Organizing For Dummies E-Book

Eileen Roth

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 610

Beschreibung

Organize your office, your home, your life! What's the favorite four-letter word of people who are less than fully organized? "Help!" So many technological, social, and economic changes affect your life that you need organization just to keep up, let alone advance. Many people have two jobs - one at the office and one taking care of things at home. If you have a family, you may count that as a third job. Caring for elderly relatives or have community commitments? You can count off four, five, and keep right on going. No matter what life stage you're in, getting organized can make every day better and help you achieve your long-term goals. Organizing For Dummies is for anyone who wants to * Polish his or her professional reputation * Experience less stress * Increase productivity * Build better relationships * Maximize personal time Organization isn't inherited. With the human genome decoded, the evidence is clear: DNA strings dedicated to putting things into place and managing your time like a pro are nonexistent. Instead, organization is a learned skill set. Organizing For Dummies helps you gain that skill with topics such as: * Understanding how clutter costs you in time, money, and health * Training your mind to be organized and developing a plan * Cleaning house, room by room, from basement to attic (including the garage) * Creating functional space for efficiency and storage * Time-management strategies for home, office, and tavel * Scheduling, delegating, and multitasking * Making time for your family * Managing your health - physical and financial * Finding time for love * Organizing and cashing in on a great garage sale Getting organized is about unstuffing your life, clearing out the dead weight in places from your closet to your calendar to your computer, and then installing systems that keep the good stuff in its place. Organizing is a liberating and enlightening experience that can enhance your effectiveness and lessen your stress every day - and it's all yours simply for saying "No" to clutter.

Leseprobe

Organizing For Dummies

by Eileen Roth with Elizabeth Miles

Organizing For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2001 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone]. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, 317-572-3447, fax [phone], or e-mail [email protected]

Trademarks: Wiley, the Wiley Publishing logo, For Dummies, the Dummies Man logo, A Reference for the Rest of Us!, The Dummies Way, Dummies Daily, The Fun and Easy Way, Dummies.com, and related trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. P-L-A-C-E, P-L-A-N, R-A-P-I-D, R-E-M-O-V-E, W-A-S-T-E, and Take Action File are trademarks of Eileen Roth. Everything in its Place is a registered service mark of Eileen Roth.All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Library of Congress Control Number: 00-107683

ISBN: 978-0-7645-5300-4

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13

1O/TR/QT/QY/IN

About the Authors

Eileen Roth: When asked how long she’s been organizing, Eileen Roth relies on the estimate made by her dad: since age five. At an evening dinner party in her native Chicago, the sweet young systematizer would go downstairs to say goodnight to the guests. Spotting the candy dish they’d been passing, she’d make a beeline for the bonbons—not to grab a treat, but to return the dish to its original place! Despite this early prowess, Eileen insists she wasn’t born with an extra organizing gene. Instead, her parents had been teaching her to put things away from the day she could walk, and she draws on those simple lessons today in helping people see that organization isn’t inherited—it’s a learned skill.

Through her company Everything in its Place®, Roth consults with clients including Fortune 500 companies, trade associations, entrepreneurs, and busy individuals and families. Her success shaping up even the organizationally impaired has landed her spots on Oprah, the Today show with Bryant Gumbel, Handy Ma’am with Bev DeJulio, and NBC, ABC, and WGN news. Eileen’s organizing fixes been featured by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times and on a number of radio stations, and she uses her advanced time management skills to squeeze in workshops across the country.

Roth was sixteen when she first brought her organizing skills to the workplace. Her after-school job at SS Kresges (now Kmart) turned into a management coup when she became the only part-time person asked to run several store departments. After graduating from the University of Illinois, Roth was ready for a bigger challenge: organizing business executives. She started as a secretary and went on to spend fifteen years in office and association administration, honing the systematic skills that keep her in demand at companies seeking a competitive edge.

Motherhood brought balance to Roth’s organizing talents by taking her out of the office and back home. Eight months pregnant with her second child, Eileen attended her first Tupperware® party and fell in love with the organizational advantages of the plastic food storage system. When the local sales manager told her that she could earn a free set by hosting six parties of her own, she did it—all before the baby was born. Five more years selling Tupperware® enabled Eileen to stay home with her two young daughters while she perfected her domestic organizing techniques in the kitchens of her party hostesses.

