Organization Quest

Supernatural Cleaning Methods

Some homeowners trying to rid a home of ghosts take a do-it-yourself approach. Others call for professional intervention. If you have more than piles of laundry or stacks of paperwork haunting your house, check out this article in the New York Times. Happy Halloween, Questers!

read the NY Times story | digg story

Revisiting Options in the Search for the Perfect Organizer, Part 4

Back to Palm?

Having decided against an organizing option that would necessitate monthly fees (i.e. software intended to be used with a Blackberry) or trusting my data with somebody's website, I decided to re-consider Personal Data Assistants.  Visor is no longer around, but Palm is, and so I thought that might work. 

I actually did buy a Palm a couple years ago, along with (believe it or not) Franklin Covey software, but when I tried (yet again) to use comma-separated values to export my data--this time from the desktop version of the old Palm software on my Mac to the desktop version of Franklin Covey on my PC, the result was uneven and messy.  Still, I made an effort and spent perhaps a good five hours or so cleaning up the file.  Nonetheless, I could never commit to the new set-up. I found the Franklin Covey software impossible to use; trying to create linkages between a person and an event--like an appointment--was excessively difficult.  The Palm itself, a Palm Z22, looked cool in a streamlined, ipod kind of way, but the screen was much smaller than my old Visor and I couldn't get used to the truncated view. Worse, it lacked the Visor's "Find" feature in which each consecutive letter provides an ever shorter list of matched entries.  This was important, as I have so many entries in my address book that scrolling through entries, coupled with the Z22's truncated window, made finding an address an exercise in frustration. 

So last month when I found myself re-considering the Palm, I wondered if perhaps the find feature I liked on the Visor was some kind of option that had been turned off on my Palm; if so, maybe my Z22 might work for me after all.  I also thought I could try using the Palm software instead of the Covey software I'd bought.  So I dug out my Z22, found the power cord, plugged it in, and . . . . nothing.  I could never get it to start again.

This could have been a tragedy:  our computer had crashed a year ago and I had not able to recover the data I'd put into the Covey program.  Now that the Palm Z22  was completely dead, there was no way to recover any of the data at all.  The only condolence was that I'd actually input relatively little data into the hand-held/Covey, because I'd been so annoyed with it.  Most of the data that had been on my Palm was the data I'd originally exported from my Mac, and the data was still on my Mac.  So my original 353 contacts were intact. The only thing I really lost was the time I'd spent cleaning up the export and trying to learn the new system.

Still, this whole experience gave me plenty of pause for thought.  While I toyed with getting a new Palm, I could never commit to going out and actually buying one.  I'd used my Z22 a mere handful of times!  A search on Consumer Reports told me my experience wasn't unique. I was also concerned that hand-held PDAs are on their way out.  Palm has been focusing its attention ever more on its phones, and it hasn't significantly updated its software in years.  I'm not saying I'd never get another Palm, but at this point, I'm not interested in getting one now.

. . . So How About Another Look At Low-Tech?

I turned my attention back to the low-tech options.  DayTimer?  Nah.  Filofax?  No.  Franklin Covey?  Please.  DayRunner?  No. . .

With all this mulling about organizers, I found that I started making lists again--of projects, of priorities, of calls to make.  I found I liked the look of brilliantly-colored fountain pen ink against the super-smooth, super-white laser jet paper Office Max offered.  That's right:  plain old printer paper!  And fountain pen ink!  That's about as low-tech as it gets!  I developed task headers that changed by the day and by circumstance:  Priorities, To Call, To Email, Errands, Clean/Organize, and Blog were some of the headers I most frequently used.  I also developed the habit of boxing the titles, the better to see them, and creating fat little bullets to make checking off items all the more satisfying. 

I wasn't a slave to updating my lists, but composed them when the mood struck, maybe a couple times a week.  After a month or so, I began to realize:  this works, I like this.  I like seeing my lists in my own handwriting.  I like writing with vivid colors on a pure white background.  I like the freedom to doodle, to circle, to underline, to cross off, without a pre-printed form to hem everything in. Once I realized this, my lists grew more exuberant:  arrows underscored the importance of a certain priority, emoticons cropped up with increasing regularity.  I found I liked writing my lists in one color and crossing them off in another.  If for some reason the time or opportunity to do a particular task had passed, I struck a line through it. Sometimes I drew a box around an unfinished item to remind me of their open status.

As much as I enjoyed my new-found To-Do list style, it didn't address my calendar issues, nor solve the problem of what to do with all those Post-its with names and numbers, email addresses and websites waiting to be input . . . somewhere.  With a regular routine now in place, the quantity of lists on hand multiplied. While I could certainly file them, but there was no simple, systematic way to organize them for easy perusal.  Maybe I could get a notebook?  But hadn't I sworn off those clumsy 3-ring binders?  I had.  And then the perfect solution suddenly seemed just so obvious.

On Saturday:  The Perfect Solution

New Technology Researched: Search for The Perfect Organizer, Part 3

After the failed Franklin Covey experiment, I basically gave up on the idea of organizers--or organizing the information that would go into one.  So that would be, let's see . . . about  six years ago.  So you can well imagine just how many Post-it notes with little bits and pieces of information I have stored up, in desperate need of being organized in some way.

Six weeks ago, when I started researching the current organizer options available, I jotted down my criteria for a new system based on my previous experience, which in turn became the basis of my Lessons Learned posts. 

