Organization Quest

Congratulations, You're Visitor 1,000

This week, Organization Quest saw three milestones:  Monday was the first time the Quest had over 100 hits in one day; Thursday was the one-month anniversary of going online; and today saw a total of 1,000 hits since the blog's inception.

When I started this blog, I'd hoped that my journey to get progressively more organized would find an audience.  I didn't anticipate we'd have visitors from Germany, the UK, France, Norway, Canada, Australia and Palestine, and US traffic from all  corners and everywhere in-between.  I'm not sure if the appeal is the subject of organizing itself or watching someone attempt, no matter how clumsy, to become organized. I'm just grateful that people have found Organization Quest, and have taken steps in starting or continuing a Quest of their own.

"Aren't people who write organization blogs already organized?" Alpay had asked, when I had told him my concept for this blog.

"That's where the 'Quest' part comes in," I said.  "Otherwise, I'd call it www.I'm-organized-and-you're-not-so-there!.com, and what would be the point in that?"

More Filing Strategies For The Filing Inept: The Two-Pass Approach

When it comes to filing, I favor a two-pass approach: As I make my way through a pile of papers, I first make the decision whether or not I’ll keep the item. I’ve found that when I make the save-or-toss decision en masse in this way, the second part of the process, which is the actual filing, goes much more quickly.

Yes, yes, yes, I'm aware that this flies in the face of Conventional Filing Wisdom, which, as discussed in yesterday's post, only works for people who don't actually need filing guidelines. But to paraphrase the subtitle of a popular how-to book series, if you're like the rest of us, trying to do everything at once--deciding what to toss and what to file, categorizing and preparing the keepers and then actually filing them--is over-ambitious.  It's much easier to sift through a pile in front of a shredder with save-or-toss the only decision to be made.  Those who are predispositioned to be a grind can make piles-by-topic of the things that need to be filed.

Before the second part of the process, the filing part, I gather up my supplies:  scissors, stapler, binder and paper clips, and my label-maker.  I also make sure I have a variety of interior and exterior folders in each of the colors I use, so I can make new folders if need be.  If the items have multiple pages, I put them in order and staple or bind them as needed before filing them away. 

Lickity Split, of course, is always happy to lend a helping paw.

Filing Strategies For The Filing Inept

One of the fundamental rules of filing mandates you never read, scan, puruse, or otherwise allow yourself to be absorbed in what you are filing, nevermind the fact that you probably wouldn't have bothered to save something in the first place unless it was at least a little bit interesting.  Such rules don't work because the people who make them up don't understand how a filing backlog can happen in the first place; their own files consist mostly of financial papers.  It never occurs to them to keep a running file on a variety of interests, hobbies, ideas, and projects.  These are people who don't appreciate the entertainment value of decyphering a faded receipt; neither do they see the point of keeping old magazines or catalogs.  A performance review from a former job or postcards from a friend's 1995 trip to Mexico hold absolutely no interest for them. 

If you happen to be one of these people, then you can follow conventional filing rules with great confidence, because Suze Orman or Julie Morgenstern can tell you exactly how long to keep your tax returns and that will be that.  But the rest of us need to come up with filing stratgies of our own. 

As I dealt with my Supreme Paper Mess , I was continually assailed by articles, newsletters, brochures, manuals, project lists,  alumni magazines, product information, old cards and letters, and journal entries, among other things, whose interest value rivaled the Olympics.  Many of these materials had landed in the To File pile that consisted of the floor of my study precisely because I had intended to go through them but hadn't found the time. 

I didn't want to derail my efforts by settling down with a cup of coffee and a two year old copy of University of Pittsburgh's alumni magazine; neither did I have any intention of throwing it out before getting a chance to look through it.  The compromise I made is one that has ended up working surprisingly well:  I created a To Read folder.  Whenever I have a few minutes, I pull an item or two out of the file and puruse to my hear's content. 

I'll take a catalog or magazine to work to look through on my lunch hour.  Most often when I'm done, I toss the whole thing; occassionally I'll clip a specific item or article.  When I go home, I'll file the clipping in the appropriate folder. 

I also like to choose a few things from my To Read folder in the early evening, after I come home from work but before I'm ready to do anything new.  I'm not a big TV watcher, and it's nice to develop a routine for such transition times.  Time spent in a waiting room, waiting to pick the kids up from an activity or from school, commute time via train, or before-bed reading time are possibilities that might work for other people.

