Charging Valet for Handheld Electronic Devices

With this charging valet, you can store and charge up to 6 devices at the same time. A hidden power strip keeps all the cords neat and tidy and the wood decor makes it look stylish enough to leave out in plain site. This is the perfect product to keep your handheld electronics organized!

Desktop Family Charging Station

Here’s a smaller version that will hold up to 3 electronic devices. This item is small enough to sit on your desk and would be great for offices and home offices.

ReSource Power Station, Black (Pack of 2)

This also keeps cords neat and tidy and out of sight. The adjustable tabs can fit any size electronic device and three adaptors can plug into the Power Station and one central cord which plugs into the wall outlet powers all three units. This item is also small enough to fit on a desk top or kitchen counter.

As you can see, there are a lot of solutions for keeping all that electronic clutter under control. Since my two older kids both received a Nintendo DS for Christmas, it looks like we need one of these asap! I think I am going with the first one. I love it!

Post from: Blisstree

Charging Stations – Where’s My Desk Wednesday

• Do You Have a Household Information Center?
• Organizing Mail Clutter
• Taming the Cord Beast

I hope you are all recuperating from Christmas!

Post from: Blisstree

Where’s My Desk Wednesday Round-up

Post from: Blisstree

Home Office Organization – Where’s My Desk Wednesday

For those of you that are new and have no clue what I am talking about, lol, here is a list of my Monday through Friday topics:

• Motivate Me Monday
• Tick Tock Tuesday
• Where’s My Desk Wednesdays
• Tame Those Toys Thursdays
• Find It Friday

Here’s a brief description for each day which I posted awhile back:

• Motivate Me Mondays - Every Monday I will issue you a challenge. Either to go through one drawer in your house and purge and organize it. Or, to take a trash bag, go through one room in your house, set the timer for 5 minutes, and get rid of some stuff. Or, to sit down and write out a step by step plan for the room that bothers you the most. This plan would involve everything it is going to take to get your room back! From beginning to end.

• Tick Tock, There Goes That Darn Clock Tuesdays – This day is all about time management. We will learn together how to get back our days and weeks and be able to look back on them with a smile on our face.

• Where is My Desk? Wednesdays - This day is all about that home office. From bills to files to piles and piles of paper. We will also cover the computer, your office supplies and when to turn off that phone so you can get some work done. We have voice mail for a reason people!!

• Tame Those Toys Thursdays - This isn’t just going to be about toys. Toys just happened to start with a T. This day is all about your kids. (If you don’t have any, well, email this day to a friend who does.) We will be talking about kids’ schedules, bedrooms, school work and whatever else is in between. Teaching our kids good organization skills at a young age is something they will take with them and benefit from for the rest of their lives.

• Find It Fridays – Are you sick and tired of always looking for things? Do you find yourself rummaging through drawers and closets and under the bed for who knows what? Well, this day is all about finding everything within a few seconds. It really is a good thing to know where your keys are as you are leaving the house. Or to know exactly where those twin sheets are when you need them. Or to be able to look in your closet and see exactly what you have in your wardrobe.

I’m also adding a topic to Saturdays and Sundays:

• Supper Saturdays will be all about meal planning, grocery shopping and kitchen related organizing.
• Sweep Through Sundays will be a day that I “sweep” through the b5media blogs and find topics that other bloggers have written that I feel you can benefit from. We have an amazing group of bloggers here and they all have something great to share.

Alright, I think that does it! Let’s get started….

Post from: Blisstree

A Note from Declutter It!

Last week I talked about creating a Household Information Center. Part of my center includes menu planning and coupon clipping. So, for my series on The Household Information Center, I am going to start with talking about groceries. Why? Well, for one reason, I need to get back into the groove of shopping smarter and doing better at planning meals. Like I said, I am revamping my system too.

Have you ever played or heard of The Grocery Game? I used too be very involved with it and then for some unknown reason to me, I stopped. Funny how that happens.

Basically the Grocery Game is a great way to save a whole lot of money on your groceries. When I was participating, I cut our weekly groceries down from $100 a week to anywhere between $20 and $40 a week. Yeah, it’s that good. Why did I stop again?

Here’s a brief summary of how it works:

• It is $10 every 8 weeks to participate. (You get to try it out with a $1 4-week trial first.) The “game” pays for itself.
• You choose the store you want to shop at (and yes, you can pick more than one, but it;s $5 extra per store) and every week a list is available for you to print.
• The list is a combination of store sales and what coupons, from the Sunday paper,  to use with these store sales to get more bang for your buck.
• You print out your list, clip the coupons you need, head to the store and save money.
• It took me about 8 weeks to really start saving money. You need a few weeks to get your coupon collection going.

