Hasta La Ideas

As we talked about in the post Ask Unclutterer: How can I change someone into an unclutterer?” we get many emails asking how unclutterers can live with clutterers. It reminds me of one of those light bulb jokes: How many Psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change.

Our clutterful light bulbs — our roommates, significant others — may not want to change. But, there is something that we can change, ourselves.

If you’re up for the challenge, what small unclutterer change or efficiency enhancer are you willing to make? If you’re stumped, think about your partner’s pet peeves. Some examples I’ve seen with couples are:

• Dropping a jacket on the floor when arriving home
• Leaving dishes about the house
• Losing keys frequently

These things may not bug you, but we’re talking about our partners here — the things that bother them. As I got to thinking about Valentine’s Day this year, and realizing my husband hates gifts, I thought: how about changing something I do that bothers him? I ran the idea past him and he’s all for it. We decided that I will work on keeping the house better stocked with groceries. I’ll sit down with him and templatize a specific list of items to regularly have on hand (in addition to the staples). It’s the little things that make a difference.

Forming a New Habit

First, it takes 21 days to form a new habit. I like to use 30 day blocks, however, to be sure the habit gets locked in.

Start Small: Pick just one daily, do-able thing that you’ll take on for 30 days. For example, you commit to putting your clothes in the hamper before bed for the next 30 days. Selecting one thing will put all of your focus there, rather than trying to tackle several habits at once.

Be Clear: Be sure that you know clearly whether you’ve accomplished the task or not. For example, is your goal to file paper in your home office for 10 minutes each day or is it to file 1/2 an inch of paper each day? Near dinner time each day, mine will be to check off food items that need to be purchased this week.

Track Progress: Use a calendar, goal-setting software such as Lifetick or create a spreadsheet with 30 boxes to track your progress. A check mark or gold star means you did the task. Leaving the box blank of course means you didn’t do it.

Keep It Visible: Have your document pop up on your screensaver, set reminders in your electronic calendar or place in another visible place, such as on the refrigerator. As you’re forming a new habit, you’ll need prompts.

Be Consistent: When possible, do the task at the same time every day. This will make the action a routine and, in time, you’ll be pulled to complete it automatically. For instance, pop your jacket into the closet right away when you arrive home each day.

Begin: The hardest part is to begin. Pick a start day. Today is a good idea so that you don’t build up resistance to change. And, why wait to surprise your partner with a clean family room or an uncluttered car?

I think creating a productive habit will give you more mileage than your standard Valentine’s Day gifts.

Up for the challenge? What habit do you want to take on for 30 days? Let us know in the comments. And, if you choose to go a more traditional route, check out Matt’s post from last week on uncluttered Valentine’s day gifts.

If you’re not a subscriber to Fast Company magazine, I wanted to call your attention to a terrific article in this month’s issue “Six Tools to Help Tackle Overflowing Email” by Robert Scoble.

Five of the tips are exclusively for Outlook users. Since I don’t use Outlook, I haven’t been looking at tips for this system as I work my way through my 2009 new year’s resolution. However, I know that many of our readers are on Microsoft systems and could greatly benefit from Scoble’s advice:

If I were going to recommend only one tool, ClearContext (clearcontext.com; free for personal use, $90 per seat for project management) offers the most immediate productivity gains. The Outlook add-on looks at who you’re replying to and how often, then automatically prioritizes the messages. It color-codes the most pressing ones, graying out mass emails.

The article even provided some insight for us non-Outlooker users:

As much as I like these tools, the best way to improve your email experience is to follow the advice I gave those Cisco employees: Take some conversations elsewhere. If you need to write a press release or a report, and 10 other people need to modify or approve it, you’re much better off using an online word-processing tool such as Google Docs or Adobe’s Buzzword. One email invites everyone to join the collaborative workspace, then everyone can make changes or leave notes on the document itself. No revision tracking. No full inbox.

Thank you to reader Laura for first bringing this gem to our attention.

I am a wine enthusiast (oh my, that sounds dorky). I subscribe to three wine magazines and listen to multiple wine podcasts per week (feel welcome to laugh). Some people like fixing up old cars or knitting or woodworking — I happen to like pairing the perfect bottle of wine with a well-crafted meal.

I’m not a wine collector, nor am I an alcoholic, I’m simply a wine consumer. I have never purchased a bottle of wine in a store that cost more than $50, and most of the wines I buy are under $20. I like to try new wines, and am interested in the background of a wine almost as much as the flavor.

