September as National Preparedness Month, Are you prepared?

Contributed by Kathryn McMillan of  Clutter Conversions, LLC, www.clutterconversions.com

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has designated September as National Preparedness Month, are you prepared?  You may think, “It can never happen to me” but if it does happen are there enough supplies to last me and my family through the ordeal?  Are you sure??  If you get prepared, you will be sure!!  How do you get prepared for the unknown?  Here are some simple steps and products to get you started but you do have to take into consideration which part of the country you live in and what has happened in the past.

Step1: Get A Kit of emergency supplies.  Basic Kit:

• Water (one gallon per person per day)
• Non-perishable Food (at least a 3 day supply)
• Battery powered or hand cranked radio or NOAA weather radio w/tone alert and extra batteries
• Flashlight and extra batteries
• Whistle to signal for help
• Filter Mask or cotton t-shirt to help filter air
• Moist Towlettes, garbage bags and plastic ties for sanitation
• Wrench or Pliers to turn off utilities
• Manual Can Opener
• Plastic sheeting and Duct Tape
• Important Family Documents
• Items for unique family needs (medicines, baby formula, diapers, etc,)

Think about 2 kits: A big one for your home and smaller version for your vehicle

Step 2: Make a Plan:
Develop a family emergency plan and practice it.  Who is going to do what and where when disaster strikes.  If you have family or friends that live far away from you, consider using them as the contact person everyone needs to contact because it can be easier to contact them than within your own area.

Step 3: Be Informed about what might happen:
Make yourself aware of what can happen in the event of a natural or man made emergency.

Businesses need to be prepared also.  If you own a business, you need to have an emergency plan for your employees.  Prepare a written plan, give them each a copy and personally go over it with them explaining to them that in the event of an emergency, who is in charge (chain of command), how do they communicate with you and what is their expectations in helping to get the business up and running again.  People often want to get back to work because getting back into the routine of work provides them some distraction from outside stressors and gives them the comfort of a paycheck to fix any problems they may have.

You can find tons of useful articles, tips and products at  www.ready.gov,  www.thereadystore.com and www.redcrossstore.org.

Recommended products:

1. Family Life Organizer and Planner 2009
2. Organize for Disaster: Prepare Your Family and Your Home for Any Natural or Unnatural Disaster
3. Jakoter Medic Tag: Programable Flash Drive/Key Chain
4. Locket Personal Management Info System – a system that gives you control of your most private documents that is storable, compact and portable, all on a 1GB thumb drive.

Clutter Conversions, LLC © 2009

Our Birthday Special – Drinn Mobile/Cell Phone Holder

To celebrate our July birthday, today we are featuring the Drinn Mobile/Cell Phone Holder. This is a great little product that creates an instant shelf underneath your outlet. It keeps your cell phone off the floor and your charger cords neatly gathered.

Organized A to Z is celebrating our birthday in July, but we’re giving you the presents! Each day, we are offering our favorite products at 25% off. The discount is good today only, so get it now!

Today’s Featured Birthday Special – GTD Tickler File System

Whether managing household paper, bills, or business documents, the GTD Tickler File System will keep you on track. I chose to feature this system as a birthday special because I love the simple concept and its usefulness in many applications. You can store whole documents and always keep them easily accessible. When you need to organize by date and remember to tasks and papers, this is the system to use!

Organized A to Z is celebrating our birthday in July, but we’re giving you the presents! Each day, we are offering our favorite products at 25% off. The discount is good today only, so get it now!

Today’s Birthday Special – Neat Scan to Office

Today’s featured “birthday” special is Neat Scan to Office!

Organized A to Z is celebrating our birthday in July, but we’re giving you the presents! Each day, we are offering our favorite products at 25% off. The discount is good today only, so get it now!

Today’s Birthday Special – Password.log

Today’s featured “birthday” special is Password.log, a simple little “grey” book that holds my most important info. Of course I keep it secure in my office, but it has become my Internet lifeline!

Organized A to Z is celebrating our birthday in July, but we’re giving you the presents! Each day, we are offering our favorite products at 25% off. The discount is good today only, so get it now!

6 Steps to Reducing Paper

Don't Agonize, Organize! $15.95

Thanks to Diane Hatcher, CPO® for contributing this excerpt from her book, Don’t Agonize, Organize Your Office Now!

