Hasta La Ideas

Since 2007, we have been recommending an extravagant organized gift as part of our annual Holiday Gift Giving Guide. The first year, our ultimate pick was the Fujitsu ScanSnap. In 2008, we recommended the Kindle. The following year, we suggested my book, Unclutter Your Life in One Week. In 2010, it was the Fellowes Intellishred Shredder (now called the Powershred). For 2011, our ultimate generosity idea was for hiring a professional organizer. Then, in 2012, it was a closet makeover with Rubbermaid’s Configurations system.

All of these suggestions continue to make terrific gift ideas. In fact, we heavily debated if we should have the Fujitsu ScanSnap be our selection again for 2013. However, we decided we should pick something we hadn’t done before.

For 2013, we have selected a subscription to Unclutterer’s Quarterly shipments as our ultimate extravagance.

It is difficult to put into words the excitement that we feel each time we put together one of these mailings. We know that with each package we are having fun and helping people to be more organized in their homes.

Quarterly is a subscription service that sends out curated packages four times a year, as its name implies. The Unclutterer staff selects the items that go into all of the Unclutterer mailings. We include straightforward directions on how to use/install/manipulate the items. Our assumption is that for every item we send, you will actually be able to subtract one or more things from your homes and offices. Or, the items will help you discover a significantly improved level of organization in your life.

Our previous mailings, which you can now give as gifts after the fact, contained solutions for organizing a mess of cables and getting your filing cabinet in order.

What we love about these shipments are that if you already have the specific area of your home organized, the items make great gifts to give others to help them on their organizing journey. And, the items we pick for our Quarterly mailings are very positively reviewed, tested, and tried and true solutions to disorganization problems.

Want more gift-giving ideas? Explore Unclutterer’s full 2013 Holiday Gift Giving Guide.

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

A reminder that if you are interested, Sunday, September 1, is the last day to sign up for Unclutterer’s second Quarterly product shipment. Sign up now if you want to make sure you don’t miss out on our next shipment. To learn more, visit Quarterly’s site or our recent post “What was in Unclutterer’s first Quarterly mailing.” Thank you!

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

The following is a sponsored post from Staples about a product we support. We’ve been aggressively testing this product and the review is based on our first-hand experiences. We agreed to work with Staples because they sell so many different products in their stores, and our arrangement with them allows us to review products we use and have no hesitation recommending to our readers. Again, these infrequent sponsored posts help us continue to provide quality content to our audience.

This spring, HP released a series of new four-in-one color printers exclusive to Staples — the Pro X line. Not too long afterward, we received an HP Officejet Pro X576dw to review. We were interested in this new line of printers for a number of reasons, but one of those reasons is that it’s being marketed as the “world’s fastest color desktop printer.” It actually holds a Guinness World Record for speed, and we thought that was something we wanted to test for ourselves.

The HP Officejet Pro X576dw is $800 and is intended for active use by small- and medium-size businesses. It’s wireless, so everyone in the office can use the same machine. This means instead of buying each employee a scanner and printer, you can save your company a good amount of money with a shared device. Being wireless, it also means you can store it anywhere that is convenient for all of your employees.

And, it really is fast. When I hit print on my computer, it immediately starts printing, and the pages come out at a rate of up to 70 pages per minute (that’s for basic, single-sided printing). The printer we were using before this wasn’t even half that number and it wasn’t color. The HP Officejet Pro X576dw can print, scan, and copy both sides of the paper, so it saves us money by also not wasting paper. It uses what HP calls “PageWide technology.” According to HP, that means it “delivers four colors of Original HP pigment ink at one time onto a moving sheet of paper. As the paper moves, the printhead remains stationary, allowing the HP Officejet Pro X Series to print quickly and quietly.” In short, it moves the paper instead of the ink.

In addition to saving time, it saves money, too. It’s Energy Star qualified and the entire unit consumes less energy than a laser printer. It’s also half the initial cost of a laser four-in-one printer with relatively comparable features. It uses high-yield ink tanks (which you can also get at Staples) that result in fewer and less expensive ink tank replacements over the life of the machine in comparison to a laser printer. You save money at initial purchase and then over the lifetime of the machine.

The setup process is simple. While the machine runs its initial automatic internal configuration, you just use the touch screen on the front to type in the network password and make preferences. You don’t need an installation CD or any high-tech knowledge to make it work.

A few of our favorite functions:

• You can email the machine things you want printed and copied. If you’re out and about, you can send an email from your smartphone and print documents so they’re available when you and your clients arrive back at the office.
• I really like the Stamps app, which allows you to print postage through Stamps.com directly on the printer. With the help of a trusty scale, I weigh what I need to send, use the app to print a stamp for the exact postage amount, and then hand the package to the mail carrier. I’ve stopped going to the post office, saving myself a lot of time.
• For its size, it has a really big paper tray. It holds a full ream of paper (500 sheets), while our previous printer held less than half a ream (200 sheets). It’s genuinely nice not to have a partial ream of paper hanging open in our office supply closet all the time. It sounds silly, but unopened reams stack much more cleaner than open ones.

