A year ago on Unclutterer
- 2007 Gift Giving Guide: Charitable giving
What do you give the person who has everything? You don’t. - Hide your desk’s power strip
Step-by-step instructions for how to hide your desk’s power strip. - 2007 Gift Giving Guide: Buying for children
The holiday season is upon us and now is the time when grandparents overindulge and spoil their grandkids by purchasing everything that they think looks cute. - Unitasker Wednesday: Caramel apple dipper
If you have a sweet tooth and you like to indulge in compulsive purchases, then the Caramel Apple Dipper is probably right up your alley. - Workspace of the Week: Student office
Natasha’s office is a studying retreat.
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More project management application reviews
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/13/15-useful-project-management-tools/ I’m always on the lookout for project management tools that are simple to use and worth their price. I’ve written about a few of my favorites that can be found online, and personally continue to use Basecamp for work projects and LifeTick for non-work goals.
Last Thursday, SmashingMagazine.com completed an in-depth review of 15 project management applications — many of which I didn’t know existed before I read the article. The applications are excellent for people working in technical and creative jobs, and can certainly help you to increase your productivity and organization at work.
The article explores basic project management, wiki-based project management, bug and ticket tracking, collaboration and conferencing, invoicing, and time management applications.
If you’re in the market for a new project management system, I recommend reading the SmashingMagazine review.
Do you have a favorite project management application not mentioned in this set of reviews or in our previous article? If so, please let us know about them in the comments. I’m interested in learning about the tools that help you to be an more organized worker.
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Preparing for holiday house guests
They are coming over for the holidays, and they are bringing more than just presents. That’s right, your relatives along with their kids, their stuff, and lots of stress! However, you can be prepared! The following tips will give you some simple ways to get yourself prepared ahead of time:
- Clean off your dining table today! I don’t mean the night before, do it today (or at least start). Start finding a permanent home for each item that has accumulated on your dining room table. Chances are the same items end up there again and again because they don’t have a permanent home within your home. Involve the whole family as most of the time, clutter on the dining table belongs to more than just one person. Once you have the table cleaned off, put a centerpiece on it, or something out of the ordinary to make sure it does not accumulate stuff before your dinner party.
- Get the dishes ready. If you need to borrow or use special serving dishes or holiday dishes, start taking them out now or borrowing them and get them washed. Use the dining room table as a staging ground to keep them until the holiday.
- Clean the house room by room. Pick a room each day or a few rooms each week. Or schedule a special session with your normal cleaning service.
Don’t wait until the night before everyone arrives to start cleaning. - Take inventory of your guest spaces. Can your guests sleep on your pull out couch or in your spare room comfortably? Does the room need to be cleaned? This is a great time to get your guest items organized, and to throw out and donate any unnecessary items that have found their way into your guest spaces.
- Create a friendly environment for your guests. Lay out guest towels, bathrobes, magazines, mints, maps (for your out of town guests), and water for your guests. Provide your guests with enough information so that they can enjoy your geographic area without assistance from you. Make sure they are familiar with phone and Internet access at your home as well.
- Be prepared to spend time with your relatives. Do your cleaning and preparation ahead of time so you can spend time relaxing and visiting, and not in the kitchen. If your relatives will be around for a number of days, consider making dinner reservations at a local restaurant so you can take a night and all relax together.
- Ask your guests if they have any special dietary needs before they arrive. This will help you avid any last minute trips to the grocery store.
- Have any gifts wrapped and ready to distribute before your guests arrive. They are lots of fun to shake and look at for the kids in your family. This will also allow you to spend time with your family instead of locked up in your bedroom wrapping presents.
- Remember to enjoy your company. Sharing your home can be stressful, but by cleaning and organizing in advance, you can have a relaxing time visiting with those you love!
Bonnie Joy Dewkett is the owner and operator of The Joyful Organizer. She offers professional organization services to help you organize your home and your life.
