Free Resources - Newsletter Archives, Helpful Hints & Tips
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Tip of the Month
When time is short, but you need a bit of organizational inspiration, check out the new “Tips” section on our website. It’s updated at least every month- sometimes more frequently. The tips are designed to dovetail with events in our lives that can be fraught with confusion. For example, after tax season, we might offer a tip on purging your home files; or at the holidays, the suggestion could focus on streamlining your gift wrapping and delivery system. Current events like free document shredding, prom dress donation sites or where to dispose of unwanted medicines will also be highlighted. One thing we can promise is that if you did nothing else all year to get organized, simply implementing these tips could give you a new lease on life. If you’d like to have the “Tips and Events” delivered to you inbox, please
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or fill out the Tip of the Month sign-up form to the right. - July 2010 Tip of the Month: Stop the paper clutter before it arrives in your home! Keep your shredder and recycling bin together. When you bring in the mail 90% of it can either be recycled or shredded before it lands on your desk. Check our the Paper & Time Management section of our Resources page for more ideas on how to stop the "junk mail".
- June 2010 Tip of the Month: Just can't seem to fold your sheets quite right? Fold your sheets the best that you can and then put each set into a pillow case. This will not only keep the sets together, but the pillow case will create a nice clean look on your linen closet shelf.
- May 2010 Tip of the Month: The final Picasso piece is about to find its way home on the last day of school. There is no better time than now to pick your favorite pieces from the year and let the rest go. Really learn to treasure and honor the artwork you love.
- April 2010 Tip of the Month: Sort and purge financial files as soon as your taxes are filed. Consult your accountant or visit IRS.gov for details on document retention. Remember to establish tax files for each new year in January, before your documents and receipts are scattered.
Media Coverage: Simplicity in the News
Simplicity Newsletter Archive
 Travel: Packing & Smart Clothing Choices
- The Smart Suit: Clothing that knows how to divide & multiply. A two-day business trip? An out-of-town wedding? If the idea of extra luggage doesn’t fit your travel plans, here’s a suggestion for getting more mileage out of a great suit. We call it ‘breaking the suit’, which simply means the jacket and trousers do double or triple duty. You get three or even four outfits, but your arrive with only one bag. Now that’s a smart suit!
Information and Images Provided To Simplicity By:
TAYLOR RICHARDS & CONGER
PHILLIPS PLACE ... CHARLOTTE...704.366.9092
SHOPS ON THE GREEN....LAKE NORMAN.... 704.895.2081
www,TRCStyle.com
Closet Organization
- Closet Queen: "If you can’t find an article of clothing you want, or get easily dressed in the morning, your closet isn’t working for you—it’s working against you,” asserts Carson Tate. Read more by downloading the full article.
- Closet Purging 101: Clothes purging can be fraught with emotion. Here are a few thoughts and suggestions to help you keep your emotions in check and your closet project on track. Read more by downloading the full article.
- Reclaim Your Closet: Reclaim your closet and your wardrobe with a few simple organizational solutions.
- Closet Efficiency: If you can’t find an article of clothing you want, or get easily dressed in the morning, your closet isn’t working for you—it’s working against you. Effective organization is key to reducing stress and simplifying your daily routine.
Donating, Recycling & Yard Sales
- The Salvation Army of Greater Charlotte, NC: Check out their website to find the address and hours of the Salvation Army location nearest you. For free pick-ups for Thrift Store Donations within 50 miles of Uptown Charlotte, please call 704.332.1171 or visit www.charlottearc.org.
- Recycling Drop-Off Centers in Mecklenburg: All Recycling Centers Accept: Office paper, Cardboard, Magazines, Newspapers , Phonebooks, Aluminum cans, Steel cans, Tin cans, Plastic bottles and Glass bottles. Full Service Centers accept a wider variety of recyclables. Click on your closest Recycling Center's location link to view the specific items collected at that location. Recycle your cell phones with the Mecklenburg County Women's Commission, 700 North Tryon Street, 704-336-3210 for the Domestic Violence Program.
- Donation Resources List: Find a listing of various organizations accepting donations.
- Free Cycle (A Yahoo! Group) www.freecycle.org: It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Membership is free.
- E-Cycling Central: www.eiae.org: Everything you need to know about electronics recycling. Lists of local and national organizations that refurbish and donate used electronics to charities. Recycling options also available.