Exact product specifications and more technical information can be found on Staples’ website. But, on the whole, we are really impressed with this four-in-one printer. It greatly exceeded our expectations, especially with saving us time and money over the longterm.

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

The following is a sponsored post from Staples about a product we believe in. For the past month, I’ve been aggressively testing this product and the review is based on my first-hand experiences. We agreed to work with Staples because they sell so many different products in their stores, and our arrangement with them allows us to review products we use and have no hesitation recommending to our readers. Again, these infrequent sponsored posts help us continue to provide quality content to our audience.

When I travel (for work or pleasure) or have special projects, I almost always organize the corresponding paperwork in a three-ring binder. I like to have all of my necessary information in one storage system so I can grab it and go. I also usually have a scanned backup of the same data in Evernote or on Dropbox, but I see these digital copies as being useful only if something happens to my original binder. Usually I need physical copies of the papers I’m keeping, especially with projects, when the papers may be something I’m giving to clients or need to file with a legal entity.

Earlier this year, I was introduced to Staples’ new Better Binder system, and I’ve been using them ever since. I’ve taken them to a conference, on vacation, and am currently using one to store all the paperwork for our second adoption. When finished using the binder for one purpose, I’ve removed the FileRings and dropped them into my filing cabinet. They could also be useful for keeping yearly family or tax information or anything project where you’ll be actively using the paperwork for a period of time and then need to archive it when you’re finished with it.

In short, it is a three-ring binder whose FileRings spine pops out and allows you to file the contents of the binder directly into your filing cabinet. The binders themselves are reusable and additional removable FileRings are available for purchase. (They are currently in the $4 range for the replacement FileRings.)

Removing the FileRings is incredibly simple, especially after you see it done. Pull on the plastic pieces at the top and bottom of the FileRings spine to pop it out. You then push in the top and bottom plastic pieces to hang the FileRings in your filing cabinet. Inserting the FileRings is also simple — set them in place and then push in the top and bottom of the FileRings spine to secure them into the binder.

They also have available Better Dividers, which I really like. The tabs can be inserted on the top or the side of the divider, making them extremely versatile. There are times when having the tab at the top of my binder is helpful, especially when I only have a need for two or three divided sections.

The binder comes with a blank spine label you can tear off and easily slide into place, so you don’t have to cut up a sheet of paper to make one from scratch. The front panel of the binder also allows you to slip in a cover sheet of your own design.

Better Binders come in the traditional size (11” x 11-3/4”) for 8-12″ x 11″ sheets of paper. They’re available in 1″ (275 sheets of paper) for roughly $8, 1-1/2″ (400 sheets) for $9, 2″ (540 sheets) for $11, and 3″ (600 sheets) widths for $14. The binder comes with one removable FileRings spine, but additional FileRings must be purchased separately. Current colors are white, red, black, pink, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, dark teal, fuchsia, plum, olive, and multi-color combinations of some of these colors. I use the different binder colors to make it even more obvious which binder I need to take with me, in addition to the labeling I use on the binder.

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.

I just wanted to drop a quick reminder that the subscription deadline for Unclutterer’s first Quarterly mailing is in a little more than a week, June 1.

Again, Quarterly is a subscription service that sends out curated packages four times a year, as its name implies. The Unclutterer staff will be selecting the items that go into all of the Unclutterer mailings. We will be including straightforward directions on how to use/install/manipulate the items. These will be quality products that will bring a higher level of organization to your spaces. Each mailing will be focused on a particular theme, to help you find order in a specific area of your life.

Rest assured, the products we have chosen for our mailings are useful and clutter-curing, not clutter-creating. Our assumption is that for every item we send, you will actually be able to subtract one or more things from your homes and offices. Or, the items will help you discover a significantly improved level of organization in your life. Our many years of experience as professional organizers has taught us that there are universal clutter problems for which almost everyone needs better solutions and tools. The themes of our mailings address these universal issues. Additionally, if you already have the solution we mail, the items will make wonderful uncluttered gifts for friends and family so you can spread your vision of an uncluttered life with others.

We are incredibly excited about this project and have had a very positive experience putting together the first mailing. If you’re interested, you can learn more about Quarterly and Unclutterer’s partnership on Quarterly’s site. We truly appreciate anyone who chooses to subscribe to our mailings, as in addition to helping you become more organized, a small percentage of the subscription fee comes to us so we can keep the lights on, servers running, and our writing and technical staff paid for all of their hard work. Subscribers need to sign up for the first mailing by June 1 and the first package will go out on June 14.

Thank you to all of you who have already subscribed and to those who choose to do so in the future.

Let Unclutterer help you get your home or office organized. Subscribe to our helpful product shipments from Quarterly today.