Some Tasks Are Just Too Pressing To Dread

Last night after Snapdragon, poor thing, barfed as if to reprise Linda Blair's role in the Exorcist, he made for his kitchen hidey hole in that no-man's land between two cabinets. Stacy's suggestion that repairing the gap go the top of my chore List came back to me just like it does on soap operas, complete with the requisite Look of Concern accompanied by a music cue, but I didn't have time to savor the life-imitating-soap-opera moment as I was in the middle of transferring pie crust to pie pan just as Snapdragon made his attempt to squeeze his 6-pound body through a 3" hole.  Alpay grabbed and soothed the kitten, I finished the pie, Alpay cleaned the barf, and I got out the duct tape, some cardboard, and the scissors. Some tasks are just too pressing to Dread.

Task:  Repairing Snap's Hidey Hole

Division of Labor

Call me nosy, but in my view few topics are as diverting as the agreements other people make to divvy up chores.  Like most things that are truly interesting, it’s a tough topic to broach. It always amazes me that people can drone on and on about what political candidate or stock offering they favor, but good luck finding out just who scrubs the grout in the bathroom. 

And yet:  people want to know, desperately, and not just people who have organization blogs.  People wonder how others negotiate household division of labor.  Who does the dishes, who the laundry, and how is this decided?  Does the person who objects the least or is bothered the most end up doing the chore?  Or are the chores split 50-50 down the middle?  Is there a work-outside-the-home/work-inside-the-home ratio?

For us, we’ve found that down-the-middle chore splitting does not work at all, partly because there are chores that one of us passionately cares about while the other could care less, and partly there are things one or the other of us simply isn’t very good at.  There are also things that one of us enjoys that the other one hates.

Because it is widely known that People Who Blog Have No Shame, here is my list of who-does-what:

Alpay:

• Clean cat box daily
• Deal with all things financial:  bills, checking account, stocks, etc.
• Do dishes 80% of the time
• Do all errands—groceries, hardware, supplies, cat food, etc.
• Deal with the car—oil changes, washing, etc.
• Cook 20% of the time
• Morning chores:  feed and water the cats, take out garbage, make tea, water plants
• Sweep 50% of the time
• Clean refrigerator 70% of the time

Anne-Marie:

• Clean bathrooms
• Do laundry—sort, wash, iron, fold, put away
• Do dishes 20% of the time
• Do all project work:  paint, supervise construction, clean filters, organize closets and drawers
• Put groceries away
• File
• Do most non-daily work:  polish silver, mirrors, and windows, clean baseboards, scrub sinks, mop, polish furniture, clean stove and microwave
• Cook 50% of the time (the rest of the time we go out)
• Make lunches
• Sweep 50% of the time
• Clean refrigerator 30% of the time

Illogical Marriage Rules

There are many things I Am Not Allowed To Tell Anyone about Alpay:  that he is a pillowhog, for one, or that he spends more time in the bathroom every morning than my sixteen year-old niece.  These prohibitions make sense, but other things I Am Not Allowed to Tell Anyone puzzle me.  I Am Not Allowed, for instance, To Tell Anyone Alpay is a poet, and that he went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.  I Am Not Allowed To Tell Anyone that he has a book out, or that a Pulitzer-Prize winner wrote the introduction, nor am I Allowed To Tell Anyone that Alpay has won the state art award in two of the last four states we’ve lived.  He is allowed to tell people these on his web site, however, apparently with the hope that nobody actually visits it. 

Other women may have had love poems written about them, but how many men write poems for their kitty?  Or  love poems that include mention of their wife’s compulsive paperclip collection?  There are reasons why after 19 years, we’re still going strong.

Mount Laundry

A few posts back, I said I've never  misplaced a baby in a load of laundry, which is true enough.  What I didn’t menion is that until this weekend, my laundry was piled so high, you could lose an English Sheepdog in it. 

I actually love doing laundry, which makes it puzzling as to why I put it off for so long.  I like sorting things into piles; I like that clean laundry smell when pulling warm laundry from the dryer.  I like folding.  I got a special folding apparatus from the Container Store that folds anything from dress shirts and pants to tee shirts and bath towels into identically-sized rectangles.  I love identically-sized rectangles. 

