I am back from Japan, have been out of town again to a conference and have gone to Seattle for a week. I just want to say what a delightful time I had in Japan. The friends we have there are wonderful. We only saw them for a few hours as we were out and about on our own but everyone, everywhere was so nice and helpful. My daughter would show someone the name of the city or rail line we were looking for and they would point us in the right direction.

The last day I was there our friends mother who speaks about 5 words of English and I speak 3 words of Japanese (hi, yes, thank you) went shopping for the afternoon together. They have wonderful Department Stores and Malls connected to their train stations. What a great idea. I wish my daughter who lives in Washington D.C. was so lucky. Her form of transportation is the Metro there and shopping is not convenient for her at all.

Back to Japan; my guess is because so many use trains as their transportation it makes sense to take the shopping to the people. My favorite name of a store we shopped at is called, “Three Minutes Happiness”. It is a small variety store with clothes, jewelry, candles, containers (I would have loved some but I had no room), and other fun things. We had Twenty Minutes Happiness in the store.

Thank you to our friends and the wonderful Japanese people for making our trip fun, exciting and memorable. What is one of your most memorable experiences of the summer?

A few years ago I was working in what I called the fish bowl because it was just a large room with half partitions around some of the desks. Every conversation could be heard by everyone else. Every morning I would hear a man complaining about his wife losing her keys and having to look for them and making them late for work every day.

One day I bought him a keep ‘keeper’ for his wife to put her keys on. It had a carabineer on one end to attach to her purse and a long curly cord like the old phone cords where she attached her keys. He has thanked me more than once for saving his marriage. Such a simple little thing to solve what had evolved into such a big, irritating problem.

I was attaching my keys to my purse with just a Carabiner the other day and thinking how much I loved that little dollar item and I thought I would share that tip with my readers. It saves me time and you know I am all about time management and it keeps me organized in that I don’t have to search for my keys, which is a big waste of time.

Do you have a favorite gadget that saves you time? We would love to hear what it is. I am always looking for things that can help me save time.

Do you ever feel like your time is not your own? My I suggest an absolute essential item to have? A planner is a must where you can record all of your appointments, to do lists, phone numbers grocery lists and a variety of other things.

I was called a few days ago and asked if I would speak at a women’s group. I immediately checked my planner and told her I would get back to her on Thursday. Then I decided unexpectedly to go out of town to a conference when realized I needed to follow through on calling her back. What saved me was I had written on Thursday the woman’s name so it reminded in all my rushing around to leave that I needed to call her. As a professional organizer the last thing I want anyone to think is that I am unorganized. And besides I can’t stand it when someone tells me they will get back to me and then they don’t. I must say though that I am a professional organizer, not a perfect organizer.

If you are like me you sometimes plan parallel events at the same time. And if you are lucky before both of those events happen you realize what you have done and can make changes. A planner is essential in helping us with time management and organizing our lives and those of our family. We are just too busy and have too many things to remember everything, fortunately we don’t have to.

Do you have a favorite planner you use and do you have a unique way you use it? We are always looking for new ideas and tips.

School started Monday in my home city and many of you have children who either have or soon will be going off to school. This is my challenge today:

•Teach your children that every night they are to check their backpacks to make sure they are ready for school the next day. Make a list of things they need to check: school work, permission slips, money, treats, books, gym clothes and any other items you know they regularly take to school and are looking for in the mornings. Post this list and have a pencil accessible for them to check off the items. If your school has a certain color of clothing they are to wear on certain days this can be on the list so they will know the night before if it is clean and ready to be worn.

You will be teaching them valuable time management skills. As you help your children to organize it won’t happen overnight, it will take extra time on your part at the beginning but it will be worth it to you! You will save, time and a lot of hassle and frustration throughout the school year.

Keep a template of the list so you don’t have to recreate it. Make a separate list for each child. It could be kept on a clip board and hung on their backpack hanger. Or it could be posted on the wall or placed in a shallow basket designated for that list only.

We would love to hear your stories in trying this system, or let us know what system you use now that works for you and your children.

I have to share a funny story. My daughter called the other morning saying she had gotten up early so she could make a cake for a friend who was coming in from London. It was a butter cake recipe and as she read the ingredients; after she had put the flour and liquid in the bowl she realized she didn’t have any eggs.

You know what she did, because we have all done it, trundled off to the store which took at least 25 minutes. She gets home and adds the eggs and then continues to read the recipe and realizes she doesn’t have the butter it calls for. (The title of the recipe is Butter Cake). By now she is thinking, “What was I thinking”. She doesn’t want to go back to the store so she makes the cake without the butter.

Later she called just laughing. The cake was one inch high. It didn’t call for leavening but the eggs were to be beaten well and she just stirred them in by hand. There are two things we can learn from this; one is time management and the other is how to organize when we are baking.

•Read through the recipe all the way before starting to make it.
•Make sure you actually follow the recipe for best results. This doesn’t mean never to deviate from the directions, but be aware the results may be different if you don’t follow them.

I’m not sure what she did with the cake but we had a good laugh and she learned a good lesson. Another day I’ll share my own cake story with you. What ‘surprises’ have you had by not following a recipe? Or for that matter for following one.

Nancy Kirk from The KirkCollection a web site for quilters tells this great little story about an editor friend who was on the night desk at the Omaha World-Herald several years ago.