 

The advent of computers promised to lead us toward a paperless society. Instead, our paper production has increased. We print out e-mails, make multiple copies on the copy machine, and send and receive faxes with the touch of a button. There is a solution, however. Keeping your paper under control with these 6 simple steps can make life more manageable:

1. DON’T ALLOW PAPERS TO BUILD UP: Handle your paper on a daily basis. Open mail daily. Don’t let it grow into a pile for days or weeks, otherwise it gets totally out of control and the difficulty for dealing with it actually increases.

2. MAKE A DECISION ON EACH PAPER THE FIRST TIME YOU TOUCH IT. This doesn’t mean that every time you get a sheet of paper that you have to work on it immediately. It simply means that, rather than putting it down somewhere ‘temporarily’–like on the dining room table or a desk (read as “pile”)–you have a plan for it. If it can be completed in 60 seconds or less do it now. Otherwise, place it in an action tray to be worked on at a more appropriate time. Separate items that need to be read or filed later. The other choices are to refer it to someone else or toss it into the garbage can.

3. IMPLEMENT THE PROCESS. Continuing the thought from step 2, it is important not to spend your day shuffling papers—for instance moving a sheet of paper from your in-box, to your desk, to your table, into your action tray and back to your desk. Instead, each time you pick up a sheet of paper, make a small dot in the upper right hand corner. Notice anything? You may be procrastinating. Three or more dots are indicative that it is past time to take action on that paper. Refer back to step 2.

4. BE RUTHLESS: 80% of what is filed is never accessed again and 80% or more of the paper you receive on a daily basis can be immediately discarded. Keep a garbage can or recycle bin within reach when opening mail. Toss unwanted papers immediately. Go through your “in-box” each day if others bring you papers. Toss anything that doesn’t concern you. Remove yourself from distribution lists and magazine subscriptions you don’t need. Purge your files once or twice a year at the minimum. Outdated papers and duplicates obtainable elsewhere should go.

5. THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT. Do you really need to print every single e-mail you get? Many e-mails, once read, can immediately be deleted. If you have to keep an e-mail, learn how to make folders for storage on the computer and back them up on a disk. If you must print an e-mail, or a web page, decide if you really need to print the entire thing. You can highlight a portion of an e-mail or a web site with your mouse, click on FILE, PRINT, then choose PRINT SELECTION. This prints only the portion you need.

6. FOLLOW RETENTION GUIDELINES. Your company or personal CPA may have retention guidelines setting out how long a particular paper or file must be kept. You can obtain guidelines yourself on the web. Getting familiar with these guidelines also helps manage the amount of papers necessary to be kept. At the very least, remove closed or inactive files from your active work area and get them to storage. Always indicate a “destroy” date on the box or page to ease the future purging process. An additional benefit of this process is that it serves to provide more space for the coming year’s papers. Space can be “reused” rather than adding new filing cabinets.

Author Diane Hatcher, CPO®, has been organizing offices and homes since 1998. She specializes in law offices, chronic disorganization and virtual organizing. Contact her at www.timesaversusa.com or 954-252-7511.

Peace Stealers – Paper Management

Special thanks to Organized A to Z partner Kelli Wilson, a professional organizer and owner of A Simple Plan Consulting for contributing this week’s “peace stealers” series and offering practical solutions to help you find a new sense of peace and calm!

Peace Stealer #2

Someone “helped” by bringing in the mail, some is on the table, some on the microwave. The pile is looming, the VISA is late AGAIN and the To File stack is now migrating to Canada. Wait, “Where’s the insurance form,” the passport, the school needs what certificate to register for kindergarten?

Tips for paper/mail management

• Establish one place for mail. Either the “helper” puts in there, and ONLY there, or leaves it in the mailbox.
• Establish bill pay dates 5th & 20th, 1st & 15th and schedule time with yourself to do this. (Trust me, it’s less daunting when there’s a plan)
• Go through the mail over the trash. Toss ads etc, open EVERYTHING. Toss all extra inserts, envelopes. Keep “only” what you need to pay or take action on.
• Use a small basket for envelopes, deposit envelopes, stamps and bills to keep it all together. Review the basket 1st & 15th
• Simplify files so things can easily get where they belong – keep them out of Canada.

Checklist for Filing Your Income Taxes

Completing the process of filing your taxes can be overwhelming, confusing, and leave you feeling scattered and unsure of yourself. You want to know it’s done right, and you want to ensure that you have taken advantage of all of the deductions and credits your entitled to! It’s a good idea to sit down and organize your thoughts before you jump into the process. Business.com offers a systematic checklist of help you with this task. Once you know what you need, you can collect the information and have it all in one place so you can efficiently fill out those forms, or deliver the necessary paperwork to your tax preparer. This article (link below) also gives you a checklist of common errors to help you avoid them! And be sure to visit Organized A to Z for some great products as you finish organizing for this year and start keeping track of next year’s expenses!