When her daughters were older, Roth returned to her career. In 1992, as organizing became recognized as a profession and after being laid off twice in one year in a job market slump, Eileen called on her entrepreneurial spirit and her extensive experience in both home and workplace organizing to found her own company. Everything in its Place® caught on like wildfire, and Roth was soon a consultant, speaker, and trainer for companies such as Northwest Airlines and Argonne National Laboratories.

With her first book, Roth brings a lifetime of the lessons learned while organizing in the trenches to readers everywhere. Written for any level and to cover the full spectrum of a busy life, Organizing For Dummies®, says Eileen, could even reduce the national stress level and improve GNP. No matter what, this tell-all reference will help people put everything in its place and put their disorganized days behind them for good.

Eileen Roth has recently moved from her hometown of Chicago to Phoenix, AZ to be closer to her college-age daughters. She is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), National Speakers Association (NSA), and American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).

Elizabeth Miles: Looking for a better way to strengthen your mind, feed your soul, get healthy, wealthy, or wise? Turn to author, media personality, and entrepreneur Elizabeth Miles. Known to her fans for her user-friendly approach to peak performance on many fronts, Elizabeth offers answers that pop off the page and onto your to-do-now list. She’s miles of smiles as she tells you how to tune into success, new-millennium style.

With a professional career that’s run the gamut from banking on Wall Street to booking rock concerts and developing gourmet recipes, Miles relies on a broad range of experience in making the good life easier for busy people. She puts her graduate degree in ethnomusicology to work with her book and CD series Tune Your Brain®: Using Music to Manage Your Mind, Body, and Mood (Berkley Books, Deutsche Grammophon 1997-2000), which draws upon the latest neurological and medical research about music’s effects on the body and mind to create an applied system for listeners. As creator and host of the daily “Braintuning Break” radio feature, she’s taken her advice to the airwaves and earned listener loyalty over three seasons on the California Classical Network.

Music is food for the ears, says Miles—but you can’t live on sound waves alone, and you’ll often find her in the kitchen cooking up something tasty and targeted to your personal energy needs. The Feng Shui Cookbook: Creating Health and Harmony in Your Kitchen (Birch Lane Press 1998) is the first book to reunite the Chinese art of feng shui with its age-old partner of nutritional medicine. Elizabeth’s contemporary take on tradition helps readers of all tastes and lifestyles eat for optimal energy, health, and prosperity—the “good chi” that spurs achievement. If you prefer a scientific slant when serving up dinner, Miles has partnered with Hollywood nutritionist Carrie Latt Wiatt to pen Portion Savvy: The 30-Day Smart Plan for Eating Well (Pocket Books 1999),which pairs science with psychological and lifestyle factors to produce mind-body prescriptions for fitness.

Miles’ popular approaches to achieving potential have been extensively covered in national and international media from Self to Success, PBS to the BBC, while the Tune Your Brain CD series has enjoyed long Top Ten runs on Billboard’s classical chart. Miles lectures and consults for organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization, the Wellness Community, and many more concerned with health, education, and performance. As a previous self-professed organizational dummy, Elizabeth enjoyed applying her trademark knack for making things easy to Eileen’s expertise and proven techniques to help bring Organizing For Dummies to life. Anative of Madison, Wisconsin, Miles holds a Master’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA from Dartmouth College. She lives in Los Angeles, halfway between UCLA and the beach, amidst musical instruments, cookware, books and CDs that are all finally finding their place.

Dedication from Eileen

To my mother and father, Millie and Marv Roth, who taught me how to get organized and so are largely responsible for this book. If she’s watching from heaven, my mother is surely proud.