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Workspace of the Week: A makeshift space
This week’s Workspace of the Week is Stuart’s Emergency Workspace:
http://flickr.com/photos/26791140@N02/2974804573/in/pool-unclutterer
This is one of the most fun entries I have ever seen in the Unclutterer flickr pool, and it was calling out to be shared. When Stuart was moving to Arizona, he had to pack up all of his furniture and ship it across the country. Unfortunately for Stuart, he still had time left in his old place before he made the move. Out of necessity, he built a makeshift office to sustain him until he traveled to his new home. This emergency office is proof that you don’t need much to create an uncluttered office. Granted, nothing matches and it’s a little crazy — but WOW is it resourceful and simple! Thank you, Stuart, for sharing your emergency office with us.
Want to have your own workspace featured in Workspace of the Week? Submit a picture to the Unclutterer flickr pool. Check it out because we have a nice little community brewing there. Also, don’t forget that workspaces aren’t just desks. If you’re a cook, it’s a kitchen; if you’re a carpenter, it’s your workbench.
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Learn to safely wrap cords, cables, and hoses
The magazine Fine Homebuilding has an informative and season-appropriate tutorial on its website “ Wrapping cords and hoses: Learn how to avoid twists and kinks that can cause damage.”
This advice is perfect for garden and air hoses and extension cords that are ready to be stored for the cold months. There are three methods described in the article: a looped bundle, a loose chain, and a reverse coil.
If the pictures in the article don’t provide you with enough information, check out the instructional video that accompanies the article.
Also, I recommend that you take a few moments and check out the whole site — you can find many more helpful how-to solutions for your home on FineHomebuilding.com.
(via Apartment Therapy: LA)
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Oprah’s Clean Your Messy House Tour
Oprah has been giving decluttering a lot of attention lately — and we are glad to see it. She has teamed up with an Unclutterer-favorite Peter Walsh for the Clean Your Messy House Tour. We interviewed Mr. Walsh a while back and have covered Oprah’s efforts in this area in the past.
The online slideshow that accompanies this project has some quick tips. If you feel overwhelmed by the clutter in your home, taking 10 minutes on a small project is an easy step to get you started.
Some general tips that were covered in the first episode included:
- Before beginning organization, ask yourself, “What do I want from this space?”
- Ask yourself, “Am I valuing my possessions?”
- Ask yourself, “Am I saying one thing to myself about my habits and my life and doing another?”
- Always store like with like.
- Create zones for specific functions. (i.e. the mail zone.)
- Start small. Begin by tackling a manageable area that you can organize relatively quickly. Small chunks over time will be less overwhelming.
- To hang children’s artwork, get a variety of small rug squares and use double stick tape to hang the squares to the walls. You can pin the artwork to the rugs as a creative display board.
- With clothing, hangers should all be facing one direction. As you wear the clothes, hang them back up in the opposite direction. In six months, check to see what you have not worn. If you haven’t worn it, take this opportunity to decide if you really need it. If not, donate or sell locally.
- In small spaces, create dispersed light. “When you light everything, you light nothing,” says Candice Olsen of HGTV’s Divine Design, who is providing design guidance for the tour.
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Unitasker Wednesday: Piercey the egg piercer
All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!
Since we started the Unitasker feature, the egg has been responsible for many of the products featured. Who knew preparing an egg was so tricky? I’m not very useful in the kitchen, but I can manage to prepare a few things and one of those things is a hard boiled egg. I even manage to get it prepared without cracking it! Apparently, cracking hard boiled eggs is a problem for some folks so someone decided to invent the Piercey Egg Piercer.
The Piercey Egg Piercer promises to keep your hard boiled egg crack-free by piercing a pin sized hole in the large end of the egg with deadly precision. Yeah, you could probably try to pierce the egg yourself, but you wouldn’t be able to enjoy the friendly face that Piercey has. Piercey will make your hard boiled egg preparation easy and friendly. (Woah, there is even a competing product to Piercey!)
Thanks to reader Wesa for bringing this unitasker to our attention.
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A year ago on Unclutterer
- Gift guide for the 2007 holiday season
Presenting Unclutterer’s 2007 Gift Giving Guide! - Eye-Fi eliminates the need for USB wires
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Save time and effort with a personal shopper
I’m not someone who enjoys spending time shopping for clothes. When I need to update, enhance, or replace items in my wardrobe, I write the information down on a list that I keep on my computer. Then, usually twice a year, I will go shopping to collect the items I need from my list.