Guide to a Stress Free Tax Season: How to create a streamlined checklist for filing taxes

Captio TaxCase Manages Important Paperwork All Year Around

Captio TaxCase

One of our featured products this month at Organized A to Z is the Captio TaxCase. This is truly an organizer created to help you meet the April 15th deadline! Whether you do your own taxes or go to a pro, rounding up the information and paperwork you need can be a painful process. But with Captio TaxCase, you get an easy system for organizing, tracking and storing everything you need at tax time.

A complete road map walks you through the filing process — from what records to keep and how long, to which forms to use and how to file. Business expenses, IRAs, interest, estimated tax payments, dependents and more.

Tabbed folders keep key documents close at hand, and pre-printed labels to create a companion file box. The TaxCase works year-round so there’s no last-minute rush to meet the deadline. Convenient forms track income and deductions. Checklists, tips and Web resources help you make smart tax choices.

Our customers love the convenient tabs that make it easy to know you are saving the correct financial information, and they appreciate the fact that their paperwork stays organized all year around. It’s a great product, and a great time to buy!

5 Steps To Prepare For Tax Season

Thanks to guest blogger Carmen Coker for these great tips to help you prepare for tax time!

In the words of Dave Barry, “It’s income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.”

Filing taxes = huge pain. We all know it. We all go through it once a year. And while there’s no way around tax season, there is a way to make the process less stressful.

P.R.E.P.A.R.A.T.I.O.N. (I’m hearing a collective sigh from all the procrastinators out there!) A little bit of preparation can make a huge difference in your tax filing experience.

Here are 5 steps to a help you file your taxes, on-time and un-frazzled…

(Think T-A-X-E-S!)

(1) Tally: Decide how many hours you’ll need for tax prep.

First, choose a final date, such as “I wanna be done with my taxes by 1 April.” Then work your timetable backwards from there, planning around your work schedule, family responsibilities, and extracurriculars.

Second, think about how long it’s taken you in the past to file. If 6 hours of tax prep has been enough in the past, then this year will likely be no different unless you have major changes in your life. So pencil in 2 hours on your calendar for 3 Saturdays between now and April 1st, or maybe 1 hour each Monday evening for the next 6 weeks. Etc, etc.

Looking ahead will prevent a last-minute tax crunch and all the pressure that comes with it!

(2) Assemble: Gather all tax-related documents.

Search your files, baskets, and bins. Your objective? To find any and all receipts, canceled checks, and other papers that support an item of income or deduction.

Be on the lookout for important forms like W-2s and 1099s in the mail.

And don’t forget about the charitable donations you’ve made over the last year! Visit www.itsdeductibleonline.com for *free* software from TurboTax that tracks and adds your donations year-round and accurately determines the value of your donated items.

(3) X-cessorize: Compliment your tax prep efforts.

I’m not talking shoes and purses here! It’s all about storage. Now that you’ve got each and every one of your tax documents assembled, they must be organized in one central location, so as not to get lost.

There are lots of different tax organizers that can keep your tax papers in order. You can dress ‘em up in style with something like the PortaFile Project Files. Or if you’re not into fancy-schmancy, then you can dress ‘em down with the oldie but goody manila envelope.

(4) Evaluate: Assess how you want to file your return.

Will you prepare your return or go to a tax preparer? Do you qualify to file at no cost using Free File on IRS.gov? Are you eligible for free help at an IRS office or volunteer site? Will you purchase tax prep software or e-file online?

There are many possibilities to consider! Weigh them all and find the option that best suits your needs. You may need to make modifications to your tally and time line, if necessary.

(5) Schedule: Make a date to file your return.

If you’re doing your own taxes, make an appointment with yourself. If someone else is doing your taxes, make an appointment with him/her.

Schedule asap – before the calendar fills up! And schedule a date several weeks ahead of the April 15th tax deadline, just in case something comes up and you need a bit more time to complete filing.

And remember: It’s never too early to start tax prep for 2010!

By-line:

Carmen Coker is a former US Air Force officer turned professional organizer. You can receive a FREE Tip Kit comprised of more than 50 ideas to boost your organizing savvy; a subscription to the FREE monthly HÖM newsletter; and dozens of FREE organizing hints, helpers, and how to’s by simply visiting one of her 3 sites: Home Organization Online, the Get Organized! Blog, or Clutterbugs.