Could I sit down every week and go through the flyers and my coupons and do a list myself for free? Well, yes and I have tried that on many occasions. I stopped for two reasons though: 1. Sheer lack of time and 2. The list that comes out has store savings that are NOT listed in the Sunday flyer. The creator of the Grocery Game has secret spies or something in each store.

The Grocery Game website also has some other wonderful features:

• A forum with meal ideas and many other helpful hints
• Savings stories
• Tips from Teri, the creator
• The ability to earn free weeks by having them email your friends about it. You can earn up to 12 free weeks for every 3 friends referred.

I just signed up with the gorcery game again and am looking forward to saving some money from my family. This will help me tremendously with meal planning. Now I just need to decided what I am going to do with the money I save. That is one of the best parts. Don’t just let the money you save fall into the cracks of your budget. Make a plan for it and it will make coupon clipping so much more enjoyable!

Post from: Blisstree

The Grocery Game

Do you have one area where you keep all the information related to running your house? For example: the family calendar, meal planning, mail and paper, bill paying, etc.

If not, what are you doing to keep up with your family’s activities and meals and bills and all of that stuff that is necessary to keep up with? Is your system working or not working and if it’s not, why?

I feel that having one area for household information is very necessary for me. You may not feel that you need this and every one is wired differently. Personally, if I didn’t have a family calendar, I would never show up to things and if we didn’t have a system for bills and mail, well we would have a lot of mad people calling our house and I’m pretty sure we would lose the dog and at least one child under mounds and mounds of mail.

Lately I’ve been noticing that my household information center needs some help. I haven’t been planning meals very well due to some various reasons that I won’t even go into and I feel that I am letting events slip through the cracks that aren’t making it on the calendar. So I am going to be doing some revamping and I am joining you to follow along with me if you’d like.

I believe that the household information center is the foundation of my house running smoothly. When it gets out of wack, so does the rest of my house and my time.

Over the course of the next few weeks, on Where’s My Desk Wednesday (your information center does not have to be set up at a desk, but we’ll go over that later), we will discuss all the ends and outs of getting the foundation of your house in order by creating a household information center. I’ll be joining this whole process along with you. Fall is a good time to do some revamping right?

I’ll be covering things like meal planning, the family calendar, bills and a few oher items.

I’m looking forward to it and I hope you are too. If you have any comments about this or a topic you would like me to cover in this series, please let me know. You can either leave a comment below or email me using the email link next to my name.

Post from: Blisstree

Do You Have a Household Information Center?

Now that I am back on track with my blog (which feels SO good by the way!!), I am going to start answering some reader questions that I have been getting. On my last Where’s My Desk Wednesday I talked about Creating an Efficient System for Mail, both physical mail and email. Today I will talk about physical mail.

Susan Gunelius of BrandCurve made this comment:

Mail clutter is one of my biggest organization problems. I’ve tried many systems to keep the clutter to a minimum and avoid using the kitchen table as a flat filing cabinet, but alas, the mail clutter piles up again. I have yet to find a solution that works for me. I’m open to any and all ideas!

Well Susan, let me take a crack at this by telling you what works for me and what I have set up for a few clients who are still using this system today. Next Wednesday I will tell you about some ideas I have read online or in one of my organizing books.

This is what we do around my house:

Step 1: Go through the mail immediately (with a trash can near).

Toss the junk magazines, ads and other items that you don’t want into the trash can right then and there. Do not throw any credit card offers, bank statements or anything with an account number into the trash can. You would be amazed at how easily identity theft can happen to anybody. Which leads me to my next step…..

Step 2: Put the items that need to be shredded in the “To Shred” file.

I do not throw away anything with an account number, even if it’s fake. I have a file box on my counter with a “To Shred” file folder. I put all credit card statements and other items similar to that in there and then we have a once a month shred party. No, we don’t invite the neighbors. It’s just a family party.

Step 3: File the bills to pay.

The majority of our bills are automatically withdrawn so paying bills isn’t really a big deal around our house. If you do have a problem keeping up with your bills I would highly recommend checking into the company being able to withdraw it or check with your bank.

We do have just a few of those though and they go into a “To Pay” file. We know to check that file at the very end of the month and the middle of the month.

Step 4: Put anything we want to read in the appropriate person’s file.