The paper made a decision that they would try to answer any question from any reader and bought a full set of encyclopedias to keep in the news room. When the students of Omaha learned of the policy, it became the research tool of choice for school reports and papers.

One night a young person called asking “What is the Diet of Worms?” Dutifully the editor pulled out the D volume of the encyclopedia and proceeded to read a lengthy article about the Diet of Worms convened in 1521 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, which took up the issue of the behavior of Martin Luther. At the end of his defense Luther reportedly said “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.” And after another week the Diet declared Luther an outlaw and the Reformation was irrevocable.

When he finished, the editor asked the student “Did that tell you everything you need to know about the Diet of Worms?”

A small, hesitant voice queried “But what do they eat?”

Sometimes that is how it is in organizing, we make it too complicated, keep it simple, set up a system, which will save time. As I organize for women I realize time management is a challenge for most.

Here is one little tip to help save time. When you buy in multiplies (several bottles of shampoo, toothpaste and so forth) put a rubber band on the last item and when you get to that you will know you need to purchase more so you never run out and have to waste time by making a special trip to the store for more.

What is your favorite way to save time?

Closed armoire

This is my office armoire where I store my office supplies. Computer paper, e-books I have printed off, staples, paper work (I don’t have a desk with drawers) and other office related things. I organized it about a year ago and I expected it to stay like that. Hum, just like I always say, things just get undone.

It dawned on me one day that I dreaded getting to my supplies because it just wasn’t working for me anymore. I had started just putting things back where there was space and not putting them where they belonged. BIG MISTAKE

Here is what it looked like before:

I wanted to use containers because I knew it would be well organized and I would be happy when I was done. I had been given magazine organizers years ago and these now came in handy. Everything has a place and at least for now everything is in its place.

Here is what it looked like after:

When organizing look around and see what containers you can use that have different uses than originally planned, in other words different and multiple uses. When organizing in containers you will be less likely to just chuck things in a closet, on a shelf or on the floor. This is a time management tip as you won’t have to re-do when it is put away right the first time.

Have you found a favorite organizing tip you can share with us?

I am often asked what I do with photos that I have taken. How do I organize them, how do I get them developed? There are so many choices today. Here is one resource I just came upon scandigital.com It looks like a great system for those who want to send their photos, albums, slides, negatives and home movies to be digitized. They scan and digitize them so they can be preserved and enjoyed forever.

I have slides from my wedding eons ago and I am going to check out scandigital. Their web site is very easy to navigate through and looks pretty self explanatory. They were referred to me by a friend.

Kudos to Costco Photo Center. I love being able to sit in my own home, and look at photos I have taken, crop, add borders and do other things with them and then just email my photos in to be processed. In one hour I can pick them up. Or I could chose for them to mail them to me. There are a lot of places to go that have this same type of service, but I use Costco because they are fast, friendly, and efficient. I ordered 12 photos yesterday and they had them ready for pick up in 30 minutes. Once I had over 800 photos and they said it would take two days and they still had my photos ready in four hours.

When I organize for women I find that time management is a huge factor in them getting to the boxes and boxes of photos they have saved for years waiting to be put in albums. One idea is to hire some teenagers at $5.00 an hour to put the photos into scrapbooks after you personally sorted through them. Furnish them with the paper and whatever embellishments you want in your book.

I was walking the other morning and way up the hill from me a man on a bike was peddling back and forth from one side of the road to the other until he came even with his friend who was also on a bike. While the one person was still making progress up the hill the other person had gotten off his bike and was at a standstill.

I thought it would sure be hard for the person on the bike that had stopped to get going again and make it the rest of the way up the hill. Even though it was hard (and believe me it is a steep hill and is hard to bike up) by going a little at a time it would be easier than stopping.

You know me; I got to thinking about organizing and how organizing is like these two bikers. I think as I organize for women and for seniors some days we need to work on a big project and whether we get tired of doing it or just get tired we need to keep moving forward until the project is done.

I am always saying take tiny steps when organizing and I believe this completely. However with some projects even though it seems hard, it is easier in the end to just keep going and going, moving closer to our goal of getting that one place organized.

No matter what the organizing project it can be done using tiny steps, the important thing is to just keep going. It can be easier to keep going than to stop and work at getting the momentum going again.

Have you had an experience that you have found it easier to just keep going than to stop and come back to it later?

Have you ever sat down and done an exercise called, Start, Start, Continue. We used to do this once a year where I worked. It was a great time for reflection and forward thinking. At the beginning of the school year even if we don’t have little kiddies it is a good time to do this. (And change your batteries in your smoke detectors).

Start: What is something you have been putting off doing? Learning a new skill, taking up a new hobby? Next month many Community Schools programs will be offering classes at local high schools. I am excited because I get to be one of these teachers this year teaching home and office organizing.

Stop: Being so hard on yourself, recognize your successes and tell yourself, good job. Stop that bad habit—whatever that is to you. This is an ongoing one for me. I bought me a sign that says “Enjoy The Journey”, I often get caught up in wanting to be finished instead of enjoying the journey.

Continue: For me that is organizing anything and everything all the time and quilting, quilting, quilting. I am passionate about both.

I could be here all day coming up with things in each category. We would love to hear your Start, Stop, Continue plans.