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to Tami Booth, the original Acquisitions Editor for Hungry Minds who invited Eileen to write this book, and Betsy Amster, our literary agent, who tracked Eileen down, broke it to her that she didn’t have the humorous writing style for the series, and teamed Eileen and Elizabeth together. To Sherri Fugit, Project Editor at Hungry Minds and our trusty guide to the For Dummies world, who gamely endured all our efforts to make things “just right” and contributed welcome shape, substance, and finesse to the final results. To Karen Young, the new Hungry Minds Acquisitions Editor who worked with us on illustrations, marketing, and cheerleading. To Esmeralda St. Clair and her colleagues for copy editing to please a perfectionist’s soul. To our expert reviewers—Shelly Cohen, who gave a CPA’s view of the Information Flow chapter; Ken Braly and Charles Miles, whose technological expertise brought the Cyberorganization chapter up to the minute; Ann Gambrell, NAPO founding member, who reviewed the Home section; and Jackie Tiani, current NAPO board member, who reviewed the Office and Time Management sections. Thanks also to those who helped picture our thoughts on the page—David Hochberg and Kathy Mosechella at Lillian Vernon Corporation, Frank Rakawski, Maggie Scillia and Donna Miserendino at Get Organized!, Cathy McMannis and Jeremy Reiss at Stacks and Stacks, Dave Brown and Nancy Deptolla at Hoffman York, and especially our illustrators at Precision Graphics.

It’s been a long year for me, what with a divorce, getting my youngest daughter off to college, and moving from Chicago to Phoenix all while writing my first book. For all the support, personal and professional, during this transitional time, I thank my children — Mindy and Julie Parelman; my family—Marsha Buck, Allan Roth, Marv Roth, and even my ex-husband Joe Parelman; my friends, especially Vicki Schneider; my colleagues in the NSA-Illinois Chapter, especially the Forum Group; Windy City Toastmasters; and all my clients, consulting and speaking, whose belief in my organizing skills has made my career possible. Most importantly, thank you Elizabeth, for working with me to create this book, for polishing a diamond in the rough. I couldn’t have done it without you! I tip my hat to you. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you. (Was that enough trite phrases to a writer? Whoops, I should have created an acronym!)

As always, I have my friends and family to thank for keeping me centered and sane with generous input, insight, and unending patience when I disappeared from the scene for weeks on end to tend to my prose. Special thanks to my parents—the house at 200 North Prospect served as my mental model for each room of the Home section—to all the roommates who’ve shared the challenge of living in small spaces with me and so made me organizationally sensitized, and to the colleagues, creative partners, and clients who motivate me to find better ways to reach the finish line at work. Last but not at all least thank you Eileen, for entrusting me with your life’s work and passion, for not laughing too hard when you saw my house and making me laugh lots of other times, for being a true partner even when your burden was heavy. Thank you for teaching me the deep power of putting everything in its place, a life-changing lesson that has made co-creating this book a pleasure with eminently practical results!

Thank you all.

Eileen and Elizabeth

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development

Project Editor: Sherri Fugit

Acquisitions Editor: Karen Young

Copy Editor: Esmeralda St. Clair

Technical Editors: Ann Gambrell, Jackie Tiani

Editorial Manager: Jennifer Ehrlich

Editorial Assistant: Jennifer Young

Cover Photo: ©Getty Images/Daniel Allan

Composition

Project Coordinator: Maridee Ennis

Layout and Graphics: Matt Coleman, Leandra Johnson, Jill Piscitelli, Julie Trippetti, Jeremey Unger

Proofreaders: Laura Albert, John Bitter, Corey Bowen, Melissa D. Buddendeck, Angel Perez

Indexer: Norcross

Contents

Title

Introduction

Organizing for the Millennium

Being Busy versus Being Productive

How to Use This Book

How This Book Is Organized

Icons Used in This Book

You Don’t Have to Be Organized to Get Organized

Part I : Basic Organizational Tools and Tenets

Chapter 1: Dealing with Clutter

Living in an Overstuffed World

The Cost of Clutter

The Causes of Clutter

Chapter 2: Training Your Mind to Be Organized

Letting Go to Find Flow

Your Organizing Plan

How You Do It

Maintaining Organization

Chapter 3: Assembling the Tools, Supplies, and Systems

Paper Clips, File Folders, Binders: What’s It All About?