Everyone in my family, except for the dog and my 3 year old, has a file with their name on it. If one of us comes across a piece of mail that we know that person will want to read, we put it in their file folder. I go through my folder when I am headed out the door to a doctor’s appointment or any other kind of appointment that I know has waiting involved. If I am really in a hurry, I can just grab the whole file and go.

So, those 4 steps literally take a few seconds and it helps tremendously at taming the mail beast. There are days that our mail gets piled up because, well, we have a life but it takes just a minute or two to go through it.

This system will not work for everyone, but no system will work if you’re not consistent with it for several weeks. Give it a shot and see if it helps. I’ll have some more tips next week.

Products Pictured:

simplehuman Stainless Steel 8-gal. Trash Step Can

Eldon / Filing Crate, Collapsible, Rolled Mesh Steel, Black / ELD45309

Post from: Blisstree

Organizing Mail Clutter

For the next couple of Where’s My Desk Wednesday posts, I will cover the problem of mail. We will learn how to deal with physical mail and email.

Mail is one of the biggest clutter problems. Physical mail clutters up your counter tops, coffee tables, kitchen tables and night stands. Electronic mail clutters up your computer. Both types of mail, if not dealt with, clutter up your mind and waste valuable time.

Mail does not have to be a stressful thing. You just need a simple system and when you get the system in place, you need to be diligent in following through with it.

What are some of the annoying things you hate about mail? If you have questions you would like answered or some ideas on how you deal with mail, shoot me an email and let me know.

Post from: Blisstree

Creating an Efficient System for Mail

It’s best to have a small filing cabinet that you store everyday files in, within arms reach from your desk. If you are constantly having to get up to file your papers, 9 times out of 10 you will stack it on your desk to “file later”.

If you have a large number of papers that you file on a daily basis, put your filing cabinets on the same side of the room as your desk. If all you had to do to file something was to swing your chair around and roll on over to the cabinet, those papers have a much better chance of making it to their designated places. And in the end…your desktop has a much better chance of staying clear.

Now about categories. It is so important that you name your categories the right way. If you have too many or ones that later don’t make sense, then filing will become difficult and a pain. Then what happens? Those papers don’t get filed!

Here are some tips from Julie Morgenstern on naming files:

Keep titles simple and categories broad. The fewer place to look for things the better.

Title files based on retrieval, not storage. Select files based on where you would look for something if you needed it again.

Use titles to group similar files. A sales section can have separate files such as domestic, international.

Use titles that incite you to action. Instead of “invoices to write” use “create invoice”.

Use titles that soeak to your soul. Some examples,instead of “financial planning” make it “wealth” or instead of “articles of interest” make it “fascinating people”.

Next she says that when you are all done to reevaluate your files. Make sure they make sense to you. Make sure the files are not to thick, which means your title is too broad and make sure you don;t have too many categories. If you have an enormous pile of files, chances are you’ve got too many.

Most of all, keep your system as simple as possible.

I hope these tips will help you to clear off your desk and give those papers a home. Julie’s book has an extensive chapter on filing for those of you that feel like you need some major details.

Post from: Blisstree

Where’s My Desk Wednesday/Arrangement and Categories

Thanks to my friend Greshen, over at Home Filing Made Easy, she has provided us with some categories for financially related paper work. Here they are:

Autos, Boats & RVs

Bank Accounts

Charities

Credit

Employment

Expenses (Employment & Miscellaneous)

Insurance (Autos, Boats & RVs)

Insurance (Health & Disability)

Insurance (Home & Property)

Insurance (Life & Annuity)

Investments

Medical Records

Personal

Real Estate

Residence

Retirement Savings

Schools & Childcare

Self-Employed

Social Security

Taxes (Income)

Warranties & Receipts

Wills & Trusts

Here’s a suggestion from her also:

We recommend that the bill paying system is separate (even though they can be stored in the same file container), with one file for the bills paid and one folder for each month where the paid bills go.

Thank you Greshen!

Before you go, here is a little information about her blog and business:

Organize every paper in the house with tips, links and observations to help
you finally take control of all that paperwork you’ve been meaning to get to.

Homefile Publishing sells kits to help you organize your personal financial papers. As an almost compulsive organizer I actually enjoy looking for new ideas, people and products that help with the process. I like solutions that are effective, easy to use and have a little style to them. Let me know your organizing secrets and I’ll pass them along.

Head on over to Home Filing Made Easy. There is a ton of good information over there! Thanks again.

Post from: Blisstree

Where’s My Desk Wednesday/Filing Categories