In every sense, I am a utilitarian shopper.
One of the frustrating things about being a utilitarian shopper, however, is that fashion trends and my list usually don’t mesh well together. Styles, cuts, and colors change from season to season, and I don’t keep up on these things so it takes me days to find matches for my list.
Recently, I discovered that I can greatly improve my shopping experience with the help of a store’s personal shopper. In every case I have encountered, the service has been free. And, in all but one case, when I offered the shopper a tip, the shopper refused to take it. Free help is my kind of help!
Here’s how it works: You put together a list of what you’re looking for and take your measurements. Then, call your favorite department store and ask to speak to a personal shopper. The shopper will ask you basic questions about your life and your price range, and then you give him or her your list and measurements. You’ll also set an appointment for when you will come in to meet with the personal shopper. At your scheduled time, you arrive and the personal shopper will have clothes already pulled for you that you can try on and see if you like. You have no obligation to buy any of the clothes, and the shopper sticks around while you’re trying on items to see if you need different sizes or different cuts. Usually, at least some of the pieces work, and you’re out the door and on your way home in half the time of a normal shopping experience.
I’ve even tried this process in shops that don’t officially have personal shoppers. When a clerk in the store asks if he or she can help me, I whip out my list and discuss what I’m looking to buy. Nine times out of 10, the clerk will ask you about your size and then go and find some pieces for you. I’ve even had clerks tell me to go ahead and make my way to the fitting room and they brought the items to me. The clerks know their merchandise and find items much more quickly then someone coming into the store.
I also feel that I dress a little more hip now than I used to. The personal shoppers and clerks know the latest trends much better than I do, and they always seem to find things that flatter my body better than I find when I’m left to search a store on my own. For a utilitarian shopper like myself, a personal shopper saves me time and energy when I need new pieces for my wardrobe.
And, it should go without saying, but only use these services when you need to replace or improve your wardrobe. I like to follow the one-in-one-out philosophy with clothes: If I bring something new into my wardrobe, at least one old piece in my current collection has to go to charity or the rag bag.
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Remember the Milk: Now with iPhone and Gmail integration
Of all of the software-based GTD “solutions” I’ve managed to get my hands on, there’s a fairly common theme among all of those that didn’t really cut the mustard: they simply tried too hard to build something that encompassed each of the main tenets of GTD, but have very little flexibility. In other words, these apps shoehorn you into the “canonical” GTD configuration without giving you room to customize the system to best suit your needs. Thankfully, Remember the Milk has managed to not only hang in there (for 3 years now), but pull ahead of the pack through integration with other products and services. And, as of this past month, these services now include Gmail and the iPhone.
RTM’s new native iPhone application (which requires a Pro account at RTM, which will set you back a scant $25 per year) is what got me to switch from my previous solution (OmniFocus on OSX + iPhone). The app is an excellent first release, much moreso than most of the other 1.0s that appear in the store. Launching and synching are both blazingly fast, unlike most local-storage-heavy iPhone apps. It also supports landscape mode for just about every view, which is a killer feature for me. It lets you fully manage the service, all from the comfort of, well, wherever you are with your iPhone.
The other new feature that really cinched it for me is the availability of an in-Gmail gadget where you can add/edit/complete todo list items without leaving Gmail (where many of my tasks and projects originate, which I’m sure is true for many of you). This is exactly the type of integration that really puts RTM a cut above the rest of the list management applications I’ve used. Couple this with the excellent Twitter integration, and RTM is never more than a few clicks/taps away, no matter where I am or what I’m doing.
One great OmniFocus feature that I’d truly love to see in RTM is the ability to incubate tasks or projects until a given date/time. For example, if I know I need to send a birthday card to my Mom in 3 weeks, OmniFocus would let me set a start date for the project, so that it (as well as any associated tasks) wouldn’t show up in my lists until that date. A consistent weekly review would make sure this type of thing doesn’t sit fallow in your task list for weeks before it is actionable, but I’m a lazy programmer who likes to let computers do the thinking that I don’t really feel I have to do.