Organizers and Planners: Lists to Live By

Putting Things in Their Place: Containers

The Six Organizing Secrets

Part II : Getting Organized at Home

Chapter 4: Where It All Begins: The Front Hall

Getting In and Out of the Door: The Flight Deck

Coats, Boots, and Outerwear: The Closet

Hall Table

Chapter 5: What’s Cooking: Organizing the Kitchen

Clearing Off Your Countertops

Simplifying Your Sink

Classifying Your Cabinets and Drawers

The Drawer Doctor Is In

Sectioning Off Your Pantry

Reconfiguring the Refrigerator and Freezer

Fast-Track Food Storage

Mealtime or Hassletime: The Organized Meal Planner

Cookbooks and Recipes

Coupons: Turn Clutter into Cash in Hand

Sweeping the Kitchen Clean

Chapter 6: Sleep on This: Bedroom Bliss

Master Bedroom

Children’s Bedrooms

Guest Bedroom

Chapter 7: Bathe and Beautify: Creating Functional Bathrooms

Where Order Meets Indulgence

The Organizational Conundrum: Sink and Vanity

Shower and Bath

Closet of All Trades: The Linen Closet

The Half or Guest Bath

Chapter 8: Space for Gracious Living: The Living and Dining Rooms

Creating Uncluttered Elegance in the Living Room

Good Food and Company: Dining Room

Chapter 9: The Hangout Spot: Family and Media Room

Casually Neat Is Not a Contradiction

Fun or Frustrating: The Media Center

The Computer Equation

Managing Your Precious Moments: Photographs

Books and Bookshelves: The Library

Clutter or Current: Magazines

Games, Toys, and Collections

Chapter 10: Organizing for Fun: The Playroom

Positioning the Play Centers

How to Be a Senior Toy Manager

The Reading Center: Children’s Books

The Art of Organizing Arts ’n’ Crafts

Rec Room and Playroom Combo: All-Ages Fun!