I’ve long noticed that if I do laundry 20 minutes a day—whether sorting or washing and drying or folding or ironing and putting things away—I stay completely on top of laundry.  I also know that whenever I let it go, the amount of time it takes to catch up is directly proportionate to the 20-minute a day principle.  Don’t do laundry for a week, and I’ll have a couple hours to do on the weekend. In this case, I had about 8 hours of laundry to do in order to catch up.  You do the math. 

And yet:  it’s not like I never did laundry in the last month.  More like over the past couple months, I kept doing laundry yet never got around to putting the clean it away. So this weekend I got out the iron and the ironing board, the wrinkle releaser and that folding apparatus. 

After the first hour, you could still hide a German Sheppard in the pile.  An hour later, you couldn’t hide a Sheppard, but you could lose a Cocker Spaniel.  Yet another hour later, you wouldn’t be able to conceal a Spaniel, but could cover a Lhasa Apso. At four hours, you still couldn’t find a Yorkshire Terrier.  “Not a Yorkshire Terrier,” Alpay corrected when I asked his opinion.  “ A Yorkie-poo.”

Somewhere around the Lhasa Apso mark, I realized that there was actually another pile.  It was in the master closet and could hide a Cocker Spaniel.  It took another three and a half hours to deal with that; at least now we can sit in our bedside chair and we finally have something to wear.  But it's those perfectly folded teeshirts that make it all worthwhile.

Then Again, Snapdragon Is No Angel, Either . . .

Leave it to Snapdragon to find a teeny-tiny crack in the toe-kick that apparently leads to a no-man's-land between the cabinets. As Stacy said: maybe fixing that should go to the top of  your List.

Every family has its problem child . . .

. . . and ours is Lickity Split.

The Difference Between Heaven and Purgatory

At risk of belaboring the obvious, everyone knows there’s a Container Store in heaven; what I worry about is whether or not there is one in purgatory, you know, just in case. Generally I try to maintain a positive attitude about these things, but it’s important to be practical. If by chance I miss the direct flight to paradise, at least I want to make sure I have access to cedar-scented shoe trees. I may have Supreme Paper Mess, but my shoes are very organized and I want to keep them that way.

It’s occurred to me that the difference between heaven and purgatory may not be whether or not there is a Container Store, but what store location the afterlife Container Store is modeled on. I hope the afterlife Container Store is just like the one on North Avenue, with the kitchen supplies to the right and the closet supplies to the left, just like it’s supposed to be. I’ve been to Container Stores in other cities and haven’t been able to find the spice jars or drawer doublers, which is just wrong. 

Before we bought our place in Chicago, we considered moving to Seattle to be near my family. Had I known at the time that the only Container Store in the entire state of Washington is in Bellevue Square, and that the Bellevue Square Container Store has file boxes where the kitchen supplies are supposed to be, we could have saved a lot of time and anguish. I love my family and I love the Pacific Northwest, but while I’m still living, I’m not ready to trade down my North Avenue Container Store just yet.

What's Been Working Re: Dinner

We need a break from the Supreme Paper Mess. Maybe I'm hungry, because I'm thinking about dinner.  That's the thing about food: in terms of providing a distraction, it's absolutely reliable, hands-down.

At risk of replicating one of those menu grids that work for no one, here's an outline of what's been working for us this summer when it comes to dinner:

Usually I will make one chicken-or-fish dish a week; as a former vegetarian who still prefers food of the flesh-free variety, this is about as much flesh-cooking as I can handle. 

When it comes to chicken-or-fish cooking, I’m pretty much of a three-trick pony, with the chicken recipe I noted in my recent post being a favorite.  I can also make ground-turkey sloppy joes, my version of which is indistinguishable from ground-turkey chili, which in turn is pretty much the same as what my mother used to call “Hungarian Goulash” although no Hungarian I’ve ever met finds it remotely Hungarian, probably because they don’t have ground-turkey sloppy joes or groud-turkey chili in Hungary.   I also make marinated salmon, using Alpay’s recipe.  That’s it on the flesh front.  Usually whatever I make is enough for two meals for the two of us—dinner the first night and lunch the next day.

Alpay then makes his own meat dish, usually involving an animal, unlike chicken or fish, that has a Cuteness Quotient that precludes the possibility that it is suitable for human consumption, i.e. lamb or some Cow Product.  He makes enough for a couple meals. On these Neanderthal nights, I’m free to suit myself.  Oftentimes, I'll make something I love that he hates, like egg salad; I’m often happy having entree-sized portions of whatever sides we're having that night, or with breakfast foods like turkey bacon and eggs or berries and cream.