The Criteria:

1. Am I comfortable using the technology or writing in the organizer?
2. Can I afford to maintain the system I choose?
3. Is the system sufficiently expandable for my needs?
4. How confident am I that the company that offers the product or service is not a fly-by-night venture?
5. Do I like the look-and-feel of the product enough to enjoy using it?
6. If considering an electronic option, is sufficient support available?
7. Is there a quick, easy way to archive information?
8. If considering a paper organizer, is it sufficiently big enough for me to write in?  If electronic, is the screen big enough for my taste?
9. If I choose an electronic option, will my data be safe?
10. Is the product inherently annoying in some way that I just can't deal with?

New Technology, New Choices

ToDoMatrix, For Use With The Blackberry

  I first turned to what many consider the new gold standard in technology:  the Blackberry. It only took a few minutes to find what appears to be the organizing software to end all organizing software: ToDoMatrix Professional, from RexWireless. Along with standard calendar/task/and contact management, ToDoMatrix offers what they call "injection" (similar, alas, to EccoPro's "shooter" but I won't wax nostalgic) that enables a user to "inject" an email, for instance, into a ToDoMatrix task entry.  There are 15 ways to sort entries, including by status, priority, due date, and creation date.  And for an annual fee, RexWireless offers an "Always Safe" backup, in which they'll restore your data on a new device if your Blackberry is lost, damaged, or stolen.

It all sounds good, but I couldn't get over the relentlessly ugly interface that made little use of the color screen.  Then there is the question of pricing:  ToDoMatrix is only available for use with the Blackberry.  Currently I have a pay-as-you go cell, which costs me all of a hundred bucks a year and I still don't use up my allotted minutes.  I am just not a cell phone kind of girl.  Researching the monthly cost of a Blackberry proved to be an exercise in frustration:  I could get a plan for "just" $39.99 a month.  No, wait!  Really more like $59.99.  Okay, $79.99 if you want to be realistic and not get caught paying an exorbitant amount should you miscalculate your expected usage.  Not counting tax and fees, of course. 

Considering that I didn't even like the look-and-feel of the product (Criteria #5), the initial and on-going fees it would require (Criteria #2) seemed steep indeed.  I gave it a pass.

Online Organizing Options

In researching ToDoMatrix, I came across technology I hadn't even been aware of:  online organizing options.  There are any number of websites such as rememberthemilk.com, nozbe, and Toodledo that some recommend.  (For more online organizing options, scroll down to "Online Tools" on the "Massive GTD Resource List" posted on zenhabits.net) I half-heartedly signed up for nozbe, but it seemed pretty low-tech for a high-tech option, with a rather limited search function, and no address book/task integration.  I also discovered the "catch":  although advertised as a free service, one can only manage a handful of "projects" for free.  This is more disingenuous than it may appear, since it is heavily aligned with David Allen's Getting Things Done, which subscribes to the idea that even the smallest task must be written down. In other words, if you followed GTD's system, for which nozbe was created, you would use up your free allotment in, oh, seven seconds. 

The biggest concern I had, though, and this goes for all of the online options, was one of data safety (Criteria #9) and company longevity (Criteria #4).  Think I'm being paranoid?  Remember:  of the 10 products reviewed in the last two posts, Visor, Ecco, and Geodex all went under in a relatively short period of time. 

Maybe I didn't give the online options a fair chance; I am just too leery of them to invest the time.

Tomorrow:  Old Options are Revisited, in the Search for the Perfect Organizer

PDAs and Organizing Software--More Lessons Learned in Search of the Perfect Organizer, Part 2

Yesterday we covered five paper organizers; today we'll add organizing software and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) into the mix of Lessons Learned.

#6: EccoPro Personal Information Manager (PIM), circa 1993

EccoPro by Arabesque was my first experience with organizing software.  I researched all available options at the time and then finagled (is finagle a word?) a free copy from the manufacturer, as I was on a mission to get my workplace wired. This did not happen, but getting EccoPro was still the best thing that happened to me the entire time I worked there.  EccoPro was an amazing product, easily one of the most powerful PIMs ever developed to this day, with full integration between all the various modules, so that a task checked off on a project "page" was automatically copied and saved in a "done" file as well. EccoPro used an outlining system to organize data, which made quick work of grouping projects according to steps of related actions. 

As much as I liked EccoPro, its Windows-only application prevented me from really implementing it in my personal life, as I had a Mac at home.  As it turns out, this turned out for the best.  In a history-repeats-itself way reminiscent of the Geodex experience, Arabesque went under.  The company that purchased it eventually released EccoPro for free download, but every new version of Windows' operating system creates a crisis in the user group forums that are still active.  There are no updates, of course, and with no professional support, users are on their own if things go wrong (or pray that some kind soul will answer their questions on the forum).

I had quite a bit of data saved onto disks from my EccoPro days.  Attempting to transfer it over via comma-separated-values into Excel was not a happy venture.  I ended up losing all the data that I had put into it, which took months and months to piece back together, including a sizable inventory of addresses. 

Grade:  A+ when supported, D when offered as a free download.

Lesson Learned:  When it comes to paperless organizing, lack of timely updates and no or limited service = no or limited usability.