Part III : Organizing Storage Spaces and Other Secret Places

Chapter 11: Lightening Your Load: The Laundry and Utility Room

Doing the Laundry Where You Live

Sorting Systems

Drying without Crying

Getting It Straight: Ironing

Scheduling Your Laundry Day

Utility or Mudroom

Chapter 12: Where Clutter Clones Itself: The Basement and Attic

Down in the Depths: Functional Concerns

Storage Made Simple

Basement Activity Centers

The Attic

Chapter 13: Patrolling the Borderlands: The Garage, Patio, and Shed

Getting a Ground Plan: The Garage

Dealing with Your Wheels: The Car Center

Fixing It Neatly: The Tool Center

Maintaining the Great Outdoors: Lawn, Garden, and Snow Centers

Winning Ways to Play: Sports and Game Center

The Trash and Recycling Center

Staying Cool in the Hot Zone: The Pool Center

The Patio or Deck

The Storage Shed

Part IV : Professionally Organized: Your Office

Chapter 14: Making Your Work Space Work

Do Less, Achieve More: The Zen of Organized Work

Focusing on Furniture and Equipment

Peak Productivity Placement

Cubes without Clutter

The Home Office

Household Information Center

Chapter 15: Command Central: The Desk

The Desk Is a Place to Do Work

Designating Your Drawers as Work Centers

The Computer Workstation

Chapter 16: Managing Your Information Flow

The ABCs of Filing

Mastering Your Mail

The Take Action File ‰ : The Tickler Turns Proactive

Chapter 17: Cyberorganization: The Next Frontier

Choosing Your Communication Mode

Maximizing Wired Efficiency

Paper or Electronic: A File Is a File

Wired: Phone, Fax, and the Internet

Learning Control: The Computer

Making Data Management Easy

Balancing Personal or Business Finances

Part V : Time Management Strategies for Home, Office, and Travel

Chapter 18: Planning Your Day and Your Life Like a Pro

Preparing for Your Future

Lists You Can Live By

Acting with Rhythms and Routines

Noticing and Rewarding Your Accomplishments

Chapter 19: Scheduling Skills for Maximum Productivity

Going with the Flow: The Time Log

Fixing Your Flow: The Busters

It’s How You Do It: Strategic Tasking

Pro Communications

Chapter 20: Maximizing Your Personal Time

If You’re Overwhelmed, Read This First

Getting Out of the House

Shopping and Errands

Cleaning and Chores

Handling and Moving Your Money

Making Time for Your Family

Managing Your Health

Scheduling Physical Fitness

Entertainment and Recreation

Finding a Special Someone

Chapter 21: Going Mobile: Trips Near and Far

The Power Briefcase and Purse

Taking Control of Your Commute

Working and Playing from the Car

Trips for Business or Pleasure

Part VI : The Part of Tens

Chapter 22: Storage for Small Spaces: Apartments, Condos, and Compact Houses

Purging Like You Mean Business

Stacking and Tiering

Shelving It

Tucking Under: Space Beneath the Bed

Using Countertops Constructively

Containing with Cabinets

Hanging with Hooks

Behind Closed Doors

Carting and Rolling

Double-Duty Furniture

Chapter 23: Ten Moves to Make Your Move Hassle-Free

Making a Plan

Choosing a Mover

Closing the Old Place

Getting Insurance

Planning Ahead for Travel

Covering Your Financial Assets

Collecting Personal Records

Purging Before You Pack

Packing What You Need

Preparing the New Place

Chapter 24: Ten Tips for Great Garage Sales

Scheduling Your Sale

Advertising

Being Neighborly

Bagging and Boxing

Collecting and Marking

Setting Up

Changing Money

Selling Toys

Involving the Kids

Making Items Sell

Chapter 25: Ten Pointers about Pets

Time

Space

Cost

Family Harmony

Records

Training

Pet Supplies

Grooming and Cleaning

Feeding Time

Travel

Chapter 26: 911! Emergency Strategies

Money

Medical

Communication

Car

Fire

Children’s Safety

Power Failures

Snow Emergencies

Valuables

Insurance

End User License Agreement

Introduction

Organizing for the Millennium

What’s the favorite four-letter word of less-than-fully organized people? “Help!” Answering that call has given me a satisfying career and my 15 minutes on the Today show and Oprah. In case you missed the shows or absorbing life-changing information takes you more than 15 minutes, I’m here to answer the call for you with Organizing For Dummies.

If you think of yourself as an organizational dummy, don’t feel bad; everybody is born that way. Organization isn’t inherited. With the human genome decoded, the evidence is clear: DNA strings dedicated to putting things into place and managing your time like a pro are nonexistent. Instead, organization is a learned skill set, just like driving a car. In fact that’s a pretty good analogy. If you think back, learning to drive probably seemed pretty daunting at first, but driving may now be so automatic that you can practically drive in your sleep (though national safety experts don’t recommend this). Organization is acquired, and as in any learning process, you need help. This book offers you that help.

I learned how to be organized through a combination of luck and sheer force of will. The lucky part is that I was born with organized parents. My mother and father taught me to clean up my toys, put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher, and make my bed every day. They showed me that everything had a place, and that some things should be put away before others came out. Lucky me; I learned all this before I even learned to read. (Organizing for Dummies didn’t exist at that time, so being able to read wouldn’t have helped anyway.)

After college, I landed my first job as a typist. That was fine, especially back then, before the days of career women, but I wanted more, so I decided to come up with better ways to do things to build my own rungs up the corporate ladder. I learned office organizing skills to add value to my work, and soon I’d moved from typist to secretary. The next stop was as an office administrator and eventually I ended up in association administration, juggling the workings of huge organizations, honing the systems that made events and processes run smoothly, and accomplishing my company’s strategic goals. I discovered organization by doing in my office career because otherwise all the executives I worked with never would have made it through the day, let alone reached the company’s bottom-line objectives.