Once a week I’ll make a soup.  In the summer, chilled soups are nice.  Last night I made Vichyssoise; a couple times in recent weeks it’s been gazpacho.  Cream of broccolli and roasted egglant are also reliable favorites.  I’ll make a side or two to go with the soup du jour—cauliflouer “faux potato” salad to go with gazpacho, zucchini fritters to go with the egglant soup. The soup-and-sides provide a couple dinners.

Lately I’ve been making a crustless spinache quiche once a week; this works well for breakfast and for lunch if we have our dinners otherwise planned.

We’ve been trying to limit our wheat intake, but once a week I’ll boil up some whole wheat pasta.  An easy accompaniment is to fry up whatever vegetables are on hand with a few minced garlic cloves in olive oil.  Last week I fried some mushrooms and some garlic in a bit of butter, then pureed the mix using a little chicken stock, finishing up with a half cup or so of heavy cream. It was delicious and made for a nice lunch the next day.

Lastly, I’ll do something special about once a week:  recently that’s been crepes stuffed with Turkish-style stewed leeks.  In the past, the speciality has been pico di gallo with homemade tortillas to accompany chicken, or festively stuffed eggplants—the name in Turkish is “Imam Bayildi” which translates to “The Priest Fainted.”

Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables/salads round out the week’s worth of menus. On average, we spend about $150 a week, which includes cleaning supplies, paper supplies like napkins and paper towels and toilet paper, and personal supplies like shampoo and razors, as well as copious quantities of kitty litter and Fancy Feast. 

Now I Don't Feel So Bad

At least I haven't misplaced a baby in a pile of laundry.  Yet.
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How Bad Can it Be?

When I tell people that they Just Have No Idea How Supreme My Paper Mess Is, the most frequent response is, “Well, how bad can it be?”  What they really mean is: I Wish You’d Post Some Pictures Already.  And so I’ll oblige. 

Above: before starting. 

Depressingly, it actually looked worse a couple days later after I'd already spent an hour going through things (right). This is because the kittens kept diving-bombing the piles I'd made.

It took more two hours to go through all the stuff on the floor, but afterwards it did look better; see below:

It took another hour to go through the stuff on the desk:

It took yet another hour to go through the stuff that had been piled on the hatboxes I use as a side table: 

 

At this point, what had been on the floor, on the desk, and on the hatboxes had been reduced to one 7" high pile:

Then I started the filing, completely starting from scratch using the categories discussed in yesterday's post.   After another hour, the pile was  4½” high; another hour later it was 3½” ; yet an hour more it was 2¼”; then 1¼”.  I then spent a good two hours making new labels for the hanging files with the Smead labeling system I favor.  Time-consuming, yes, (although much of that time was getting our old jack-of-all-trades-master-at-none scanner/printer/copier to cooperate), but I’ve found that the functionality of my filing system relies on the visibility of the file labels. 

I ended up using only 20 hanging folders, and had plenty of room left in my file cart.  After another half-hour of filing.  11½ hours after I'd started (spread out over a number of days), I was done with the first leg of my Supreme Paper Mess. 

 

Filing System 1,310,001

The key to reigning in Supreme Paper Mess is finding a good filing system that works for you. This seems obvious, but a quick Google search suggests it can’t be that simple or there wouldn’t be 1,310,000 results for “filing system”. Make that 1,310,001. 

For me, the filing system sweet spot rests on a balance between expandability and restraint.  I  have little use for those pre-packaged filing systems with the tabs already printed out with categories that don’t apply while altogether skipping those that do. Furthermore, I need to be able to subdivide categories when the file has accumulated so many items that  it becomes unwieldly.  The challenge for me is to limit the number of files and subfiles I have.

For years, I’ve used a system based on the five most widely-available colors for hanging files:  blue, red, yellow, green, and purple.  Along the way, I’ve found a couple other colors that I’ve picked up and do use, but the backbone of my system is built upon the first five:

Blue = writing projects.  Hanging folders for major writing projects; interior folders for  Research, Contacts, etc. for the particular project.

Red = action to take; also used for work  Hanging folders for To Do, To Read, Work; interior folders for sub-categories, like Flex Spending or Performance Reviews by year.

