Hasta La Ideas

We told you about the Significant Object initiative/caper a few week’s ago, but today’s item is particularly, well, hysterical. View it at eBay here; sign up for the newsletter here. And a taste:

In the 1970’s it was still rare for a grown man to go to work in a lace cravat and petticoat breeches, especially if that man, like Ray-Ray, worked as a garbage collector for the City of Newark, NJ.

Ray-Ray was a bundle of contradictions: sensitive but hard-edged; coquettish yet vengeful; fastidious but filthy. A compassionate civil rights activist, he was also a bodybuilder who delighted in beating up hippies.

This statuette represents Ray-Ray’s attempt to reconcile two sides of his personality. The cocked fist is a symbol of the fight-ready posture he adopted so many times at pool halls, punk-rock concerts, and fondue orgies in the 70s, while the white dove atop his hand represents his message of peace. As Ray would say, “It’s up to you, friend. Give peace a chance … or taste the Five Knucklemen of Von Blauheimer!”

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Reader Gwen submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

How do you come up with something new to write every day?

Gwen, this is the question I get asked the most often. Unfortunately, the answer is a wee-bit complicated, so please bear with me on this journey.

First thing to know, Unclutterer.com is made up of seven people. I’m just the one steering the organized ship, so to speak. We have programmers and project managers and an intern (everyone say “hi” to Tim) and a publisher and me. Everyone except for me spends most of their time on other programming and design projects (things like Nest Unclutterer and building websites for corporate and non-profit clients), but I’m full-time on Unclutterer business.

Thirteen times a year, we have meetings to plan our content. Twelve of those meetings decide the content for the months and one of those meetings is a strategic planning meeting where we look at the whole of the next year.

We have these meetings during the second week of each month, so we planned for August in mid-July. Our planning isn’t necessarily specific, but it guides my writing. Take for example the plan for this past week as we planned it in mid-June:

Monday: Uncluttered speech, bathroom organizing
Tuesday: Update on photo scanning project, something from the news
Wednesday: Something book related, A Year Ago, Unitasker
Thursday: Closet organizing, something book or news related
Friday: Workspace of the Week, Ask Unclutterer

You’ll notice that not everything went exactly as planned (Thursday’s closet organizing piece became a piece on general uncluttering), but that is fine. The goal of the plan is to give me ideas, not a strict law that must be followed.

Everyone on the team has a different way of capturing their ideas (I use Evernote, some people just use pen and paper), and not everyone on the team participates in all of the planning meetings.

If you are looking for ways to generate ideas for your blog, I highly recommend the team approach. Get a group of friends together or find people who are interested in the same topic and brainstorm ideas. You can do it over the phone or in person, just get talking about your topic. Even if people don’t come to the meeting with prepared suggestions, they can still add ideas and feedback during the meeting. Our meetings are usually 15 minutes long and I wouldn’t be able to come up with so many ideas without them.

Readers e-mail, twitter, and save links to del.icio.us that give me ideas, too. I carry my iPhone with me everywhere I go and take pictures of things I think would make good posts. I’m a member of a couple professional organizations that have newsletters about industry trends. I re-read diary entries from when I was going through my transformation from a clutterbug into an unclutterer and get ideas from my notes. I read a lot of business and science journals. I have news searches saved on JSTOR and through Google news. I’m always on the lookout for ideas — I can’t turn it off.

Thank you, Gwen, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column. Be sure to check the comments for even more ideas from our readers about how they generate post ideas for their blogs.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

We don’t hang our washing outside anymore, but we still remember how nice the clothes smelled after drying in the sun. So, if you are in the habit of drying your washing in your back yard, you may have noticed that shirts on hangers have a tendency to gather at the lowest point of the clothes line. And when they are there they don’t dry so fast. One solution is the hanger in the picture, designed by Marcos Thomas, Nó Design (Brazil) and bronze winner in the 2009 IDSA International Design Excellence Awards. As far as we know it’s not yet fore sale, but maybe soon…brbr

If you haven’t been following the latest hot button issues in Calgary, please allow us this opportunity to get you up to speed on at least one. Starchitect Santiago Calatrava, he of the ever-changing World Trade Center Transportation Hub and the ever-stalled Chicago Spire, has finally unveiled plans for the Peace Bridge, a bike and pedestrian path that crosses the Bow River in the center of the city. While Calatrava being in any city to design something is usually cause for much to-do, Calgary has been playing it very low-key, running into a great number of detractors who either a) hate the way the bridge looks, b) are upset that it’s going to cost the city $25 million, or c) that the city government put the whole plans in action quickly and secretly without really mentioning it to the general public. There are arguments aplenty from both sites, like radio commentator Mike Blanchard‘s funny piece on why the bridge stinks, saying it “reminds [him] of a middle-aged man going through a mid-life crisis” and that “this design tries too hard.” The Calgary Sun‘s Don Braid sees the whole fight as good for the city, saying it helps get people talking about architecture and what they want their surroundings to look like. Meanwhile, the paper also got a chance to talk to Calatrava himself, which is surprisingly open about asking the architect these tough questions, like if the bridge is a waste of taxpayer money or if it’s too flashy for the area. Calatrava gingerly walks around the outskirts of a few of the questions, but it’s interesting to see him pressed about the controversy. Our question to him would be: do you think you’ll ever build a bridge in a city and not run into trouble?

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