Then things really got complicated: I became a mom. Determined to spend as much time as possible with my two daughters but committed to working and staying involved, I left the office and became a Tupperware rep. Yep, parties and all. Tupperware soon had me organizing kitchens all over the city of Chicago, coming in with my containers and leaving the place completely transformed. Being organized is a great way to win friends and influence people when you sell Tupperware. Meanwhile, I was busy with my family, attending all the girls’ school and sporting events, acting as a teacher’s aide and Girl Scout leader, washing a million loads of laundry, and racking up miles in the carpool lane. I discovered efficient ways to work and live because I had to. I couldn’t be in two places at one time but my organizing systems were in place everywhere, 24/7, and I was supermom. (Sorry about the bragging, but they say it’s okay for the Introduction.)

As my daughters grew old enough to need me less, I reassessed, set some goals (you can find out how in Part V), and became a professional organizer and trainer. Boy, was there a need out there! Today, through my company, Everything in its Place™, I help clients from Fortune 500 companies as well as trade associations, entrepreneurs, and busy individuals and families get organized. What I learned in the process is that anyone can learn organizing skills and put them into practice. So if you feel like an organizational dummy now, just open up your eyes and read, open up your mind and do, and you can create an organized you. All the pieces of your personality can remain in place, even as each element of your life and work finds its place too.

Being Busy versus Being Productive

So many technological, social, and economic changes impact your life every year that you probably need organization just to keep up, let alone advance. Many people have two jobs, one at the office and one taking care of things at home. If you have a family, you may have a third. Elderly relatives or community commitments? You can count off four, five, and keep right on going. No matter what life stage you’re in, getting organized can make every day better and help you achieve your long-term goals.

Read this book if you’d like to have

More time

Less stress

Greater productivity

Fit finances

Better relationships

An improved professional reputation

Space to live, work, breathe, and be

Don’t have time to get organized? All the more reason to read this book. I can make the time for you and deliver the goods, and you may wonder how you ever had time to be any other way.

How to Use This Book

Did you notice I wrote how to use, not read, this book in the heading above? That’s because reading is only half the battle. To get organized, you have to act.

I’m offering you a shortcut to my lifetime of learning. In these pages, you can have all my professional secrets. Still, all the organizing secrets in the world won’t do a thing for you if all you do is read them. You must put the principles into practice. This is not a novel or a book to read through and toss into one of your many piles. Organizing For Dummies is a reference book for real life, so you have to bring the pages to life by doing.

Thinking of a task as a pie and taking just one slice at a time is a time- management trick. Do the same thing with this book, read just one part, chapter, or a section within a chapter — depending upon your attention span and reading speed — then act on what you just read. Don’t wait until you finish the whole book. That day may never come (I’m a realist), and furthermore, you’re sure to forget all kinds of good tips and tricks by then. So read, and then do, and then read some more, sort of like an organizing sandwich.

First things first: Start with Part I. Chapters 1 to 3 contain the guideposts, the principles of organization that are key to understanding the rest, and they’re a pretty quick read.

Next, go where you want to go. Perhaps you’re currently single and aren’t too concerned about what’s going on at home, but your office is a certifiable war zone; start with the office chapters in Part IV. You can always go back to the home when you get inspired or after you have children and need to organize their clothes and playthings. (It happens!) On the other hand, if your home is the war zone in your life, that part is your starting point. Pressed for time? Skip to the time-management section in Part V.

When it’s time to tackle Part IV (office) or V (time management), you may ultimately save yourself some time by reading the whole part through first, and then going back and working on individual sections. You can get an edge by getting the big picture because the organizational ideas and skills you will gain can all work together to reinforce each other.

Psychologists say it takes about 18 to 21 days to make or break a habit, so give yourself some time to absorb this information. Read a section over again. Three times if you like. No one will think less of you for it. At school, you wouldn’t read something once and then take the test. (Or if you did, you know what usually happens.)

How This Book Is Organized

I set up Organizing For Dummies to support the quick-hit reference process I just described, so you can skip around and easily find the organizing advice you need for any aspect of your life. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s where.

Part I: Basic Organizational Tools and Tenets

Chapters 1 through 3 give you the who, what, where, why, when, and how of getting organized by showing you the principles and systems that are used throughout the book. If you really want to get going, this is the beginning.