Yellow = home.  Hanging folders for Warranties, Owner’s Manuals, Condo Association, Design Projects; interior folders for each project.

Green = finances.  Hanging folders for  Monthly Bills, Taxes, Insurance; interior folders for each the type of bill (Phone, Cable, etc.), tax year, and type of insurance.

Purple = fun. This includes creative projects and vacations; also used for design school.  Hanging folders for each class, general school information, Scrapbooking, Needlepoint, and Vacations; interior folders for the different assignments or different aspect of school (Admissions, Library Resources), vacation destination, or project for the crafting folders.

The other colors/categories I have include:

Orange = family.  Hanging folders for my Dad, my brother and sister in-law and their kids, and my sister and brother in-law and their daughter, where I file correspondence, gift ideas, etc.

Gray = diet/heath.  Hanging folders for Fitness Assessment, Diet, Exercise.

Getting Started on The Supreme Paper Mess

When I began to tackle the Supreme Paper Mess, I decided to start anew.  I didn’t want to be distracted by having to make room in the old filing cabinets I have, nor did I want to have pilfer folders already in use. The importance of allowing oneself to buy new supplies—and then using that fun, excited energy to help follow through with a task is something I learned from celebrity organizer and author Regina Leeds in her book, The Zen of Organizing.  And so I bought a  box of multi-colored hanging files, along with box of matching interior folders.  As a special treat, I bought a rolling filing cart that I especially like because it’s almost twice as long as normal carts and it fits nicely under my desk. I got refills for my label maker, and gathered up all my supplies:  stapler, scissors, label maker, pen, notebook, hanging and interior folders, and hanging folder labels.  And then I went at it. 

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Supreme Paper Mess as Past Life Payback

I have several friends who subscribe to the idea that some place, some where, wandering this earth is their Soul Mate, that one person who understands their every thought, finishes their every sentence, likes everything they do, and never leaves the toilet seat up in the middle of the night. 

I believe in soul mates but think if they find you in this life, most likely it's so they can get back for something you did in the last one.  How else to explain the neatnik-slob attraction? 

My husband is not a neatnik but finds paper in all its permutations—receipts and take-out menus, flyers and coupons, newsletters, junk mail of all types, notices important and not, newspapers and journals and magazines, business cards and scribbled lists and any kind of packaging—as an annoyance, and so throws it all out.  This horrifies me, which in turn horrifies him, and soon enough we engage in a never-ending cycle whereby each of us is convinced we are saving the other by undoing what the other has done.

After nineteen years, we’ve come to an uneasy truce: my husband gives me (most) of the paperwork, which is to say that my big prize is that I get to do all the filing. 

I don’t know exactly how this happened, but suspect past-life payback is somehow involved. 

What’s Your Ground Zero?

Perhaps because I tend to steer conversation to the topic of organization (“Yes, Michael Phelps is some athelete; say, how do you think he organizes his Christmas ornaments?”) people assume I Must Be Very Organized, and ask me for advice, most often on Where to Start or if I endorse a particular organizing system or strategy.

What tends to work for me is what I call the “ground zero” approach.  Because so many cleaning and organizing tasks are predicated on others, I’ve found that if I can identify the premier prerequisite for order in any given room, everything else quickly falls in place. 

The day I decided to start this blog, I cleaned the kitchen.  I emptied the dishdrain and the dishwasher, did the dishes, cleared the counters, scrubbed them down and cleaned everything that went back on them.  I cleaned the stove top; I cleaned the sink.  I got all the grody stuff behind the faucet, wiped the walls, mopped the floor.  We have a small kitchen—8’ x 5’—but it still took more than an hour.  When I was done, I decided that I was going to try to be better about maintaining it. 

A couple days later, with the counters cleared and the dishdrain and dishwasher empty, it wasn’t such a big deal to empty out the refrigerator, including all the shelves and bins, then scrub everything down and wipe the bottles and containers going back.  I was also surprised to see how little food we actually had; the fridge had been stuffed before I started. 

The newly organized fridge made quick work of writing the grocery list.  It was easy to put away the groceries, too, and I felt inspired to arrange the produce in colorful bowls.  With attractive, accessible food, both Alpay and I  enjoyed cooking more.  The quality of our meals went up while the cost dipped to less than half of what we’d recently been spending going out.  And the more time I spent in the kitchen, the more motivated I was to find places for things that didn’t have homes or to tackle items I’d been putting off, like cleaning and organizing the glass display shelves. 