A few years ago, my husband and I started keeping logs of the wines we tried. If we’re up for the task, we’ll steam the label off the bottle and rubber cement it to the page with our review. If we’re being lazy, we’ll just write the information down and sketch a picture of the label. Each wine gets its own page, and each page contains notes from both of us on flavor, vintage, and pairing. Our system is low-tech, but has been fun to put together. (We also have a separate notebook that I carry in my purse of wines we want to try and the notes we’ve collected about those wines.)

To make a low-tech wine notebook, I recommend hopping onto etsy and checking out their handmade notebooks. The one we are currently using is a laser etched notebook from Modofly (their store should be back up in the very near future).

Bay County Liquors in Maryland has an impressive roundup and review of online and computer software programs that are on the market for tracking the same information that we use in our low-tech notebooks. “Wine Log” and “Wine Snob” are two iPhone applications that track similar information. A benefit of using a digital program is that you can search the data much more easily than you can with a low-tech notebook.

If you’re also a wine enthusiast, check out the list of online and software programs that might suit your needs, download one of the iPhone applications, or consider starting a wine notebook. Any of the three systems will make sure that you never reorder a wine you dislike again!

Domino magazine’s February 2009 issue has a fun article with tips from interior designer Ryan Korban on cheating with your clutter control, aptly named “A cheater’s guide to a tidy home.”

In the article, he provides six tips for tidying up in a hurry. Two of my favorite are the following:

make stacks purposeful

Topped with an object, orderly piles of orphaned books and magazines look deliberate even when resting against the wall — and not like you desperately need shelves. Korban likes to dress his with plants or figurines.

realize the power of trays

Instead of crowding your sink with creams, put your products on display. Korban creates a back-of-toilet tableau by grouping his on Venetian glass, arranging jars up front and tall bottles in the rear for easy access — and decorates them with a framed photo and fresh flowers.

The whole February issue is dedicated to the organized home, so be sure to check it out. Unfortunately, we got word on Wednesday that Domino is closing its doors. So, unfortunately, this may be my last fun post about the great magazine. Domino, you’ll be missed.

Photos for this article from Domino magazine

My 2009 new year’s resolution is to get e-mail under control. In the past, I’ve tried every system you’ve heard of (and probably dozens more) to manage my accounts, and none of them have worked for me over the long term. This year, I hope to find a more permanent solution for my e-mail needs.

My resolution goals for January have been to get the technical problems of my e-mail fixed. I have two devices (my laptop and my iPhone) on which I regularly check and respond to e-mail from four e-mail accounts. Up until last week, my two devices didn’t talk to each other. Every e-mail I received and read on my laptop was still unread on my iPhone, so I was handling every e-mail twice. Additionally, I was receiving in my inboxes about 400 pieces of spam every day. I would waste half an hour a day simply weeding through the spam.

These two problems had to be solved before I could even think about getting a handle on my other e-mail problems.

Multiple device communication

For more than 15 years, I have been using POP (Post Office Protocol) to download my e-mail from my server to my e-mail program. It served me well until I started using my phone as a second device for checking e-mail. Since POP doesn’t allow for multiple e-mail clients to tell each other, “hey, I already read that,” I had to handle each e-mail more than once.

To solve this problem, I changed my e-mail access protocol from POP to IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), which allows my different e-mail clients to speak to each other through my mail server. Honestly, I am very upset with myself for not doing this earlier.

If you want to make the switch, too, start by contacting your e-mail service provider to make sure that they offer IMAP. Once you determine that they do, check out your e-mail service provider’s website to see if they already have directions for how to make the switch for your particular system (Comcast, Verizon, etc.) and client (Outlook, Mail, etc.). My e-mail provider had extremely detailed directions that I could follow. If this information isn’t easily found online, call your provider’s customer support line so that they can direct you to the best instructions for your system. If you only use Gmail for your e-mail, follow the instructions on Google’s website.

Spam filtering

To help fight spam, I enabled a server-side spam filter on my mail system. I talked with my e-mail service provider and learned about how I could make the threshold more selective so that spam no longer makes it into any of my inboxes.

Check with your e-mail service provider to see if they have server-side spam blocking available. If they do, they probably have a way for you to set the threshold level for that spam filter. Additionally, many allow for you to create “white lists” that let you receive e-mail from specific addresses that might otherwise be blocked by a spam filter. For example, I buy my favorite t-shirts online from Gap. Since I know they will send me receipts after I place my order, I have gap.com as a white listed address. If I didn’t make this adjustment, my spam filter might think that it was spam and not allow the receipt e-mails to arrive.

Additionally, Gmail has a great spam filtering system and is the best that I have found in the free e-mail system market. Unfortunately, three of my four e-mail accounts are not through Gmail.