Simple Effects Blog: Organize Your Personal Life

Here’s a great idea for organizing busy students on the go.  Use a portable car desk (like this one from Mobile gear) to house paper, pens, notebooks, their school calendar and worksheets. They can move the desk from room to room in the house and all their stuff is right at hand.   It’s also a great way for kids who spend a lot of time in the car (heading to and from sports  or music events etc.) to work on their homework while mom or dad drive. 

When it comes to homework strategies for this school year, think about how your family operates and look for ways to work with those challenges to make it easier for your child to get their work done.

Many of us have "techno trash" cluttering up drawers and closets in our home.   Old ink cartridges, VCR tapes, cables and components for technology we no longer own, and so it goes.

GreenDisk  accepts techno trash and  all of the material that GreenDisk collects is reused or recycled.  No hazardous materials or obsolete components go overseas to be processed or disposed of. 

Here’s a list of some of the things that GreenDisk will accept:

• All forms of electronic media and their cases: diskettes, zip disks, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, DVDs et al, video tape, audio tape, game cartridges, DAT, DLT and virtually all other type of computer tapes.
• Hard drives, Zip and Jaz drives, jump drives, etc.
• All forms of printer cartridges including both inkjet and toner.
• All types of cell phones, pagers, PDAs and their chargers, cables, and headset accessories
• All types of rechargeable batteries (not regular alkaline ones) and their chargers
• All of the small computer accessories such as MP3 players, iPods, digital cameras, hand-held scanners, handheld games and other connected devices
• All of the cords, cables, boards, chips, etc. attached to or removed from a computer.
• Laptop computers

Greendisk serves all 48 States and some limited service for Canadians.  You must contact  Greendisk directly  to arrange to shipment at your expense. 

You can simplify your gift giving by choosing one of these clutter-free gift ideas as your go-to gift for all your friends and family:

- Fresh flowers or a Fruit basket (pick up a bouquet  or fruits at the market or send via a florist or other on-line delivery service)

- Tickets…to the art museum, zoo, symphony, rock concert, sporting event, theater, or any special event you know they would enjoy! (often you can save time by ordering on-line)

- Restaurant Gift Certificate — for their favorite local cuisine

- Retail Gift Certificate – for a store that supports their favorite hobby (ie bookstore, yarn or fabric store, computer or camera store etc.)

- An Indulgence –  (a bottle of fine wine, decadent chocolate truffles,  extra virgin olive oil, a box of their favorite nuts, a spa treatment etc.)

Everyone can be given the same "type" of gift (to simplify things for you ) but make sure that you "personalize" the gift for each one!

What great clutter-free gifts do you give?

You and your children are invited to participate in a new and
groundbreaking plastic bottle cap recycle initiative –Recycle Caps with Aveda.

Aveda realizes that the U.S. does not have an operable system in
place to recycle plastic bottle caps. They can become trash and
dangerous pollutants, littering our beaches and oceans. Birds
and other marine creatures mistake them for food with tragic
results. The magnitude of this pollution problem is devastating to
our oceans and wildlife.

With the help of their network of salons and stores in partnership with community schools, Aveda is building a new recycling program
for plastic bottle caps.  But they need willing volunteers to set up collection boxes in local schools.

If you and your school would like to participate, contact email capcollection@aveda.com or call 1.877.AVEDA09

College and Universities are out for another year and many students will have packed up and come home with their text books.  You can store them in your basement or attic for the next several years or encourage your son or daughter  to sell them on-line.

Campus Books will help you find out who’s buying your textbook and for how much. You just enter the ISBN number and they’ll do the rest.

So, don’t keep those textbooks until they are so outdated they are of no value to anyone. Sell them now and use the cash for next year’s books.

There’s nothing quite so welcome as company when you are faced with a large and overwhelming task.

Ask a friend to sit and visit with you while you undertake a major organizational project.  She/he can help you get over the guilt in passing along that holiday sweater from your in-laws, or tell you honestly that you will never finish that rug-hooking project you started in college.

Or, if your friend is willing to help out, an extra pair of hands to move furniture or haul out the trash will help to speed the process along. You can plan to work at your house one week, and your friend’s house the next so that you both benefit.

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1. Organize your receipts:

Put a mid-sized ziploc freezer bag in your purse, briefcase or backpack.  Write the month and year on the front of it and put all your receipts for that month inside.  At the end of the month, drop the ziploc bag into a shoe box for the current year and put a new ziploc bag( labeled for the current month) back in your bag. If you need to refer to your receipts throughout the year, you’ll know exactly where to find them.  Keep a separate bag in your carry on  for business expense receipts while travelling. This will make it easy to find them for your expense report.

2.  Keep track of spare parts:

Toys, Electronic gadgets, small appliances etc. often come with spare parts.  Label a ziploc bag and store the corresponding parts inside. Keep all these bags of spare parts in a single drawer or box and you’ll know where to find them when you need them.

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Organizing deadlines can come up for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you are putting your house up for sale, expecting a new baby, or have an aging parent or adult children returning home.

Or you may be facing an ultimatum from a boss, a landlord, a roommate or a spouse telling you that you need to clean up your mess by a certain date or else!

Regardless of the reason for the time constraint, a professional organizer can help you figure out what you need to do to get organized by D-day. Just make sure she/he has the time, experience and staffing resources available to help you through to the finish line.

Have an old car or boat battery taking up space in your garage, shed or basement? 

You can drop these batteries off at your local AAA Aproved Auto Repair Facility.  The used batteries will be collected and delivered to an EPA-regulated recycling plant.

Since the program began in 2001, approximately 1.8 million batteries have been collected for recycling. 

For a list of AAR facilities near you, click here

Wondering what to do with your old camera, phone, game system, GPS  etc. after you’ve upgraded?  Radio Shack’s Trade-In program will appraise your item and tell you what they think it is worth.

You ship the item using their pre-paid shipping label and they will send you a Radio Shack store credit.  Just another way to go green with your old electronics.