Hasta La Ideas

British officials have found that excessive street signage impedes driver safety, in addition to cluttering up a picturesque view. As a result, national-level British officials are writing to city council leaders across England demanding road signage be decreased. From a Reuters article about the uncluttering:

When busy Kensington High Street in central London was stripped of excess road furniture, for example, it helped reduce accidents by 47 percent.

Reducing the signage clutter also reduces the cost of making new signs and replacing old ones for a local government. Again from the article:

“Our streets are losing their English character,” [Communities Secretary Eric] Pickles said. “We are being overrun by scruffy signs, bossy bollards, patchwork paving and railed-off roads — wasting taxpayers’ money that could be better spent on fixing potholes or keeping council (local) tax down.”

Is your city or neighborhood cluttered with too many signs? My specific suburb isn’t, but downtown Washington, D.C., is a much different situation. It will be interesting to see if the signage uncluttering in Britain becomes a trend across the globe, and helps reduce accidents caused by signage clutter.

Thanks to reader Carol for this news tip.

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Without getting up from your chair, do you know exactly where:

• your keys are?
• your 2009 tax documents are?
• your car’s registration is? (If you own a car.)
• your winter gloves are?
• your social security card is?
• your flashlight is?
• your phone charger is?

How did you do? Were you able to answer at least five of the questions exactly? All seven? One?

Except for your keys and maybe your phone charger, you’re probably okay with not knowing exactly where the other items on this list are currently located. However, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to waste time hunting for these items the next time you need them?

What do you need to do to find a place for all your possessions and have everything in its place? Do you need to file your important papers? Switch out your winter and summer clothes? Set up a reception station in your home with a place to store your keys each evening and charge your phone? Clean out your bedside table and make a storage place for a flashlight?

If you know where all seven items on the list are located, is there anything in your home that doesn’t have a permanent home that should? What items are constantly out of place in your home and might need a new permanent place to live?

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Interesting articles and services relating to uncluttering, organizing, and simple living:

• Patrick at Minimal Mac asks “A Most Important Question.” If you don’t know where something belongs, it may “… not have a place in your home, in your relationships, in your job, or or in your life,” and, “perhaps it should not be there.”
• Alton Brown, the celebrity chef who is the inspiration behind our Unitasker Wednesday posts, wrote a diary about his (bizarre?) minimalist eating practices when he travels in last week’s New York magazine: “Alton Brown Makes His Own Avocado Ice Cream, Does Shots With John Hodgman.”
• Learning Express Library is an online resource for practice tests on hundreds of topics. The free and digital tests range from the U.S. Citizenship exam to college entrance tests. Save your money and some trees with these helpful resources.
• Lose the equipment and your gym membership, and get an uncluttered workout using only your body weight. From Nerd Fitness, “Beginner Body Weight Workout.”
• The Art of Manliness has a tribute to all things minimalist in “Go Small Or Go Home: In Praise of Minimalism.”
• Clean up your iTunes digital music collection with Tagalicious — a simple and easy to use application that gets rid of all of those “Track 01″ files you have in your directory.
• Are you on Twitter? Does it bother you when someone attends a conference and floods your stream with messages that don’t interest you in the least? Use DeClutter to remove specific keywords from your timeline. (via Swiss-Miss)

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After Saturday’s simple tape suggestion, PJ and I have been talking about our favorite tricks for marking items. Here are a handful more tips for identifying items in your home and workspace:

• Separate new and used sponges by cutting off corners — straight from the package is good for dishes, one corner missing is good for counters and the table, two corners off and it’s perfect for cleaning spills off the floor.
• Reader CatServant recommended in the comments section to Saturday’s post something similar to the sponge method, but for other cleaning supplies: “I put a band of duct tape around the handle of any cleaning object that has been ‘demoted’ to ickier jobs: old toothbrushes now used to scrub the bathroom, old dish brushes now used for scrubbing out plant containers, etc.”
• After folding the top and bottom bed sheet and one of the pillow cases, many people will then use the second pillow case as a sack to hold the other three pieces. It makes storage simple, and it’s easy to grab the sack from the linen closet when it’s time to make the bed.
• We continue to love Alex’s suggestion of putting removable dots on small kitchen appliances to track which items you use over a six month period, and which ones you don’t. Label all small appliances and then only remove the dots when you use an item. At the end of six months, take to charity any appliance that still has a dot on it.
• Reader DG e-mailed recently to suggest using strips of blue painter’s tape to label fabric items. Great for labeling sets of sheets so everyone knows which set works with which bed, great for putting reminders on backpacks, and great for marking clothes to identify which ones you haven’t worn (like the kitchen dot suggestion). Since the painter’s tape can be pulled off the item, stuck to the lip of a shelf, and reused for many months, it’s an extremely low-cost marking system. One roll of tape can last for many years.
• If neighbors, co-workers, and/or friends have a tendency to borrow tools and not return them, scratch your initials into the metal with the tip of a screwdriver.
• Large families often benefit by using colors for each child — a simple dot on an item’s label made with a brightly colored Sharpie instantly says whose item is whose. Older children should be lighter colors (yellow, orange) so if an item is passed down to a younger child, the dot can easily be colored over with the next child’s color (red, blue).

What simple marking strategies do you use in your home? Share your marking methods in the comments.

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One of the easiest ways to keep paper clutter from overwhelming your space is to set up a mail processing center immediately inside the door by your mailbox. In a buffet, chest, armoire, or another piece of furniture that matches the decor of your home, install a recycling bin, shredder, and trash can. Also, have mail cubbies for each person in your home so whoever sorts the mail can have a place to immediately store everyone else’s mail.

When you sort the mail, you have four options:

• Recycle. Most flyers, postcards, and papers can easily be recycled. If you don’t want or need the mail, and it doesn’t include any personal information, drop it straight into a recycling bin.
• Shred. Credit card applications, notifications, and other junk mail that includes your private information should be shredded to help prevent identity theft. A few seconds shredding these documents can save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars fixing a stolen identity.
• Trash. Not all mail can be recycled. Check with your local recycling center to know which types of papers and envelopes can be recycled and which ones can’t. For example, envelopes with the plastic window pane often have to be trashed.
• Process. Keep a pen in your mail center to write action items on the mail you choose to keep. “Pay by November 1.” “Send to lawyer by October 15.” Give yourself as much direction as possible so you don’t waste time re-reading the mail again.

The truly organized might also have a scanner in this location to immediately scan materials that don’t need to be kept in physical form, but can be retained digitally.

You can be proactive and reduce a good chunk of junk mail by opting out of direct marketing materials through DMAchoice.org. Additionally, call the customer service number on any catalog you don’t want and request to be removed from their mailing lists. You can also contact the three credit reporting agencies to opt out of credit card applications for five years at a time. (You will need to contact all three agencies — TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.) There are also companies that do all of these mail reduction services for an annual fee, such as 41pounds.org and PreCycle.

A mail center is also a great place to empty clutter out your pockets, backpack, and/or briefcase. The less paper clutter that comes into your home, the less clutter you have to worry about getting rid of later.

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