Honestly, there isn’t much I’d change about RTM’s current set of features, other than perhaps some SMS integration, but that problem is solved easily enough with the Twitter integration. Otherwise, I find it to be quite useful - not to mention a total bargain, and well worth some investigation if you’re a productivity-minded technophile like myself.
Brett Kelly is a sometimes-independent writer, software developer and productivity nerd from California. You can read more about his unending adventures online at brettkelly.org, or you can just follow him on Twitter.
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Unclutter your refrigerator before Thanksgiving
If you host Thanksgiving at your home, then now is the time to start making room for all of the dishes that need to be stored in your refrigerator. To make room for everything it is a good idea to use up the items that are currently taking up space. My wife calls the process of clearing out the ingredients available in the refrigerator as “creative cooking.” It consists of not shopping for groceries for a week while concocting dishes from the ingredients that remain in the refrigerator and cupboards. Creative cooking also takes place at our house prior to long vacations.
While you clear out the space in your refrigerator it is freeing up valuable real estate for the turkey along with the side dishes that will reside in there while they wait to be prepared. This also allows for room in your refrigerator for the all important leftovers.
With just a little more than a week to go, get cleaning and avoid having to play refrigerator Tetris on the big day. Let us know about some of your favorite “creative cooking” recipes in the comments. One of my favorites is a good ol’ fashion stew using up meat and savory vegetables.
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Thanksgiving buffet
I’m heading to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving this year. It has been a few years since I spent the holiday at my parents’ place, so I’m looking forward to it.
Our Thanksgiving dinners are usually served in a buffet style. This makes the whole process run smoothly and keeps the table free of serving dishes. The table is set with utensils and glasses, but the plates and food are stationed at the the buffet. It is an efficient way to serve your guests, especially if you are hosting a larger party.
Martha Stewart has some helpful tips on setting up a Thanksgiving buffet. Some of the tips:
2. Position the buffet table away from the wall, so that guests have access from all sides.
6. Lay out food in a logical order: entrees before side dishes.
7. Save space for food by displaying low arrangements.
If you’re having a party of six or more this year, a Thanksgiving buffet may be something to consider for your meal.
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The old new is the new old
Every once in a while I stumble upon a company and think, “I like how this company sees the world.” Last week, I learned about Fusion Furniture, a company that repurposes industrial furniture for private use.
http://www.fusionfurnituregallery.com/
In this case, Fusion re-designed and re-purposed a never used medical supply storage unit and turned it into a portable bar.
Even if you don’t like the industrial design of these pieces, anyone can appreciate the idea of finding a new, useful purpose for an older piece. If you have furniture items in your home that are clutter because they’re not being used, think about transforming the piece yourself or maybe selling it to a company that transforms furniture — your clutter can become someone else’s treasure.
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A year ago on Unclutterer
- Don’t let bath toys consume your bathroom
With bath toys, just like regular toys, you need to get rid of the old when new ones are acquired. - Interesting way to hide powercords
Finding ways to hide them and get them into a manageable arrangement is always a struggle. - Unitasker Wednesday: Doughnut maker
If you want to undertake doughnut making, Williams-Sonoma has you covered with the Mini Doughnut Maker. - Cleaning and organization quirks
Tell us about your quirky organization and cleaning sprees. - Organize that messy locker
Back in my school days my locker was a complete disaster. - Workspace of the Week: Home Office 2.0
This week’s workspace is a new home office with no visible cords and a terrific view.
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Twenty percent off coupon for The Container Store
If you watch the Oprah Winfrey show or follow UncluttererTips on Twitter, then this information is old news to you. However, with the holidays on the horizon, I wanted to make sure that all of our readers knew how to get a 20 percent discount at The Container Store.
Oprah has once again teamed up with Peter Walsh to help Americans clean up their messy homes. This time, as part of the effort, The Container Store is helping out, too. To get the 20 percent discount you can print the coupon to use in the store, enter the code to use online, or print a barcode and give its numerical information to a phone representative.
The coupon and codes expire on November 19 — just four days from now — so you’ll have to act quickly if you want to take advantage of this offer!
Image courtesy of the Oprah Winfrey show
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