Friday at the "Organize It" Party with 2 Giveaways.

It's Friday at the "Organize It" Party and today our focus is on bringing organization to our computers, going paperless and we even have TWO gifts (giveaways) today.

Declutter your computer
By: Marcia Francois

Today I want to talk about an area of the office that may just be one of my favourite things to organise – your computer!

Because we can’t SEE computer clutter as obviously as we can see physical clutter, we often don’t realize it’s there but believe me, it’s still affecting you.

When you open your Inbox, you feel drained at the sight of all those emails, your computer runs slow because there’s so many photos on there (well, hello, they’ve been there for the last 3 years!) and when you click into your Google Reader, you can’t BELIEVE how much some people post because you went through your blogs for 3 hours yesterday and now there are 127 unread items yet again!

Sound familiar?

Let’s look at 4 places where you can declutter electronically:

Blogs
How many blogs are you following in your Google Reader, Bloglines or other feed reader? Do you know how long you take to read all of those blogs every day?

Take some time to go through and declutter those you tend to skim over. Get to know your comfort number. Mine is around 42 – 45 and I know when I start adding more and more blogs without deleting any, I start feeling more and more overwhelmed at the sight of all those unread items!

Free downloads
We women like free things, don’t we? As a result, we download anything and everything we can find that’s for free. If it’s free, it’s got to be good, right? Right?

No, actually, it’s not all good. Not only are you cluttering up your computer but you can’t possibly use all the things that are out there because we’re living in an information overload society.

At one point I had about 6 different grocery shopping lists on my computer (all free downloads). None of them quite worked for me so I made my own 

Email

Mmmm, email. My clients need help with email more than any other thing in their office, and paper’s a close second. That’s because email’s so fast and because we don’t use it correctly.

Get familiar with the delete key (my favorite key on the keyboard) and start deleting. Delete immediately once you’ve replied to an email and don’t file unless you absolutely have to.

Disable all the notifications from social networking sites like Facebook. I only get friend requests, messages and notes on my wall in my inbox. The rest I’ll see when I log on.

Here again, decide on your comfort level for emails and make sure you process until you can breathe again.

I set a daily goal of deleting at least 50 items so once I’m done with my inbox, I go through my Sent Items and delete, delete, delete ;)

As a matter of interest, how many emails are in your inbox right now?

Photos
Now that we’ve all gone digital, it’s so easy to snap, snap, snap and then snap some more. Download pictures regularly, delete the bad ones there and then, and save to CD or DVD regularly.

I only print gorgeous shots (because printing is so expensive) so if I wouldn’t want to print it, I don’t keep it on my computer. If I want to use pics on the blog, I compress them immediately so that they take up 50KB as opposed to 1MB.

My coaching challenge to you
Print out this post.
Tackle one of these sections every week until they’re all done.
Let me know when you do them.

Happy organising!

Marcia Francois is a time management and organising coach who works with small business owners and other busy professionals who want to make the most of their time. Marcia shares practical organising and decluttering tips on her Organising Queen blog and anything else that takes her fancy like photos, recipes, etc. on http://takechargeofyourlife.blogspot.com/.




Fridays First GIFT ( Giveaway)


AMIES is a series of characters inspired by the fun and friendship shared between dogs and children.
We translated the idea into a collection of stationary, backpacks, totes, wallets, coin purses and gift accessories of all ages. Visit AMIES website to see the fun products they have available.
Today's AMIES giveaways is their stationery set that designed for people who love dogs and love whimsy design in mind. Our dog characters were ingeniously created with specific funny and
silly attributes.

This stationery set contain 10 small greeting cards for everyday events, small notebook for daily usage and small notepad with magnet on the back that is so useful for daily reminder, chores list, schedules and grocery list.





AMIES and 24/7 MOMS are giving away one set of stationary. To enter for your chance to win, enter your name and email address in the box below you will be signed up for today's AMIES giveaway as well as be added to the 24/7 MOMS E-list(if you are not already a 24/7 MOMS subscriber). Drawing to be held on February 1, 2009.



Get Organized and Go Paperless with Pixily

Ok busy moms.How frequently do you find yourself in one of the following
situations?

1) You look around your desk, filing cabinets and kitchen counters several
times a day, and find it painful to see how the papers have piled up over
the weeks (or months.or even years). You wish you could just make it all go
away, or at least make it more organized and accessible.

2) You have so many documents, so many papers.all important for one reason
or another. Like moms and dads always say, "keep everything for seven
years, even your receipts." But it just seems so challenging to save
everything. How do you collect so many pieces of paper and still keep it in
order?

3) You're on vacation, attending a meeting for work, or visiting family, and
for some reason you need to find a file - a recipe, a tax form, a newspaper
clipping, your kids' artwork, an essay you wrote - but you don't have access
to it, and now you're distracted from the meeting or vacation at hand.

4) You worry that your basement may flood, your house may get damaged in a
natural disaster or fire, your computer might crash, or that your hard
drives and flash drives will get lost or broken. If this happens your
important documents aren't safe from water or fire damage, but don't know
what to do to prevent the irreparable damage that would come if you lost
everything.

If you can relate to any of the scenarios above, you are going to find the
new digital organization service Pixily ( www.pixily.com) a breath of fresh
air.

The best way to think of Pixily is as your very own digital organizational
assistant that takes care of securely scanning, filing, organizing and
managing any and all of your paper and electronic documents (think recipes,
kids' artwork, great articles, fitness routines, invitations, receipts,
invoices, the list can go on and on). For $14.95 a month, you can put
Pixily to work by securely sending your paper and electronic documents to
Pixily via email, scanner or Pixily "scanvelope" (a water-and
tamper-resistant, pre-paid postage envelope designed to securely mail
documents to Pixily). Pixily also accepts boxes of documents for those of
you who really are up to your ears in paper. Upon receipt, Pixily scans and
uploads the documents to your secure web account, where you can effortlessly
organize your documents with Pixily's labeling tools, quickly find
information with keyword searches and securely share documents with others.
Once scanned, you can opt to have Pixily securely shred and recycle your
documents or request that they be returned by mail.

Pixily gives a whole new meaning to the term getting organized and will let
you finally achieve your dream of a paperless house. It promises to be a
service that is going to save you time so you can do the things you love.
As part of National Get Organized Month, Pixily wants to help you jump start
your New Year's resolutions to get organized and go paperless, and clear
out the backlog of paper clutter in your home and office. Pixily members
can mail or scan in an extra 50 sheets of information to Pixily during the
month of January.

So if you're thinking of checking out Pixily, this is a particularly great
month to do it.





Fridays Second GIFT ( Giveaway)

Pixily and 24/7 MOMS are giving away TWO one month Pixily Value Plans of Pixily. The Value Plan enables you to send in 50 pages a month as well as upload additional documents . To enter for your chance to win, enter your name and email address in the box below you will be signed up for today's Pixily giveaway as well as be added to the 24/7 MOMS E-list(if you are not already a 24/7 MOMS subscriber). Drawing to be held on February 1, 2009.




Have a FABULOUS weekend - The "Organize It" Party continues on Monday.