take initiative in our chapter and show dedication to our profession. Last year our winner was Jen Bowen of Contemporary Organizing. Here’s what she had to say about her experience:

“In 2014, I was the lucky winner of the NAPO Conference Scholarship, sponsored by PhillyJunk.com. This year’s NAPO Conference was a truly spectacular experience. Amidst the gorgeous Arizona landscape, I was treated to outstanding presenters and effortless camaraderie.  During the professional workshops, I gained information and skills that will help me better serve my clients. Some of the many intriguing topics included: student organizational tools, productivity apps and home inventory software. Additionally, I learned strategies to develop my own business model and enjoyed motivating presentations from veteran organizers.
It was a great honor to represent our chapter at the national conference this year. I encourage all eligible NAPO-GPC chapter members to apply for the 2015 Scholarship, and I invite all those interested in a professional partnership with NAPO-GPC to consider a contribution to the Scholarship Fund.” ~Jen Bowen

Thank you to our 2014 NAPO-GPC Scholarship sponsor, PhillyJunk.com.

Are you one of the (scientifically identified) 6 million people who avoids shredding your sensitive documents because of your home shredder. 5.9 million of that number have actually burned up at least one home shredder at some point. 5.8 million have burned up more than one. (I might have made those numbers up.) It might be twice that high. Most families should own a cross-cut personal shredder. They are actually very easy to keep in good shape.
Here’s help on how to use your home paper shredder.

• Buy the best home shredder you can afford, without breaking the bank. You can find many options under $50. If you work at home or like to shred a lot, you might need a higher capacity machine costing between $50 and $200.
• Know your sheet capacity. If the shredder says, “Max. 8 Sheets,” like mine does, it really means 4-6 sheets of regular copy paper at a time. It does not allow for heavier paper, plastic, brochures, or folded items.
• Don’t try to shred everything. Don’t just shred everything because it has your name or address on it. Information anyone can get from a quick Google search or from the phone book doesn’t need to be shredded. However, anything with financial account numbers on them (like your bank statements and brokerage accounts) should be shredded. Your grocery store junk mail, just because you may have a frequent shopper club number there, is not sensitive information. Really, it’s not. Nor are most of your utility bills, believe it or not. Don’t make your little household shredder work harder than it needs to. Use it only for what needs to be shredded.
• If the shredder is usually unplugged for safety or other reasons, then you’ll probably be batch shredding. Your machine will only shred for 15-20 minutes before it overheats. Just give it a rest, and finish your batch another day, or after the machine has had a chance to cool down. Better yet, stop when you hear the motor or the blades laboring. That “rrr…rrr…rrr” sound means you are either feeding it too much paper, or the machine needs a break.
• Occasionally, give your shredder a little treat and lubricate the cutting blades. You can purchase special feeder sheets or shredder oil for this purpose. I’ve used my sewing machine oil with good results. You only need to do this a few times a year.
• Don’t keep shredding if the bin is full. The already shredded paper will jam up against the rotating blades, over-heating the shredder faster than needed. Empty the bin often.
• Unless your shredder specifically allows for it, don’t feed plastics through the machine. They tend to gunk up the blades. I’ve had to surgically remove hunks of melted plastic from household shredders. If your shredder is equipped to shred credit cards and/or computer disks, empty the basket of paper before shredding these items. The paper is recyclable with household recycles in most places. The disks probably aren’t. Throw plastic bits out in the trash separately from the paper.

If you follow these guidelines, your home shredder should do the job for many years. However, if you regularly have more than 2 shopping bags full of material to shred, you can search for free or low-cost community shredding events in your area. Just Google “shred events” and your city, zip code, or region. You can find a current list of shredding events in the greater Philadelphia region

Here is a list of breitling replica shredding events in the Delaware Valley. If you are planning to attend an event, it’s wise to check the website or to call or e-mail to make sure the event isn’t canceled due to weather or other circumstances.

If you can’t wait for an event, try drop-off shredding services from Staples, Office Depot, Wiggins, or Mail Source (Springfield) for about $1 per pound.

Happy shredding!

Saturday, May 31  10 am – 12 pm  Philadelphia
Passyunk Square Civic Association (PSCA)
1400 East Passyunk Avenue & Reed  Philadelphia, PA 19147

Events

Friday, June 6  3 pm – 5:30 pm  West Chester
West Chester Wiggins Auto Tags
1301 West Chester Pike  West Chester, PA 19380
2 paper grocery bags are $10.00
http://www.wigginsshredding.com/residential/tear-fests.php

Saturday, June 21  9 am – 12 pm  Glenside Residents Only
Copper Beach Elementary School
825 North Easton Road  Glenside, PA 19038
http://www.montcopa.org/DocumentCenter/View/6715
http://www.shredone.com/community-shredding-events

Saturday, June 21  10 am – 12 pm  West Chester
West Chester Wiggins Auto Tags
1301 West Chester Pike  West Chester, PA 19380
2 paper grocery bags are $10.00
http://www.wigginsshredding.com/residential/tear-fests.php

Saturday, June 28  9 am – 12 pm  Doylestown
Doylestown EAC Central Park
Wells Road  Doylestown, PA 18901
http://www.titanshredding.com/Community-Shredding-Services.aspx#calendar

Saturday, July 12  9 am – 12 pm Abington Residents only
Abington Township Public Works
2201 Florey Lane  Abington, PA 19001
http://www.shredone.com/community-shredding-events