Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight (61 page)
Read Lose the Clutter, Lose the Weight Online
Authors: Peter Walsh
USE THE MAGIC AT YOUR FINGERTIPS
Your smartphone is a great organizing tool that will help:
⢠Eliminate paperwork
⢠Keep your life in better order
⢠Give your memory a jog when it needs it
I no longer keep lists of books I want to read, business cards that I need to remember, or information on products I see in stores that I'm considering purchasing. I either take a photo of the card, use an app to keep lists of things I need to remember, or enter items immediately into my phone (which syncs with my desktop).
Stop thinking of your phone as a phoneâit's really a personal digital assistant that's ready to work for you 24 hours a day (minus, of course, the 8 hours when you're sleeping). If you have the technology at your fingertips, use it!
Zone 3:
Finally, decide where you'll put the paperwork and other objects that you seldom need and that don't belong in either of your first two zones but may be useful someday. This is the equivalent of your car's trunk. This zone might hold:
Electronics accessories like USB cables
Copies of past tax returns
Documents that you need to retain for legal or personal reasons
Give thought to the type of storage containers you will use for holding these items, since they're essentially archived materials that you'll want to ensure aren't damaged through poor storage or lack of attention. Will you put these containers in a closet? In the basement? How much space are you willing to devote to this stuff?
Thinking of your office space in terms of zones will help you assign homes for like items and determine clear limits for how much space you'll assign to different things.
Do you need everything that's currently in your office space? For example, if you have a bookcase filled with clutter, will you even need to keep the bookcase once the clutter is gone? Do you need to
add
anything? Perhaps now's the time for a bigger file cabinet. Or maybe you need some small organizational trays and a pencil cup for your stapler, scissors, mail, and writing implements.
Once you've envisioned each zone, the next step is to start organizing them and getting rid of excess stuff. Now's the time to decide which items will live in each designated area and what supplies, if any, you need to make the different zones work well for you.
A SATISFIED TEST PANELIST SPEAKS:
Megan says: “Decluttering is making me brought my loose change to the bank to rich! So far I found $200 in gift cards and the tune of $107!”
Task 4:
CLEAN OFF ALL HORIZONTAL SURFACES IN ALL YOUR ZONES
Remove everything from Zone 1 that doesn't belong there. Take all this stuff off your desk and move it to Zone 2 for now.
While you're at it, remove all the clutter from the top of your file cabinet and any other storage areas. All these spaces should stay free of knickknacks, stray paperwork, and random objects, and you should refrain from using these areas as storage space.
Offices are notorious for gathering clutter on flat surfaces. That's because a lot of paperwork funnels into the office space from the rest of the home. So do a lot of other objects that don't have a specific place where they belong.
If you only sit down and use this area on occasion, it might seem wasteful to keep these spaces unfilled. Still, maintain these flat surfaces like you would any others in your home: empty and clean. If you don't, when you sit down to pay your bills or organize your finances, clutter is going to get in the way and distract you from your tasks.
BUT WHAT ABOUT
VIRTUAL
CLUTTER?
Whenever I'm discussing how to set up an organized, streamlined office, people will invariably ask me how much time and effort they should put toward arranging all those digital documents, music files, and photos on their computer.
Frankly, I just can't make myself get too worked up about electronic files on devices. Unlike physical items, when it comes to the digital world, you're more concerned about
access
than quantity. For starters, having 10,000 documents you don't really need on your computer isn't like having stacks of printed documents on your desk. You're not going to trip over computer files. You're not going to lose the file you really want just because you have so much stored in your computer (assuming you have a basic knowledge of how to use your computer). Within reason, it's pretty hard for you to run out of space to put your electronic files, which is a major reason why we need to avoid clutter in the real world.
These days, you can store vast amounts of pictures and documents fairly inexpensively, either on a backup hard drive or in the cloud. Personally, I keep every e-mail I ever send or receive, since it's inexpensive and easy to store them, and I can easily find specific e-mails with an automated search for key words and phrases that I know are contained in the document or e-mail.
I would simply recommend a few commonsense pieces of advice when it comes to maintaining your computer programs and files:
⢠Don't pack so much in that your computer begins to work slowly or unreliably.
⢠Protect your information (especially e-mails, financial figures, and work documents) with passwords that would be hard for a hacker to guess. That means something a little more clever than “password,” “123456,” or your first name. It's a good idea to use a different password for each application and to keep all of your passwords in a safe place. Some apps and Web sites are available for securely storing your passwords in one place, or you can go old-school and write them on a piece of paper, then place it somewhere secure in your home where you can readily find it.
⢠It's essential to back up all your files, either to a hard drive that you hook up to your computer or to a cloud-based service that will automatically do the work for you. Hackers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their ability to ruin your filesâthey can even lock them up, then demand money before they'll give them back to you. Storage is cheap and easy to access, so there's no excuse for lost documents or files that can't be recovered.
Task 5:
ORGANIZE FILE CABINETS AND OTHER STORAGE SPOTS IN ZONE 2
Now move on to Zone 2, your medium-term storage area for items you use occasionally. If you took anything out of Zone 1, consider whether it should stay here.
A lot of your paperwork is going to go here, such as manuals for your home's appliances (although most of these can now be accessed online, thus eliminating the need for paper copies) and records you'll need for the coming tax season. I would recommend a file cabinet, which can hold a lot of well-organized material but look neat and tidy from the outside. (That's in contrast to a bookshelf, which is going to look very messy even if you neatly stand up rows of file folders and stacks of paper on it.)
As you're organizing your paperwork in Zone 2, I would strongly recommend this philosophy: Good enough is fine. You don't have to aim for perfect.
I have never believed that striving for perfection is a commendable habit. It just sets you up to fail before you even begin. I've lost count of the number of
times I've seen a wish for perfection totally paralyze a person who dwells on the idea that “If I can't do it perfectly, I can't do it at all.”
“Good enough” is a target that's, well, good enough. Having a welcoming, comfortable home is a wonderful thing, even if you have a little clutter here and there. It says that your home is loved and lived in. When you reach “good enough,” relax and enjoy the view.
It's possible to get carried away with carefully filing your receipts by month and arranging older paperwork by date. This is generally a waste of time that doesn't improve the appearance or the functionality of your office area. You can use that time much better elsewhere.
Just sort your paperwork into a reasonable-enough degree of organization so that you can later find what you're looking for relatively quickly. Use clear and simple labels and be sure to date files so that when you come back to purge your filing cabinet in the future, you can quickly see how old items are.