20 a day challenge – Part 1
If one of your resolutions is to be more organised but it feels daunting, limit yourself to 10 minute slots, you’ll be amazed what you can achieve.
10 minute chunks of time … If you don’t finish the pile (or piles), don’t worry. You can go back to them another time.
Do let me know how you get on.
Paperwork
Start on those piles of papers around the house. Pick one, and sort through those receipts, bills, ‘oh that looks interesting’, magazines, instruction manuals (did you know you can often download these as PDFs so you don’t need to keep the manuals themselves), and anything else lurking in the piles.
Recycle / Shred / File.
My other half is a wonderful man in many ways but his messy paperwork drives me (and nowadays him too) insane and what makes it worse he can never find anything so this month he agreed he would try the 10 minute chunking. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Handbag
Tip it onto a table and remove anything that you don’t regularly use. Anyone who has met me (Andrea is writing these organisational tips) knows I like big bags. One of my resolutions is to carry less so I bought a smaller work bag, we’ll see if I go back to my other admittedly huge bag. According to a Daily Mail article the average woman’s bag weights 5.4lbs – the weight of a small dog. No wonder women have so many neck and shoulder problems.
Magazines
So many magazines seem to be works of art in their own right, or there are the divine food and travel magazines (and I just found one which combines both, I had to be dragged away from the rack before I bought every copy). If there is an article in an older edition you want to keep, scan or cut it out (and file, of course). Recycle or Freecycle them – also, did you see our recent blog on getting rid of unwanted gifts?
Books
Always a difficult one for me but recycle or donate old books you won’t read again. The ones you want to keep, put in one place, whether you sort them into any order is up to you but have them in one place.
Desk
Sort through and file any paperwork you need and shred everything else. I’m a pen person, at home I keep them in a drawer (yes I have a lot!) and in the office they are stored in a huge glass vase which makes a nice feature of them. Throw out any old calendars, and only keep diaries if they are truly necessary.
Keep an eye on the blog for Part 2 – coming next week.
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