#7: Enormous Desk Calendar/Blotter, circa 1995

When I started grad school , I needed somewhere to write appointments, jot down directions and numbers and addresses, and basically help acclimate myself to a new life in a new city.  Back on a college budget, I opted for the super-low tech desk calendar/blotter, initially attracted by the mammoth size.  I had great fun with it for the first month and enjoyed the way the minutiae of my new life took on a rather tactile life of its own, the page growing ever more densely illustrated until the month was over and then . . . I was supposed to turn the page?  But what about all the numbers I had written down?  And the addresses?  And my class schedule?  I never did end up turning the page, so that friends coming over would wonder why the calendar was still turned to September when it was January.  I finally tore the September page off and continued to refer to it, but I ended up throwing the rest of the calendar away.

Grade: F

Lesson Learned:  Without an easy, tidy way to archive and access past information, a system collapse is inevitable.

#8: Levenger Agenda, circa 1999

After grad school I was finally able to afford a quality organizer.  I came across Levenger's catalog and instantly became entranced by their Agenda. The paper was thick and deliciously smooth. While the variety of inserts was somewhat basic, they offered a flexibility that was satisfying nonetheless.  The best part was that Levenger uses a number of equi-distant plastic discs instead of the ring construction of most binders.  This makes for easy arranging and re-arranging of the inserts (just press the pages in or gently pull them out) without all the noisy and annoying opening and closing of traditional binders.

I used the Agenda for over a year.  The product itself was fine, but I found myself increasingly frustrated with the "classic" size, which had always been too small for my taste, even when I used Geodex.  My writing seemed ever more untidy, hemmed in as it was by the small size of the paper. When a co-worker showed me her Palm Pilot a year or two later, I dropped my Agenda without a second thought.  The eBay auction of my extant Levenger supplies caused a bidding war that amazed me, and I recouped a good amount of my investment.

Grade:  B

Lesson Learned:  Good things may come in small packages, but paper organizers aren't one of them.

#9: Visor (A PDA similar to Palm), circa 2000

What Geodex had been to paper organizers, and what EccoPro had been to organizing software, my little Visor was to PDAs, which is to say perfect, or nearly so.  Tiny as it was, handwriting was no longer a problem with the easily-mastered Graffiti shorthand used to input information into the device.  Suddenly I was spending the entire hour train commute busily inputting every name, number, address, and birthday I could find.  I would take great heaps of Post-It notes and work my way through them daily, inputting and tossing and inputting and tossing away.  I loved my Visor; it finally enabled me to truly get over the Geodex fiasco, once and for all. 

Visor actually used Palm software, with the standard contacts/address book, task/to-do, memo/notepad, and date book/calendar modules.  I used all four modules, but found the contacts/address book to be the star of the group.  The "Find" feature was sublime: with each consecutive letter written, the displayed matches reduced to a manageable number. You could use any number of filters to sort the contacts (i.e. "Family" or "Emergency Numbers"), and the desktop version was attractive and synced perfectly with the hand-held.

The memo function was less than satisfactory, however; it lacked the auto-archivability of EccoPro.  Still, I could live with that.  What I couldn't live with is the way you would lose all data--and I mean all data--if you happened to let the two, AA batteries run dry.  I don't entirely recall how one could change the batteries without this happening. In any case, the only way to recapture the data would be to re-sync it with the the desktop version, and God help you if you instructed the Hot Sync Manager to predicate the information on the Visor over that on the computer, because if you did and there was no data on the Visor, it would wipe out the information on your computer as well, and then you'd really be in a pickle.   To forestall such a disaster, I made multiple copies of my Palm user file, but this made for confusion over time, and I eventually tired of all the drama.  Then Visor went under; support was a thing of the past.  I printed out all 353 of my contacts, punched them and put them in a traditional binder, and continued to refer to the desktop version to look up addresses, but pretty much stopped updating information--even in my address book--after that.

Grade:  A+ for the Contacts/Address Book; D for the Memo/Notebook; and F for reliability, which I guess adds up to a C-

Lesson Learned:  At the end of the day, if you can't be assured that your data is going to be safe, why bother?

#10: Franklin Covey Monarch Paper Planner, circa 2002

Thus burned from high-tech organizing experiences, I turned my attention back to the low-tech options.  I'd enjoyed using Levenger's Agenda, after all.  Perhaps if I got a larger size, my problems would be solved. 

At my job, nobody had heard of Levenger; everyone used Franklin Covey, so I thought I'd give it a try.  I vaguely remember dozens of dizzying options for binder color, material, and size, as well as insert type and theme.  My boss had gone to several special seminars on how to use the system, and told me I could go, too, if I wanted.  This should have thrilled me; instead, I thought of my father and his frustration with being forced to sit through a Geodex seminar.  "What a waste of time!" he'd said.  "What a bunch of junk!" he called the organizer and inserts themselves. 

I felt the same way about the Franklin Covey products, even though they were perfectly fine in terms of quality and functional design.  But the aesthetic was wrong; the more "feminine" themes I'd selected seemed somehow "off" artistically, exactly as if whoever designed them was used to providing clean, professional, manly designs and was a fish-out-of-water trying to come up with something sufficiently girly. The resulting look was akin to the illustrations on feminine hygiene packaging.  And then there were those strange exhortations to "sharpen your saw" and to write "mission statements."  I couldn't contain a mounting irritation over the whole thing.  There was also the traditional binder concept again:  loud noisy clipping open, loud noisy clipping shut, only this time with a full-sized binder whose bulk made constant opening and closing a thumb-numbing proposition. 