- Throwplace.com: list goods they wish to give away to others. Charities, Businesses or Individuals registered with Throwplace.com® are able to search the site and make requests for items of interest. Items listed on Throwplace are not for sale—they are to be donated. Membership is free.
- Host your own Yard Sale after you've purged your home, garage, attic, and storage units. Invite your friends, family and neighbors to join the sale.
Financial Organization / Tax Deduction & Information Resources
- Get Financially Organized: Organizing your files is a step-by-step process of planning and preparation.
It’s not simple, but once you get a filing system together it should be easy to maintain. To help get your financial records in order, follow the important steps in this article. - IRS.gov: What tax records to keep per the United States Department of the Treasury's Internal Revenue Service.
- CharityDeductions.com: A yearly membership fee keeps an organized record of your donations for your tax deductions, includes values for thousands of items.
- Turbo Tax's It's Deductible www.itsdeductible.com: Free online resource for compiling the value of your tax deductible charitable donations.
Holidays Simplified
- Holiday Cards without Clutter: Creative ways to make the most of the cards you receive during the holidays.
- Good Gift Giving: Does just thinking about your holiday gift list make your blood pressure rise, your wallet constrict, and your body break out in a cold sweat? Let’s simplify the whole gift giving by thinking about GIFTS a little differently.
- Getting Organized for the Holidays: The holidays do not have to be stressful and overwhelming. A few simple organizational tips will help you make your holidays merry and bright and save you some time and money – precious commodities during the holiday season!
- How to Simplify in the New Year: Let’s focus on simply living. Streamline your routine. What can you do to reduce the number of steps you take each morning to get dressed? Can you pack all of your children’s lunches for the week on Sunday evening? Can you pay all of your bills on-line? Streamline. Make it easy.
- Resolutions: We all do it. And we all make them. Resolutions. Particularly New Year’s resolutions. January 1st arrives and we have a clean slate. It is time to begin fulfilling our resolutions. We start down the road to fulfilling our resolutions, but slowly the resolution fades into the background. There is a way to keep your resolutions.
- Holiday Survival Tips: The holidays seem more stressful than other times of the year. How come? I am convinced that people allow themselves to be stressed by their perceived expectations from others and the symbolic rush of completing the year. Here are ten ways to take back control, time, and maybe even part of your sanity.
Home Organization
- Top 10 Organization Tips: Discover the 10 best organizational tips here.
- Tips from the Pros: 7 helpful steps to organizing your home.
- Is It Just Too Much: How can you go from being overwhelmed by your possessions to creating a home that reflects who you are and how you want to live? Start living simply with these tips from organizing guru Peter Walsh.
- Got Junk in your Trunk: From school to soccer to ballet to Scouts to play dates to the grocery store- like it or not, your car is your second home. The average family drives over 32 miles a day but it is easy for the busy family to far exceed that average. You know all too well that the time spent in your car adds up to hours each week. And with all your gear, your car can start to look like a dumping ground and a messy one at that. Here are some tips for conquering the junk in your trunk.
- Cash in the Attic: During this time of growing economic stresses, the modern American family faces the most severe financial belt-tightening in decades. Along with many of my colleagues, I’ve been fielding a lot of questions lately from curious friends about expenses and costs related to organizing services.
- A Clutter Too Deep: Getting organized is unquestionably good for both mind and body — reducing risks for falls, helping eliminate germs and making it easier to find things like medicine and exercise gear.
- Charlotte Observer: Get house in order or someone else will: Slimming down your belongings to just what you really need and use takes time and intention. You don't have to do it. But know that if you don't, someone will. That someone may be your grief-stricken spouse, your stressed-out adult children, an estate sale representative who will reap a 25 percent commission, or a county worker assigned to your “case.”
- Home Staging: Staging as a house-selling concept started in 1972 on the West Coast. Now, showcasing the so-called three C's: cleanliness, clutter reduction and color. Staging has become a hot topic on HGTV shows. Its practitioners include home-staging professionals, interior designers and others.
- Make every foot count in a smaller home: Whatever the specific catalyst, homeowners and first-time buyers are rediscovering the charms of more modest digs. They're realizing that square footage, like any number, cannot tell the whole story about that complex environment we call home. They look for quality over quantity, or even decide to stay put rather than upgrade to that larger place they'd had on their wish list.
- How Healthy Is Your Medicine Cabinet?