Part II: Getting Organized at Home

Here’s a room-by-room rundown of all the places you live in — the kitchen, living room, dining room, den, playroom, bedroom, and bathroom. The part opens with the front hall, because that’s the entrance to your home (very important in the ancient Asian tradition of feng shui that harmonizes the physical placement of objects in our daily surroundings for the sake of flow). Go where you want to get organized first, and learn how to apply the five principles of P-L-A-C-E™ to systematize each space: purging, placing like things together, accessibility, containing, and evaluating.

Part III: Organizing Storage Spaces and Other Secret Places

Part III takes a good look at many spaces of your home that you don’t live in and therefore may overlook. Hopefully you don’t live in the laundry room, which is included here. (If you do, read the chapter on how to do your laundry in two days so you can get the heck out of there!) The basement, attic, and garage are covered too, to help you organize your storage and secret places so that you can reclaim this real estate.

Part IV: Professionally Organized: Your Office

Turn here if your desk is a mess or your files have gone wild. Think you don’t need files when you have good piles? Do not pass go! Proceed directly to Part IV. The tricks and tips using W-A-S-T-E™, R-A-P-I-D™, and R-E-M-O-V-E™ will get you through your papers quickly and show you what you need to pitch, what to retain, and how to store and find things from your stapler to your strategic plan. My clients say that the Take Action File™ alone is worth the cost of this book.

Part V: Time Management Strategies for Home, Office, and Travel

Whether you wonder where the time goes, need to accomplish more at work, or simply want to make the most of your day and your life, this part can get you started and take you to the time-management finish line. From the new to the tried and true, here are all the time-management techniques that you need in one place, presented in systems that you can start using today. If all you get out of this section is “plan today for tomorrow,” I will have accomplished a great goal. (Planning today is easy when you follow the four steps of P-L-A-N™.) If you grasp all the other good stuff that’s there, I can die happy and you can squeeze in a lot more living before you go.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

These five chapters have ten ideas each for organizing a particular process or space. If you’re looking for storage ideas for apartments and condos, want to be better prepared for emergencies, or need some pointers about pets, this is the place to turn for quick ideas. Anyone gearing up to move may want to jump into Chapter 24 and have a great garage sale, then go to Chapter 23 to make your move smooth.

Icons Used in This Book

I direct your attention to all sorts of helpful hints for getting organized in Organizing For Dummies with a system of icons that help you scan right to the juicy stuff on any given page. Here’s an overview of what you’ll see.

Extra ideas to aid the points made.

This warns you of possible problems.

Points to remember that will save you time and trouble later.

Shortcuts to shave time off tasks and leave more for living.

Cut-to-the-chase ways to clean up that mess.

High-level hints for advanced organizing.

You Don’t Have to Be Organized to Get Organized

I want to conclude all this talk of what’s where with a reassuring word and a promise. First, there’s no wrong way to use this book. Read it however you please (though if you go from right to left your comprehension may be seriously impaired). The point is simple: Read and do, and you can’t go wrong.

My promise is that if you read and do just a little bit at a time, you will get results. Really. Twenty old papers tossed is an inch of free file space and the beginning of a new habit, and you can do it in five minutes or less. So get organizing today, and by tomorrow, you may start seeing things in a whole new way.

Part I

Basic Organizational Tools and Tenets

In this part . . .

O rganized people aren’t born . . . they’re made. So if you wouldn’t know a time-management technique if you tripped over one and can’t figure out how clean- ing out your closet can make your life better, where do you start?

This part introduces you to the why and how of getting organized, giving you both the convincing pep talk and the basic principles you need to put everything in its place. You can discover the many benefits of being organized, how to develop an organized mindset, and six tricks that make quick work of any organizing challenge. Read it and you’ll be raring to go!

Chapter 1

Dealing with Clutter

In This Chapter

Why anyone can get organized and why you should now

Calculating the cost of disorganization in dollars and cents

How organizing increases time, productivity, and good health

Stopping clutter-causers in their tracks

I know you think clutter-busting is going to hurt. For many people, getting organized sounds less appealing than a trip to the dentist and more complicated. You may have put off cleaning up your life by figuring that if you’re not organized yet, you must have the wrong personality type. Getting organized goes against the grain and only causes pain.