I didn't last two weeks with Franklin Covey; truly, I couldn't stand it.  Recalling that one person's junk is another person's treasure, I asked one of my co-workers whose position didn't allow for excessive organizer expenditures if she wanted it.  Did she ever! Thus relieved from my guilt, I dumped the bounty on her desk and moved on.

Lesson Learned:  There were so many things wrong with this one that it's hard to choose.  Avoid thumb-numbing traditional binders?  What about: the amount of money spent on an organizer is not commensurate with its usability?  Or: no good can come from an ugly design?  I think I'll hone in on that "sharpen the saw" business:  if you're going to constantly be reminded of the ideas of a particular product's founder, you better make sure you're on board with his or her philosophy.

Grade:  F

Tomorrow:  Completely new technology is explored as the Search for the Perfect Organizer continues.

Lessons Learned: In Search of the Perfect Organizer

Yesterday I wrote that I don't keep a calendar, which doesn't mean I haven't tried.  Paper and paperless, high-tech, low-tech and everything in between, I've been mesmerized by organizers of all types and the implicit promise that if I only I could really master this system, would I ever be organized, and how!

A technique popular at some companies these days is conducting what's euphemistically called "Lessons Learned" sessions after a project's completion, a kind of Monday morning quarterback session that has its benefits, especially when donuts are served.  And so this evening I made a nice pot of tea, the better to consider the Lessons Learned from my many failed calendar experiments.

#1:  JR Tolkien-Inspired Illustrated Date Book, circa 1980

This was my first date book; I was 16 or so.  I can't imagine who may have given it to me, seeing as I gave the Tolkien books a rather wide pass; it may have been one of those Secret Santa things.  While the content of the illustrations puzzled me, I appreciated the saturated colors and the glossy white pages nonetheless. Petting the smooth paper, I remember wondering what I could use it for.  As my social life mostly consisted of playing nightly gin rummy games with my mother, I certainly didn't need a calendar to keep track of that.  I decided to use it to write down assignments and note when the Future Business Leaders of America club had meetings, and I made a clumsy start of it, only to be horrified by the result: I felt as if I was defacing the book with my terrible, undisciplined scrawl.  I went back to looking at the pictures, but having written in it kind of ruined the whole thing for me.

Grade: F

Lesson Learned:  If a calendar, date book, organizer, or address book is Too Pretty To Write In, it's just not meant to be.

#2:  Department Store Organizer, circa 1984

Before DayTimer, Day Runner, Franklin Covey, and certainly before Palm or Blackberry, there was the nameless department store product that took my breath away.  It was my first, honest-to-God organizer, complete with pre-printed To Do, Calendar, and Address pages in a book like a binder, only smaller so you couldn't just punch some typing paper, stick it in there and call it a day.  Not that I'd want to; these were the days before Windows, before Word, before printers, making the inserts ever more special.  Plus these particular inserts were all mauve!  With burgundy lettering!  This was the 80's folks; you can't imagine how exciting mauve-colored organizer inserts were.  I loved that organizer and set about using it with abandon.  Apparently with too much abandon, as I soon ran out of the inserts and could not afford to replace them on my college girl's budget.  I kept the organizer on my bookshelf for years.  By the time I could afford to buy inserts on a regular basis, its time, along with mauve-colored inserts, had passed.

Grade: A range from what I remember.  But that may be nostalgia talking.

Lesson Learned:  It doesn't do any good to splurge on the initial investment if you won't be able to afford the maintenance.

#3:  Spiral-Bound, Vinyl Academic Day Book, circa 1984

Having tasted organizer heaven, I decided I had to replace my glorious mauve organizer with something, if only to keep track of assignments and phone numbers.  I found a cheap vinyl academic day book at the college bookstore.  It was a huge let down compared to the Mauve Wonder, but I set about using it, and found it was actually pretty useful.  Unfortunately, the more I used it, the more I wanted, specifically more space, which was a lost cause.  Lists and notes, appointment reminders and assignments spilled over their allotted space, into the next day's, which in turn made for even less room for the next, until I finally threw up my hands and threw the thing out.
Grade:  F

Lesson Learned: Zero expandability = zero usability

#4:  Geodex Personal Management System, circa 1987

For a short time after graduating from college, I lived at home.  Having never forgotten the Mauve Wonder, I turned my back on all but the most rudimentary organizing until the day my father came home with a smooth leather binder and even better, a leatherette box with every type of insert imaginable, with titles like "Delegation Control" and "Decision Makers/Problem Solvers".  "What a bunch of junk!" he said. Apparently he'd been forced along with other executives to take a class on the principles of "personal management."  "A total waste of time!" he opined before dumping the glorious bounty onto the kitchen table. "Do you want any of this?"  Did I ever! 23 categories of inserts!  The instructions alone were half an inch thick.  I settled down and read the instructions as if they were directions to heaven written by God himself, then immediately starting setting up my system, happily clicking the binder open and close, open and close, as I shifted the contents about.  Aside from the doll wardrobe my sister had sewed for me when I was eight, the Geodex was the best thing anyone had ever given me. The formerly beloved Mauve Wonder seemed babyish in comparison.  This was the real deal!  As far as organizers went, I felt as if I'd finally arrived.

