Recent Posts By erindoland

With Christmas just days away, you might be feeling overwhelmed by all the preparations left to do. Instead of freaking out and yelling at everyone who crosses your path, or shutting down and giving up entirely, take a few moments to breathe and put everything back into perspective.

If you celebrate Christmas, you probably have your home decorated and ready to go for Saturday. Now is the perfect time to get rid of any items that are cluttering up your Christmas decoration collection. Here’s how:

If you’re looking to get some quick uncluttering projects completed before the end of the year, here are some projects that don’t take much time but get rid of pesky clutter:

1. Clean out the pen cup. I love this simple project because it doesn’t really feel like uncluttering — it feels like an art project. Round up all of your writing utensils, and test them on a scrap piece of paper. Toss out any dried up pens and markers, sharpen any dull pencils, and recycle the test paper when you’re done.

Towels, washcloths, bed sheets, pillow cases, and blankets can move into your linen closet and take up permanent residency. I once believed that these fabrics had the ability to reproduce, because how else could there be so many of them? The reality is that you hold onto them for those just-in case moments — What if, one day, you need old towels to clean the car or you get a twin bed or you have a houseful of guests and need all the contents of the linen closet at once? What then?!

I realized recently that I follow a lot of rules that dictate and guide my uncluttering and organizing behavior. Most of these rules are small, some even ridiculous:

1. Just because you have clean underwear still in the drawer is not an excuse to procrastinate doing the laundry.
2. Get rid of an object if it is broken or damaged for more than six months.
3. Dinner isn’t done until the dishes are in the dishwasher.

Your filing cabinet might be an organized thing of beauty, or it might be a chaotic disaster. Either way, the archived folders in your filing cabinet should only be holding two types of documents — Can’t Lose and Extended Knowledge papers.

The holidays can be a difficult time for family finances. We want to shower the people we love with tokens of our affections, but we don’t want to break the bank.

In his book The Simple Dollar, author Trent Hamm brings up an important budgeting concept that applies amazingly well to the holidays:

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us and we’re propelling toward the holiday season, it’s a great time to get organized to keep your stress levels under control. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, you still might be invited to parties, plan to take time off from work, and will celebrate the New Year. December is a mess for pretty much all Americans — and the better organized you are the easier it is to survive.

Coming back from a few days out of the office can be hectic. You usually wish you were still on vacation, and you find it difficult to get back into the swing of things.

Before heading out on Thanksgiving vacation — or any vacation — try these actions to make re-entry more enjoyable:

Time is a precious commodity, and finding time to organize can be difficult. Here are three quick uncluttering and organizing projects you can tackle in five minutes or less: