Summer Schedules
I am honored to be a guest blogger on Organized To Revitalize!
Please check out my post http://dallisonlee.com/blog/2011/06/09/summer-schedules-for-families/
Have a great summer!
Is it valuable? Personal Notes on Organizing Your Memorabilia
Our biggest question when it comes to memorabilia is whether it is valuable. I have faced this question myself and have found that there are a few extra steps that may make you feel more comfortable in finding the value of your keepsakes. It will definitely take extra time and extra steps, however here are some ideas to help you process this decision.
- Look online to find the item. My husband had a vase that he inherited from his mom that he knew was “valuable.” We found a duplicate for sale on ebay for $70. Once we knew a true value, then we made an educated decision on the next step.
- Check online for associations related to your memorabilia. When I sold my mom’s paperweight collection, I was able to connect with local paperweight associations. I made a list of the items and I listed it there. It took a while (two months) and found a buyer who appreciated this collection and would sell these to others who appreciate paperweights.
- Donate your items to a charity silent auction. If you are passionate about a cause, you will find the value of your items priceless in helping your cause reach a financial goal. After trying numerous ways to sell a silver plated tea set including Craigs List, Replacements and Ebay, I donated the set to Mothers Against Cancer (www.mothersagainstcancer.org.)
- Check online at ItsDeductibleOnline.com. This values items and is an easy way to track your charitable donations.
- Find experts who can help you make a good decision on value and find a purchaser. There are independent appraisers in many different fields, including art, to assist you. One connection for us led to the sale of a family painting.
Memorabilia can be overwhelming and emotional. All of these items we were ready to part with, especially knowing that these are not items our children would treasure. Decide if YOU love the keepsakes, and are not only keeping them for other reasons. If you are truly organizing your memorabilia, be sure to choose a way to honor and display your items. Needless to say, that is not in a smushed box in the garage or attic! Today I have 5 paperweights from Mom’s collection in a hutch in my dining room. I treasure them!
Parents’ Resources for ADD
Learning that you or your child has a new diagnosis can be scary. Getting some background and tools empower you and your child. Here is a short list of suggested resources for you to start your education.
Websites
http://www.familieswithpurpose.com/
Blogs
http://www.additudemag.com/adhdblogs/
http://www.parenting.com/article/adhd-in-children
Books
Empowering Youth with ADD by Jodi Sleeper-Triplett
The Organized Student by Donna Goldberg
The Crumpled Paper that Was Due Last Week by Ana Homayoun
Journey Through ADDulthood by Sari Solden
Super Parenting for ADD: An Innovative Approach to Raising Your Distracted Child by Edward M. Hallowell M.D. and Peter S. Jensen
ADD and the College Student or Understanding Girls with ADHD both by Patricia Quinn,MD
Attention Deficit Disorder: The Unfocused Mind in Children and Adults by Thomas E. Brown
Smart but Scattered: The Revolutionary “Executive Skills” Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential by Ped Dawson, EdD
What are your best resources? Please share!
ADD and Productivity
Slow to start, hard to complete, lose interest, can’t get it perfect? These are some of the stresses of productivity and ADD. Having some tools to work through these challenges can help.
- Know your strengths and work from your strengths. Have the best possible match for your work. Creativity, being in the moment, and being a people person are often strengths for people with ADD. Also an intense curiosity and love of information are common. Tedious, every day tasks are usually not. Whatever your strengths, capitalize on them in your work.
- Create partnerships that work for you. It can include an administrative assistant, a colleague, or technology. The interaction with your partner will help you get started and the accountability will help you finish. Be sure to ask for help in addition if you need this from a professional organizer, an ADD coach or a productivity consultant.
- Set a timeline that is compelling. Your brain clicks, clicks, clicks with a deadline. Set a series of baby steps with faux deadlines to get projects completed on time.
- Use a planner that works for you. For technology your smart phone is always with you and can remind you. For paper think about the planner pad with its lists, week at a glance and month at a glance features. Focus on using the week at a glance features to help you “see” what you are doing each day.
- Capture tasks on paper or with technology. Always have a way to have a brain dump, then prioritize your 3 Most Important Tasks (MITs) for the day. You can’t get it all done, but you can get the most important done!
- Establish routines in your day and your week. Have a power period each morning and afternoon, with interruption and distraction free times. Assign certain tasks to certain days, such a Money Monday or Financial Friday. Routines ensure that you are on top of the most important tasks.
- Delegate what you don’t do well. Continuing to struggle can be demoralizing and distracting.
- Know what good enough is. Perfectionism can strangle your work. Reflect on what a minimum standard and a good enough standard are and come to a compromise.
What is your best go to idea for struggling with productivity?
Cell Phones for Soldiers Drive during June and July 2011
Cell Phones for Soldiers Drive Hosted by PostNet Kingwood and Professional-Organizer.com
Your old cell phone can help a soldier stay in touch with family. Cell Phones for Soldiers wants to turn your old cell phones into more than 12 million minutes of prepaid calling cards for U.S. troops stationed overseas. To do so, Cell Phones for Soldiers wants to collect 50,000 cell phones each month through a network of more than 3,000 collection sites across the country. PostNet Kingwood and Professional-Organizer.com are partnering to host a drop off site in Kingwood from June 1 – July 31. PostNet Kingwood is located at 4321 Kingwood Drive in the HEB Shopping Center in Kingwood. Drop off your used cell phones and make a difference!
To learn more about Cell Phones for Soldiers visit
To learn more about PostNet Kingwood, including store hours, visit
http://www.postnet.com/kingwood-tx194/ or call (713) 589-2151
Spring Cleaning: Big Cleaning
It might be called spring cleaning. Not to be confused with organizing, these are projects that make our homes sparkle. Our parents had time to deep clean each room and even wash the windows. However in our busy world, we seldom can get the dishwasher loaded and unloaded. Here is a basic checklist for The Big Clean for freshening your home. With summer here, we have a little extra time to do the extra little touches too!
Create a schedule and a checklist first, then ask your family team what they want to tackle with you over several weekends. Choose a room to start in, work as a team, working around the room perimeter and then the middle of the room. You will know where you started and where you ended. You can add an extra incentive with extra moola for your kids too! Host a family celebration for all your hard work at the end of each baby step.
Room by room
Dust the ceiling fan
Dust the edges of the door frame
Polish furniture
Vacuum around the baseboards
Vacuum the curtain
Wipe down the front of the cabinets or furniture
Dust the light fixtures
Kitchen
Vacuum refrigerator coils
Clean your oven and stove top, including grill area
Wipe down inside your refrigerator and freezer
Dust top of refrigerator
Check for expiration dates on canned goods
Office
Archive paper from tax preparation and other files
Shred tax preparation that is older than 7 years old
Dispose of old software
Dispose of old technology
Outside
Clean the patio furniture
Wipe down the front door
Polish the door handle
Clean gutters
Run sprinkler system and look for leaks
General
Change the batteries in your smoke detector
Pick up fresh flowers once a week for your entry
Need more help? Hire youth from your church or a once a month house cleaner to pitch in. Freshening up your home makes everyone smile!
Blended Family: Blending Together
A mom and dad remarry, and it is not quite like the Brady Bunch! The new American family comes together with kids, pets and way too much stuff! There are a lot of emotions involved as well as a lot of personalities. The job of creating a new space for the new family, as well as family cohesiveness, can be helped with the assistance of a Family Manager. A blended familyblending together is much easier with an organized approach to life.
From the start, there is a lot of territory to cover. The logistics of family stuff, such as laundry, dinner, kids coming and going, all add up to the same responsibilities as running a small company. Having a new persective brings order to the home. Mom and Dad can redefine the responsibilities with a clearer vision of how the family comes together. A great family calendar and family meeting are a must! A command center for paper keeps control of mail, bills and other papers that come from school. Setting up systems and routines bring order to the chaos.
Blended families come with a lot of stuff. There are two homes worth of goodies. How will this new home bring together the best of each? Every home is different in this respect and it is in respecting each other, the kids’ wishes, and good cooperation, that the new home evolves, especially in community spaces. In addition, kids need their own space with their personal belongings to create buy in for the new family. Kids’ personal spaces reflect who they are and invite them to be a part of the new family too.
It can be a struggle to get all these aspects into motion. Start with your family meeting and be consistent about hosting this weekly. And add a communication time daily. Keeping open to new ideas, from kids and adults, keeps the energy of your home positive.
Make responsibilities visual. Keep a family calendar posted in the kitchen with all different activities, from sports to church. Keep posted the chores list, nightly dinner and the laundry schedule. It helps everyone know what is the plan.
Be consistent about your rules in your home. Even if your kids are in other homes during the week, what works for your family should be consistent for each kid and adult. Everyone respects consistently enforced, simple boundaries.
Get help when you need it. Whether a family counselor or Family Manager Coach, be ready to include someone on the outside to help create order on the inside. Helping everyone share their emotions and come together makes all the difference.
Best Mother’s Day Gifts Ever
A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. ~Tenneva Jordan
Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love. ~Mildred B. Vermont
Any mother could perform the jobs of several air traffic controllers with ease. ~Lisa Alther
Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother. ~Beverly Jones
Some people think its candy. Some think it is jewels. Some think it is new technology, an iPad or smartphone. So what are the best gifts for any mom? Here’s a list of the best Mother’s Day gifts ever!
- Time together to chat over coffee or an adult beverage.
- Make dinner once a week for 4 weeks, and clean up after.
- Unload the dishwasher without being asked.
- Go room by room and pick up the trash, and place it out at the street on trash night.
- Five minute toy pick up each night.
- Watch a movie or go to a movie with Mom, a movie of her choice.
- Create a family chores chart for the dishes and laundry and hang it on the refrigerator.
- Plan a picnic with Mom and you make the PBJ.
- An afternoon of riding bikes and stopping for ice cream.
- Have Mom teach you how to cook a family recipe.
- Let Mom sleep in while you take the kids to the park.
- Vacuum and wash Mom’s car.
- Attend church or temple with Mom.
- Hire a housekeeper for big cleaning of your home.
- Send Mom on a Date Night with Dad.
- Write Mom a note and tuck it in her purse to take to work with her.
- Make Mom’s lunch for her all week.
- Hire a professional organizer to organize with Mom.
Notice that none of these gifts is something that clutters up your home? Take time this Mother’s Day to spent time with Mom, creating a lasting memory!
Sync or Swim: 201 Organizing Tips You Need to Survive the Currents of Change
Sync or Swim: 201 Organizing Tips You Need to Survive the Currents of Change are the next-generation organizing tips for getting things done and controlling clutter without falling into a sea of complexity. Seventy organizing and productivity specialists share 201 of their best tips and 100 most valuable resources in home management, information organization, and organizing every basic area of life. It is a 93-page ebook written by award-winning professional organizer, Judith Kolberg, and certified professional organizer, Allison Carter. I am one of the contributors!
Featuring:
“New Organizing Tasks”: 20 years ago we didn’t have to deal with syncing calendars, avoiding spam, scanning, defragging, or managing the overload of information that comes our way every day. Our tips help you to survive the day to day chores of this generation.
“Tech Lite” Resources: This ebook contains 140 unique resources for syncing, reminding, tracking, reducing, organizing, scheduling, balancing, and so much more! But it’s not scary high tech. It’s easy to access organizingtools you can use today.
“New School” Tips: New ways to do old tasks: Filing, cleaning up, setting reminders, viewing photos, even changing the oil.
Purchase your copy at
http://www.squallpress.net/index.php?target=banners&bid=70&sl=EN&aff_id=78
Reminders: Task Management, Technology and More
Sometimes we need reminders to help us get our tasks done, be on time, and honor our priorities. Here are some systems to use!
Technology reminders
Daily Nudge helps you remember the important things in life. Setup regular, free electronic reminders, or “nudges”, to arrive in your inbox or cell-phone.
Forgot to feed the fish again? Need a little help keeping your New Year’s resolutions?
Tell us what to hassle you about, and we’ll nag you via email at semi-unpredictable intervals.
HassleMe is unique because you never quite know when your reminder will come along.
Remember The Milk (or RTM for short)
Managing tasks is generally not a fun way to spend your time. We created Remember The Milk so that you no longer have to write your to-do lists on sticky notes, whiteboards, random scraps of paper, or the back of your hand. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.
Cozi is a free online organizer that helps families manage crazy schedules, track shopping lists and to do lists, organize household chores, stay in communication and share memories—all in one place.
Other reminders
- Dry erase marker on your mirror. Write yourself a note each morning and evening using the Expo Dry erase markers. http://www.expomarkers.com/idea/mom-in-mirror
- Large, colored post it notes. Using the 5 by 7 size post it notes, keep your 3 Most Important Tasks in front of you at home, work or in the car. This is the one that works for me!
- Getting Things Done (GTD) list with quadrants for each category, such as @computer, @home, @anywhere/errands, or @meetings/agendas.
- Small, very adorable, spiral notebook with sections for mind sweep and categories such as kids, home, work, other. Date the top of your page each time you start a new day with new tasks to do.
Great Wall Street Journal article on making lists!
What other systems do you use for your reminders?
We specialize in working with ADD/ADHD clients. Whether in your home or your office, we motivate, empower and affirm our clients in their quest for organizing and productivity! 