When I moved, of course, of course, my Geodex came with me. I pleaded with my boss at my new job to buy me the expensive inserts and he did.   He even bought the special hole-punch so I could make any paper Geodex-able.  When he left the company, I opted for a package rather than a promotion and went to Italy with the proceeds. The Geodex came with me, along with the aforementioned stapler.  By the time I returned to the States a year later, I was looking forward to stocking up on all my favorite inserts:  the Key Result Planners!  The Career & Life Goal sheets!  The 26-column analysis page!  In my absence, however, something horrible had happened:  Geodex, apparently, had gone under.  There was no sight, no sound, and certainly no Key Result Index Pages to be found.

At the time, I counted the demise of Geodex to be one of the top five worst things that had ever happened to me.  It took years to recover. 

Grade:  A+ while it lasted F- when it didn't

Lesson Learned:  Organizers are like men:  no matter how amazing, intuitive, beautiful, sexy, smart and downright delightful they may be, a fly-by-night romance will only break your heart.

#5: DayRunner, circa 1992

It took a good year to get over the loss of the Geodex.  Now a grown-up with a stable if uninteresting job, I could afford to buy my own organizer and inserts.  I looked at Filofax, which I found too austere.  DayTimer was a bit better, but liked DayRunner the best; the font had a youthful, energetic feel I found appealing.  It came with a reasonable choice of inserts, even if compared to Geodex they seemed uninspired.

I liked it DayRunner well enough, but never felt the spark.  I feel a little bad about it; Geodex was a tough act to follow.  In Geodex days, I spent many happy hours curled up on the couch, updating my Key Result planner, which I realize now was probably a forerunner of Franklin Covey. I had liked it so much, organizing had been a pleasure, a fun and relaxing way to wind down at night, or to kick-start the day. With the functional but boring DayRunner, my routine of organizer maintenance began to crack.  Organizing was again a chore.  I couldn't keep it up.

Grade:  C+

Lesson Learned: It's just not enough to be functional and dependable. You have to like the product enough to look forward to using it.

Tomorrow:  PDAs and organizing software--more Lessons Learned in search of the perfect organizer.

To-Do Lists, Address Books, and Calendars: Organizing with Organizers

Last month, after Regina Leeds sent me her book One Year to An Organized Life, I was buzzing happily along Regina's step-by-step system when I hit a road block:  the upshot was that organized people use calendars--not the month-view kind you tack on the wall, but the kind you actually write in, like, appointments and stuff.

I don't keep a calendar, a fact that wouldn't surprise Shay, my hair stylist, whose appointments I miss so often that I live in fear of being "fired" from his client list, although apparently not enough to actually get a calendar.  Nor would it surprise my family, who have become accustomed to "Auntie Anne's Christmas in April" gifts, or birthday gifts that arrive months after the fact. 

Recently shamed by yet another missed appointment with Shay and by my brother's astonishment that I actually called to wish him a happy birthday on his birthday, I've decided that it's time I grow up already and get on the calendar bandwagon.  Perhaps because I'd once been a Visor/Palm aficionado, keeping a calendar seems intrinsically related to address books, To-Do lists, and the organization of corresponding notes, so I thought I'd focus on the subject this week on the Quest.

I've spent the last six weeks or so researching and trying out various systems, some of which I've tried before (because I have tried before, and some things even worked, for a little while).  I checked out and considered everything from lists on plain paper to Blackberry options and everything in-between, including paper-based organizers with pre-printed inserts, organizer software and templates, Palm Pilots, and web-based organizers.  I think I've come up some viable options to get me on the right track, and hope that my assessment might be helpful to Questers similarly calendar-challenged.

It's not as if I haven't tried. Above from top left: Franklin-Covey 365; the long-defunct Geodex; list on plain paper; DayRunner; Levenger's Circa system; Visor. 

So Much For A Peaceful Start To The Weekend

Last night, after a shower/bubble bath combo in a candlelight to inaugurate the weekend, I wrote my post and felt very smug indeed in my fluffy white robe, sipping tea and planning to indulge in a little surfing before turning in.  And then I heard it:  water noises.

As everyone knows, unexplained water noises are rarely a happy thing.  I flew to the bathroom, envisioning the virtual waterfall that occurred when the apartment three floors above ours flooded a few years ago.  The first thing I saw when I turned on the light in the bathroom was Snapdragon, who looked up at me with a very worried expression.  The second thing I saw was Lickity Split, who was in the toilet, splashing merrily away.

Ever since we adopted Mau-Mau 19 years ago, we always close the lid on the toilet, but a bolt had come loose on the lid, probably from Lickity's repeated sink-toilet-bath dive-bombings he has perfected. Apparently he had been able to push the faulty lid enough to the side to get access to the bowl.  In any case, I screamed; he leapt from the toilet and ran.  A chase throughout the condo ensued, much to Lickity's glee.  When I finally caught up to him, I brought him back to the (water soaked) scene of the crime and tried to impress upon him my extreme disapproval, but what could I do?  He's a tiny little kitten.  I told him NO NO NO in my sternest voice and let him go, then turned my attention on mopping up the mess and cleaning all the potentially infected areas.

But in my exasperation, I somehow forgot to clean Lickity himself, and I woke with a start in the morning seriously nauseated.  And so Lickity Split got his first bath this morning, followed by more mopping and furious scrubbing.

My only previous cat-bathing experience was with Mau-Mau, who submitted to regular bottom-washings (he was a long-haired cat) with resigned disbelief.  I was not prepared for the spectacle that accompanied my attempt to bathe Lickity, although I am profoundly grateful for it, because I've never before had the opportunity to use the word hellion, even though I've been dying to, for years.

Who me?