Home Office Organization
- Urban Home: Home Offices: As the command center of a home, home offices are the hub of all activity. With so many tasks take place in one space it's vital that your home office work for you and not against you.
- An Orderly (Home) Office: The author’s home office, where clutter reined and storage space was impropertly used, went from chaos to order after an intervention.
Organization for Children
- Get your “What’s Up Charlotte” Events & Performing Arts Calendar while supplies last! It’s a calendar LOADED with events in Charlotte for the next 12 months! The who, what, where & when in ONE place! PLUS the contact information for the top Mommy Venues in town for sunny days, rainy days or a day trip away! Even if you can't go to everything, at least knowing the events actually occurred can help you feel "in the loop!"
Cost $15.00 with $1.00 of each calendar donated to The Relatives on East Blvd. in Charlotte, NC. E-mail Lori Martin of The Purple Martin & Co. at
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for your calendar today!
- Help your kids manage their clutter: Parents battle the constant influx of stuff -- everything from school art projects to gifts from grandparents, hand-me-downs from friends and the plastic freebies that come with fast-food meals. Here are five ideas for taming kids' clutter.
- Packing School Lunches: Discover the 3-Ps and you’ll have lunch boxes under control.
- Prepare for Back To School: If you have more than one child and your schedule permits, it’s nice to do back-to-school preparation with each child separately. This gives you one-on-one time and reduces squabbles. Plan time for lunch or a favorite treat while you’re out.
- Urban Home: Playrooms: Playrooms are friendly places for children to learn and grow. Sometimes even the best playrooms can be your foe ... chaotic and cluttered. Want to reclaim your playroom? Make it E.A.S.Y.
- Party Perfect: How to celebrate and create memories while avoiding emotional and financial meltdown!
- Traveling with Tots: Minimize the stress, and maximize the fun of family vacations!
Paper & Time Management / Junk Mail Reduction
- Can Your Personal Documents Be Found in an Emergency: What would you do in an emergency? Are you prepared? Would you, a friend, spouse or heir be able to locate your personal papers and financial records? What can you do to be prepared for an emergency?
- STOP doing the Paper Shuffle and Save an Hour This Week: Executives waste 6 weeks per year searching for lost documents. In the office, many people "shuffle papers" instead of "handling the work". Projects, clients, ideas are all lost in piles of paper. Why do we do the paper shuffle?
- Taming the Email Monster: How many e-mails are in your inbox right now? Opened? Unopened? Waiting for something? When someone asks you if you have received their e-mail, will you bend the truth to ‘cover’ for yourself because you won’t know?
- FLOW - Time Management Strategies: Tick, tick, tick… the hands of a clock turning. Time. As professionals, time is our greatest opportunity AND our greatest liability. How can we capitalize on this opportunity and minimize the liability?
- Clear email inbox helps unclutter your time: I get several hundred e-mails a day, so I laughed the first time I heard the term “Inbox Zero.” It took me about a week to totally clear out my inbox, but boy, did it feel good once I did.
- STOP the JUNK: Stop junk mail and phone solicitations.
- Tonic MailStopper (fka GreenDimes) mailstopper.tonic.com: $20 a year removes you from all direct marketing lists and plants 5 trees for every person that becomes a member. You receive only the postal mail you want.
- Consumer Credit Reporting Opt-Out www.optoutprescreen.com: The official Consumer Credit Reporting Industry web site to accept and process requests to opt-in or opt-out of firm offers of credit or insurance.
- Direct Mail Association dmachoice.org: DMAchoice charges only $1 to remove your address from direct marketing lists. You must renew every 5 years.
Rightsizing: Organizing Your Life
Rightsizing is a process that will profoundly change the way you examine your life. Rightsizing is not simply about organizing, containing and labeling your things. Rightsizing is achieving a harmony between your physical environment and your desired lifestyle. - The Less is More Paradox: You have decided to streamline your home, now you need some helpful hints to get you started living simply. Here are our favorite tips from organizing guru Peter Walsh.
- Getting Rid of Your Folks Belongings: It's natural to be overwhelmed by emotion and your parents' lifetime accumulation of things. Use these ideas to save time, your sanity and your family relationships.
- Fewer Better Things: Advertisement with special message.
- Letting Go of Sentimental Attachments: Experiences and people make memories, and memories make us who we are. But we
must realize that things are not memories--they only represent the memories. We simply can't keep it all! Here are some options to help you let go.
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