Organize: Paper Recycling

As I've posted before I have a lot of trouble organizing my paper recycling. I have to separate color, white, to be shredded and magazines. Usually I end up with piles that turn in to bags of stuff that needs to be sorted.

Then I had inspiration hit....


We used this in our last house for extra storage and it was just gathering dust here. Now it's become the perfect home for my recycling. It's tucked in the corner of the dinning room next to Buddies feeding station.

As I'm sorting mail it's easy to pull open the drawers and put stuff where it needs to go. Or if I'm in a hurry I'll put it on top and when I go to feed Buddie I'll notice and put it away.

So now all I need to do is to set some kind of schedule for unloading it. Then it will be figuring out how to get it to the recycling center. For now I'm just happy to be avoiding my piles of junk. I'm pretty sure that Boyd will enjoy not standing at the recycling center and sorting bags.

Organize: Hot Spots

One of my goals this year is to become more organized at home. I am very organized at work, everything has a place. I really want that here at home.

Late last year a friend challenged me to do 10 mins of something around the house to help get things done. We both did very well for the first 3 weeks and then well Christmas and New Years came and we both fell off the wagon. Now we have a new goal.

We each picked a hot spot in our home - something manageable that we can keep up with and keep picked up each day. We set a goal of keeping up with our hot spots for two or three weeks - hoping that it will be a habit and then adding something else.

My friend choose keeping her couch clean - she lives on the couch in the evenings and brings work home. She has created a bag for the unfinished projects and has done fairly well at keeping things in the bag and off the couch.

Me being the over achiever decided on three things.
1. Pick up the living room every night before bed. This includes picking up dirty dishes, putting away dog toys, and folding blankets and putting them in the chair where they are usually used.
2. Keeping up with the dishes - unloading within 12 hours of being cleaned and loading each night or morning.
3. Getting our bill center organized. I have tried several different approaches and none works for the long term. One was getting a pocket folder with pockets for envelopes, stamps and addresses, bills due first half of the month, bills due second half of the month, bills to file. Another was a basket where everything including junk mail got stuck. And of course a filing cabinet that I can never seem to get to and well for me it's a black hole.

My new solution was to use a larger pocket file and label all the tabs.
In cleaning my desk I found a lot of different things that just got piled up. Including stuff for the puppies, receipts, tax information, insurance receipts, and general stuff for both Boyd and I. As a result all of the tabs are in use.


When I take the time to go through the mail I can easily file things appropriately. When I come home with a receipt or a follow up item it gets filed right away instead of piling up on the desk. Over the last two weeks the system has been working very well.

Now I just need to set appointments with myself to pay bills and to move the bills/other info from this system to the more permanent filing cabinet.

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Happy organizing/cleaning day!