This Is What The Quest Is About

In the last year, I've had exactly five guests:  my father, my brother, my best friend from grad school, my best friend at design school, and Melissa, the Crazy Cat Sitter, so (affectionately) named because of her ability to analyze, in enormously gratifying detail, exactly why our cats are so adorable. 

No matter how bad my house may have been in the past year, my dad, brother, and grad school friend, have seen it much, much worse.  My design school friend is one of those blissfully serene and equally generous types for whom unkind thoughts don't come easily.  And then there is Melissa, who saw us through the worst of the worst this past year in more ways than one; she was unfailingly there for us and for our beloved Mau-Mau, who passed this June. No matter how bad, disorganized, messy, disgusting, or just plain gross the place got, Melissa not only pretended not to notice, she did so convincingly, thus earning a permanent place on my gratitude list.  This is a woman I trusted with my pre-Quest refrigerator.  If that doesn't speak volumes, I don't know what does. 

So when I finally did clean the refrigerator, I thought of Melissa.  I wanted to call her up and tell her:  you have to come over!  You won't recognize the fridge without all the weird, multi-colored growths! Of course I was over-confident, figuring it would take a couple weeks to get the place in good enough shape to invite Melissa over for a social visit.  A couple months was more like it,  but what does it matter now?  I was finally able to extend an invitation this week. 

Next week we're looking forward to having our favorite "couple friends" over for brunch, then the weekend after that I have a talkfest scheduled chez moi with a friend I haven't seen in an age.  It's great to feel comfortable having people over again; I'm excited about re-connecting in a way I haven't for a long, long time, and am looking forward to the good times ahead.

Happy weekend, everyone! 

Creating "Play Zones" for Pets

Sometimes I come home and think: this is what our house would look like if we had toddlers. Toys strewn everywhere, balls under foot and under the furniture, small stuffed animals effectively destuffed and left in high-traffic areas, the better to trip over.

While I collect errant toys and return them to the beloved Toy Baskets on a regular basis, what has helped the most was not even intended to curb Toy Chaos: we set down a rug remnant for their clawing pleasure, and a little blanket for them to snuggle into. They immediately seemed to sense that these "play pen" areas were "theirs" and began to drag the cat dancers and fuzzy balls to this special territory.  Once I noticed this, I put the Toy Baskets near the rug, which, in turn, has become a favorite place to enact slow and methodical eviscerations on a number of toy mice.

Organizing with Kids: Kids' Art Work

Now that the school year is underway, kids' artwork is rolling in.  For my friends with elementary school aged children, deciding what to do with the artwork is always a trial.  Keep it?  Toss it?  What to keep?  What to toss?

One of my friends has made a ritual of going through her kids' artwork once a month.  She keeps one piece from the beginning of the year, one at the end, and one for each of the major holidays, plus a couple favorites.  This is more than enough for a representative sample for the years' work, and yet it's a manageable amount.  The saved items can be stored in a document box, like the ones I got from Ikea. At $10 for a set of two, they won't break the bank.

Organizing With Kids

I don't have kids; my view of those who do vacillates between admiration, awe, and sympathy, especially on the organizing front.  I can barely keep myself together, much less a small band of toddlers or a bunch of teenagers.  How some people manage to nurture, instruct, chauffeur, mentor, love, listen to, feed, tend to, wash for, tidy up after, and cook for a small army (and even one toddler can have the presence of an entire army) is a source of endless speculation.  There's a reason why in Islam all mothers get fast-tracked to Paradise.

Lately, when  I see great ideas for organizing with kids I try to make a note of it so I can pass it on.  This article at declutterit.com offers what I think is a genious solution to Lego-and-Blocks Chaos.  I have to do something to rack up those Paradise points.

Bracketology: It's Not Just For Basketball Anymore

I 'm not sure if "Bracketology" is actually a word or not; dictionary.com doesn't list it, although Wikipedia does, defining it as "the process of predicting the field of the NCAA Basketball Tournament." Whatever.  As Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir note in their book, The Enlightened Bracketologist, you can use the concept to find the "final four of anything,", including but not limited to emoticons, Bob Dylan cover songs, inventions, film deaths, red wines, Yiddish phrases, and marital arguments.  For our purposes, we can use it to prioritize the items on our to-do lists, or to figure out what to do when we happen to find a few unscheduled hours at our disposal.  Looks like shopping wins!

The Case Against Storage Units

According to the Self Storage Industry Fact Sheet, nearly 10% of US households rented a storage space in 2007.  Between 1984 and 2007 alone, "rentable self-storage square footage" increased by 740%, or 1.9 billion square feet. 

I can believe this.  Growing up,  I didn't know anyone who kept a storage unit.  People (sometimes) got storage units when they moved; that's it.  Whatever didn't fit in the basement, attic, garage, shed, cellar, or carport got thrown out or people had a garage sale. 

As I grew older, the percentage of people I knew who had storage units grew, let's see, probably by 740%. I myself jumped on the storage unit bandwagon.  The first time we kept the storage unit for a year; the second time, when we moved to our condo, we kept the unit two years.  The entire time we had it, I worried:  what if our stuff got damp? What if it got ruined?  Was it even covered by our homeowner's insurance?  And even if it was, what about all the stuff that had little or no material value, but meant something to me anyway--meant enough to pay $50 a month to store.  And what was that stuff, anyway?  Did I even know?  Or was I, in essence, paying money to store junk?

