Organizing

My new craze - organizing! Who doesn't need to organize better, whether it be things in their life, email, their calendar, events or even magazines, or junk mail?

So I'm developing a system, it is definitely a work in progress.
I am so tired of seeing junk mail in the front hallway near the door, fliers, newspapers, etc. That I want to make sure that I am going to take care of them right away. So now, I have bins by the stairway. One bin - cardboard. One bin - newspapers and any paper without my name/address on it (have to be wise about security these days). Then one bin - cans/bottles recycling in the pantry. One bin for having everything with names/addresses on it that will make fodder for the proverbial fire-pit in the backyard come this cold season.

I'm also looking for new and innovative ways to organize my jewelry findings, half completed projects, newly bought beads that don't fit in the current containers. Oh my goodness, you can spend a fortune on things to organize for yourself, that's for sure. There sure are plenty of ideas out there, you just have to be able and willing to pay dearly for them. 3 shelf unit at Target is $20? WHOA! No wonder everyone is saying the cost of living is going up - really? I'm flabbergasted! How about a desk - ON SALE with double incentives is $69.99 for one of "poor construction" according to the reviews at Staples!

How about closets - don't even let me tell you how much they cost! I got 3 wooden units for all my DVD's at Unclaimed Freight and they were $15.99 each, but they fit a large amount of DVD's so they were well worth it (and I had a coupon). Try looking for a value bookcase - have you seen the prices of things these days? I would have to go a month without eating before I could buy only a percent of what I want to buy to organize my life.

So for right now, I guess I'll keep dreaming up ways to save money without spending too much and organize as I go. The bins for the recycling and such were 6.84 at Home Depot - so for under $20 I'm not spending a ton and, at least organizing my front porch.

Organizing your schedule takes a little more doing and email, a LOT more doing. How many email accounts do you have? I count 8 for me and I'm not making any more!!! Wow, that's a lot of junk to sort through, thank goodness that hotmail now has a "junk" button anytime you are viewing an email that will send it to junk next time it gets there. I wish Gmail would implement the same thing...The rest are outlook and hosted outlook and are just a lot to organize. So I've started coming up with really cool "file" systems within my emails so that filing the items away is a breeze. I think in my work email from 11 years, I have 13 .pst folders and about 300+ folders/subfolders in every one of them. Amazing how I can find things though when push comes to shove and people ask me about past items or things from way back! So it really is all about what you can remember about how to file things...

What exactly do you do to organize things?

Thanks for listening...