Cleaning the kitchen turned out to be my “ground zero”—I knew it as soon as I was done that first day.  We’ve kept it up since then, and along with it, the refrigerator and cooking too.  With maintaining the kitchen now routine, I could turn my attention to my next “ground zero”—the Supreme Paper Mess in my study.  But that’s a post for another day.

How Long Does It Take: Data From The Chore Log

A couple of weeks ago, I promised to keep a chore log, the idea being that accurate data is useful in scheduling chores and perhaps combatting procrastination.  Here are some preliminary findings:

• emptying dishwasher:  6.8 minutes (based on 5 times—longest = 9 minutes; shortest = 4 minutes)
• washing dishes:  7.2 minutes (based on 15 times—longest = 27 minutes; shortest = 1 minute)
• cleaning refrigerator: removing all items including trays and bins, washing fridge inside and out, wiping items before returning them inside:  1 hour and 57 minutes (1 hour and 19 minutes to clean inside; 29 minutes to wipe and return items; 9 minutes to clean top of fridge)
• freshening up fridge (wiping, organizing inside), one week after cleaning: 6 minutes
• picking up living room:  20 minutes
• freshening bathroom, 1 week after power-cleaning:  20 minutes (includes quick mop)
• making dinner (includes cleaning as I go; usually includes a minimum of: dinner for two nights, one breakfast, and one lunch, for two people) an hour and 37 minutes (based on 5 times—longest = 3 hours and 10 minutes; shortest = an hour and 18 minutes)
• putting groceries away after big, once-a-week trip: 28 minutes (based on two times—longest = 36 minutes; shortest = 20 minutes)
• cleaning kitchen if We Really Let It Go (includes emptying dishwasher and dishdrain, doing dishes, putting things on counters away, wiping counters, and mopping floor:  60 minutes (based on two times—longest = 70 minutes; shortest = 50 minutes)

Wordle This

Sometimes, quite illogically, I worry that I will become so consumed with, I don’t know, filing my tax receipts or some other equally odious task on my Dread List, that all other interests will spontaneously cease and my sad little life will become a cautionary tale for others:  you know, she used to be so normal before she got on that organizing kick. 

In order to save myself from such a fate, immediate action is imperative. It actually doesn’t matter what I do, as long as it doesn’t involve cleaning, disinfecting, filing, shopping, scrubbing, polishing, or otherwise putting myself at risk of being organized. This calls for resourceful evasive maneuvers.

Wordle has endless procrastination-worthy potential.  Type in a web address or a group of words, and a pattern emerges with point-and-click design options.  And so I present the organizationquest.com Wordle Dread List.  It’s okay, kids, you can try this at home.

Chicken is the New Black

When I was growing up, my mother bought the kind of magazines with a month’s worth of menus printed somewhere near the back.  The ingredients for every meal were accounted for in the accompanying, tear-out shopping list, and a certain planned amount of a dish prepared on one day—say mashed potatoes—would serve as a building block for the next’s day’s meal of shepard’s pie, which is a brilliant idea if you happen to like shepard’s pie or if you discipline yourself and your family not to eat more than the allotted serving of mashed potatoes. 

Who could stick to such a regimen?  One person, maybe, but an entire family?  How likely is that?  At some point I realized that the grids and their shopping lists were analogous to the 98-pound teenagers who model women’s clothing:  water-in-the-desert mirages that are appealing in theory if not in fact. 

A former French roommate once informed me that all a woman really needs is one perfect dress, preferably black, an axiom I revise in order to apply to what really counts, which is dinner.  In this way, the perfect chicken is the new black—you can dress it up or dress it down, it goes with anything, and it will never make your butt look big. 

I happen to know the perfect chicken recipe.  I made it tonight, in fact, after searching 20 minutes for the magazine it appeared in, which is twice the amount of hands-on time it takes to make.  I didn’t find the magazine, but I did find it online, and so I thought I’d share it with you.  Read first the article about roasting chicken, as it provides the general principle and the key to really, really good chicken.  The second article is for the rub that goes on the chicken.

Simple Roast Chicken:

http://food.realsimple.com/realsimple/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1145940

Rosemary, Lemon, and Garlic Rub

http://food.realsimple.com/realsimple/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1142046