I thought it might take a year to go through the storage unit; it took two.  In a double-whammy of miscalculation, I'd over-estimated the space we had in the condo and under-estimated the sheer amount of stuff that we had.

When we finally did get rid of the storage unit, it was a huge relief. Not only did we save money--to the tune of $600 a year--but having all of our stuff in one space saved time and perhaps most importantly, peace of mind.  Unlike with the storage unit, the stuff in the condo was readily accessible, at least in theory.  And I didn't have to worry about anything being damp or otherwise getting ruined from being inadequately sheltered.

Over the next several years, as I continued to de-clutter, I just kept telling myself:  it can only get better.  No matter how tempting it might have been at various points to get a small storage unit to absorb some of the great Burden 'O Clutter, I'm glad we didn't.  I think it would have slowed us down in terms of dealing with our stuff, in essence putting off the necessary and the inevitable.  Because in one way or another, each of us has to deal with our stuff. I just wish I'd started before I spent over a thousand dollars to avoid doing so.

Why It's Not As Bad As It Appears

I admit: the idea of 81 boxes and 133 shelves left to organize did not sit well with me last night. According to previous calculations with the craft closet, it took between 9 minutes on the low end and 2 hours and 16 minutes on the  high end to organize a single shelf or drawer.  If each of the shelves take as long to organize as the 2 hour and 16 minute ribbon drawer did, we're looking at 300 hours of work ahead.  This is almost two months of nearly full time effort, 40 hours a week, which is another way of saying when hell freezes over.  About that soon.

But then I realized that most of the shelves aren't going to take that long.  Most of the shelves in the craft closet took an hour or so to organize, so we can safely cut the 300 hour figure in half.  And there is a certain amount of double-dipping in my box-shelf-cabinet calculations:  there are shelves, for instance, that contain two boxes, or cabinets that contain four shelves.  So it's not really as bad as it first appears, or so I tell myself. 

At some point,  I pulled back and reminded myself:  the true goal of my Organization Quest is not perfection; it's making room for the important things in life.  This means cleaning and organizing the kitchen shelves so they will be pleasant and tidy to use during cookie-making season.  It means having tax receipts in order so that the weeks surrounding Alpay's birthday in the beginning of April are not subsumed with Tax Terror.  It's photographs organized for easy selection when scrapbooking, and phone numbers on hand to give far-flung family and friends a quick call.  Perfectly ordered files or cupboards are not worthy of 150 hours of healthy, prime-of-life time, but if those 150 hours have the potential to yield many more and of better quality, then it's one of the few things these days whose potential dividend is well worth the investment.

Photos by Alpay Ulku, Copyright 2005. Used with permission.

81 Boxes and 133 Shelves Left To Go

A couple weeks ago, in the grip of a To-Do List  obsession I will happily discuss in tedious detail, I ordered Getting Thigns Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, which sort of reads like a how-to manual for OCD.  Having a bit of an OCD thing going on myself, I was astounded to discover that Allen thought up all kinds of compulsions I just don't have the imagination to consider.

One of the strategies he suggests involves doing a "mind sweep," in which a person writes down every single thing they can possibly think of in terms of "to-do" items.  He even supplies four pages (in small type) of "Incompletion Triggers" in case you may have forgotten anything.  In the process of making your list, you're directed to consider your desk drawers, countertops, floors, walls, shelves, equipment, furniture, and fixtures.  I kid you not.  The super-crazy part:  after gathering everything from said drawers, countertops, floors, walls, shelves, equipement, furniture, and fixtures (the last three throw me for a loop, but nevermind), you're to process it all, i.e. sort and file, quite as if this can be accomplished in, oh, four hours. 

In spite--or perhaps because of--the obvious insanity of this proposal, I found myself curiously drawn to the book, and wanted I'd see if I could apply Allen's principles to my Quest.  In my version of the "mind sweep," I did a room-by-room audit of all the things I still have left to organize.  As it turns out, I got discoraged about half-way through the inventory and dropped the list in favor of speed Solitaire, which was much more entertaining and did not threaten any notions of accomplishment I may have entertained upon recently clearing the condo of much of its clutter.  It turns out that I still have much, much farther to go than I'd imagined before I can realize my goal of every box, every shelf, and every cabinet being assessed and organized.  Below is my list:

Clothing Rods:  2
Photo Boxes:  5
Baskets: 8
File Drawers:  11
Drawers:  12
Cabinets:  14
Shelves in Book Shelves:  26
Boxes:  81
Shelves: 133 (Yes!  Really!)

Hey! Who Messed Up The Craft Closet?

Ideas for (Neatly) Storing House Paint

Every now and then, I go on a decorating binge.  Because decisiveness is not one of my strong points, I never seem to get the color right the first time around when choosing paint. 

I try to be "good"--meaning less compulsive than normal--and toss the unsuitable paint on the spot, but sometimes, while a particular shade of blue is just wrong, Wrong, WRONG for the living room, there is a definite possibility it will be the One and Only Perfect Shade for the bedroom at some hazy point in the future.  And so I keep the paint, citing the famous mantra of pack rats everywhere: just in case. 

The fact that this previously-rejected paint does (occasionally) find its way onto one wall or another does not solve the problem of neatly storing it in the meantime.  And so a few years ago I came up with this solution:  I buy new, pint-sized paint cans at the hardware store, which I then fill with paint. A pint is usually enough for a small accent wall, which is the most likely target for my experimentation; it is more than enough to work as a sample in any case. I also store the left-over paint I actually use on the walls for future touch-ups. 

After filling the cans, I drip some paint on the lid so I can see what the color is at a glance, and write the color name, number, and manufacturer on a slip of paper, which I tape to the bottom.


Above, left: "Before"--the drips, along with the various can sizes and labeling,make the cans look messy. Right: "After"--the uniform size and appearance of the cans looks appealing and tidy.

Heretical Bathroom Cleaning

There's a basic rule--or there should be--that people who write blogs shouldn't knowingly pass on bad advice to their readers.  So don't think of tonight's post as advice; consider it an anecdote.

I use Comet to clean my bathroom floors.  Comet, Ajax, Bon Ami--it doesn't really matter, although I am curiously drawn to Comet's neon-green packaging. My theory is that there is a point at which Gaudy is so over the top, it becomes sort of mesmerizing.  Anyway.

Before we moved into our condo, we mostly had vinyl flooring in the bathroom; occasionally we had ceramic tile.  Both were blessedly easy to clean. I was partial to Spic-n-Span, which seemed to do the job just fine.  But when we moved to the condo, I had the opportunity to choose my flooring, and for the guest bath I threw caution and common sense to the wind and chose marble tile.  It seemed nothing was "safe" for cleaning marble tile, except special marble-floor cleaner, which I used to dubious effect.

Maybe the problem was that we were forced to put the cat box in the guest bath; in the past, we had a basement or an out-of-the-way place to put the box, and when we rented houses, the cat would mostly go outside anyway.  But in the condo, the marble floors seemed to absorb the dust from the litter.  Using the special marble cleaner, the grout was always disgusting, too.  And I didn't have much better luck with the floor in master bath, which is composed of teeny-tiny ceramic tiles, for that 80's gym look.  In the case of the master bathroom, the 2" x 2" tile made for a lot of grout that was perpetually dingy. 

Completely at a loss, one day I sprinkled Comet on the marble floor in a pique of frustration. I took a brush and scrubbed at a spot and the result was near-miraculous; it was clean.  The grout was gratifyingly grime-free, too.  I sprinkled with abandon and scrubbed the whole floor.  As far as I was concerned, I'd found the holy grail of marble floor-cleaning.

I used the Comet-and-scrub brush technique on the grout around the teeny tiny tiles in the master bath, and the result was as white as can be.  Eventually, I fine-tuned the procedure:  basically I wet the floor with a mop, then sprinkle with Comet and scrub with a brush.  Then I rinse the floors--usually twice--to get rid of the gritty residue. Gorgeous, clean floors, and no one is the wiser for my unconventional methods.

Again, appologies to those who subscribe to my posts via email; I accidently clicked "send" before this post was finished, thus explaining the mysterious email you just got without a title. Yow.

More Binder Fun: Organizing Clips And Work Samples

Yesterday we saw how binders can help organize craft projects and materials; they work equally well for organizing clips and work samples.

Most writers keep copies of their published work, or "clips," to send to prospective editors, agents, or employers.  Nowadays it's possible to pull together an electronic portfolio for such purposes, but it's still nice to have hard copies on hand of your work, whether or not you're a writer.   Application materials or work samples for other professions might include reports, certificates, letters of reference or commendation, student evaluations, business plans, materials for projects, programs, or curricula you helped developed, or any number of things specific to your profession.  It was my friend, the writer and educator Lori Catallozzi, who showed me how such materials are so much more efficiently organized in binders than in folders.  For one thing, files require that you pull out items in order to look at them.  It's much easier to just flip through a binder to immediately see your options. 

I follow Lori's system of making several photocopies of my work, which are then slipped into a top-loading page protector for easy accessibility.  Behind the clip, I tuck the original source material facing the other way, so I can see the front when the page is turned.  Coupling the source material with the copies makes it convenient to make more copies when the need arises. It's a fun project to do, and a satisfying one at that.  No more digging through stacks of magazines to find the clip I want!  No more lost source material!  If only all organizing was so easy.

Left: a photocopied clip in a top-loading page protector. Right: the original source material tucked behind the clip so the magazine cover is visible when the page is turned.

Organizing Paper Crafts With Binders

In another life--I've had several--I demonstrated card- and scrapbook-making supplies, whereby I'd go to people's homes and show them how to use various products.  In order to organize the order forms, wish lists, and door prize entries, not to mention the projects themselves, I bought a dozen or more plain white binders to hand out at the demonstrations.  I attached a clear business card holder on the inside cover of each binder to hold my card and used a special,  3-hole punched, reinforced magazine holder strip through which I slipped the large catalog for easy viewing. 

It was great fun while it lasted, but when it was over one of the first thoughts I had was that I'd never have reason to use up the dozen-plus binders I'd bought.  Little did I know just how useful I'd find them.

For one thing, binders are great for organizing craft supplies.  In making cards and scrapbook pages, for instance, one uses generates a number of scraps, some of which would make great cards or pages of their own.  A fellow demonstrator showed me how she used page protectors to store such scraps, which she organized by color. The trick was using photo pages, which split the page into quarters or in half--perfect for capturing scrap-sized bits and pieces. I also use the photo pages to store cards I've made.  The photo page/binder format makes for quick and easy scanning for the perfect card.

Above: card-making scraps in quarter-page pockets.
Below, top row: close up of quarter-page pocket card-making scraps.
Below, bottom row: completed cards organized in quarter and half-page pockets.