Discardian

Tips for parents

Here's a great set of tips for those with wee ones: "Secrets of organized families: Insider strategies for getting your house in order" (Found, like so much, on Lifehacker)

Last thing, first thing

Today you should take a look at what you've set up for yourself as the last thing you see before you go to sleep and the first thing you see when you wake up.

Has your bedside table become a cluttered mess?  Unattractive surroundings in general? Are there nagging unfinished projects in view from your pillow?

Cut the clutter and tune your bedroom to reduce stress.

Make a place for your change. I use my father's silver baby cup for laundry quarters and a wide-mouthed ceramic vase I bought when I was an undergraduate in Wales for all my other change.

Do you like a warm place to put your feet when you get out of bed? Treat yourself to a good small carpet if you need one.

Is your bedside light too bright or too dim? Or are you lacking one altogether and relying on an overhead light that doesn't soothe your senses? Give yourself good diffused lighting that it's easy to turn off when you're ready to drift to sleep.

Do you have all your potential and in-progress reading piled right beside the bed? Tidy it up into a better holding location - perhaps a very small bookcase? - and just keep the active titles at arms' length.

Got a jumble of remotes? Could they go in a little basket or in a nightstand drawer instead?

Think about what you really need to have right beside the bed and contain it appropriately in something pleasing to your senses. Give your room a feeling of rightness and comfort which will soothe you to sleep and refresh you when you wake.

And, just a reminder, when you're dusting, sweeping and vacuuming always start with your bedroom so that it stays the cleanest place in the house. Allergies most definitely aren't relaxing.

The Master Calendar

If you share a house - and maybe even if you don't - you'll benefit from having a master calendar in the kitchen.

Get or make one with big squares to write events.

Things that should go on here include:
- dinner guests/parties
- house guests
- medical appointments
- household members out of town
- holidays when household members will be around home instead of off at work/school
- deliveries or repair appointments
- "Mail rent today"
- parent/teacher conferences
- any special event where one household member will be getting a ride from another ("Suzi's soccer game")
- household and significant other birthdays

The ideal spot for this is on or beside the fridge, especially if that's also near the kitchen phone.

Near it can be the shopping list, any shared bills that need to be reviewed (e.g. the phone bill), and the current list of who's doing which chores (or as we used to call it in my household "The Wheel of Torture").

Home Patrol

Well, those of you who've been reading for a while now (or who went back through the archives!) have now got a good bit of Discardian feeling under your belt and it's time to put your new eyes to work.

Make a little quiet time today to look at every room in your house and find the things that aren't how you want them.

There are two aspects you are particularly watching for:
1) easy to change
and
2) drives you nuts.

Fix at least one of the easy ones today and put in a solid 30 minutes - and remember that writing down a plan can count as progress - on the most crazy-making thing.

Make it easy, continued

Not only should you make things spatially convenient. You might want to consider temporal convenience as well.

I am not a morning person. Therefore anything I can do to make it go better is A Good Thing. The best tricks I've found so far are packing a lunch and setting out my clothes the night before, and making sure my backpack is all ready.

What could you do in advance to make your less competent moments a little better supported?

Make it easy

Routines help reduce stress and if you make a place for the things you know you'll need a place for, you'll also reduce clutter.

I have a laptop backback that I use every work day and a wallet I use the rest of the time. The pack has a pocket where I put my phone and my wallet. It also has a springy plastic coil clipped inside it to which I clip my keys. It's long enough that I can lock or unlock the front door without having to unclip them. My keys are always left in the right spot instead of in the door, a jacket pocket, on the stairs, etc.

The bag has a big pocket where I put the things that need to be taken from home to work or vice versa. When I arrive and take my mobile phone out to plug it into the charger (and, yes, I've got one of those at each end, so the phone has its place too), I also check that pocket.

As for pocket accumulations, I have an attractive ceramic pot on my dresser into which I drop all my non-quarters change. The quarters go in an old family heirloom, a little silver baby cup, where they wait until laundry day.

And the mail gets sorted in the kitchen where all the junk & empty envelopes can go right into the recycling. I have a pretty tin inbox for the remaining incoming paper (and that box also has a pen, the stamps & return address stickers for outgoing mail).

When I need to remember to take something with me when I leave the house (e.g. drop this Netflix DVD in the mail on the way to the metro), I just set it at the top of the stairs where I can't miss it.

When I shared a household, we always put the rotating chore wheel (made out of cheerful construction paper to lessen the pain of cleaning duties) on the fridge to indicate who was doing what this week. As a kid, that's also where I could see the menu plan of who was cooking what each night. And, of course, that's a great place for the shopping list.

Figure out what you need and where you need, then set things up to make it all flow smoothly.

Fresh Eyes: Living Room

Today think about what you want to use your living room for. Now go in there and look at it with new eyes; is it serving those purposes?

What doesn't belong? Where else could it go? (Not the bedroom; you started decluttering that last week). Move the things that hinder you from using this space out of your way.

What's missing? When I did this exercise a while ago, I realized that what I like is having friends over for meals and games. What I sorely needed was a table and enough chairs for them to sit on - the standing dinner party has never caught on for good reason. Fortunately, when I then told one of my friends that I was thinking of going shopping for a good table, he said "oh, we have a great one in the basement and 3 chairs; they're yours!". Sometimes all it takes is expressing a need for an opportunity to present itself. What  would give this room what it needs to function well?

Could you rearrange things to suit your favorite activities better? If you like to sit and talk with people, do you have comfortable sitting arranged so that you are facing each other? My living room suffered from "theater seating" which cramped conversation as everyone would twist sideways to see your face.

What about the things you use for these activities you want to do here? Are they somewhere else in the house? Bring them in here where they belong. Once I got my table, I pulled all my board games out of a dresser drawer in my bedroom and put them out in view on a shelf in the living room. Much more inviting and, I assure you, much more frequently used since the change.

Fine tune your living room a little today and do some of those things you enjoy!

The Closet Trick

Okay, go into your closet and turn around all the hangers so the hooks are pointing towards you.

When you wear something, put it back with the hook the normal way.

In six months, I'll remind you to get rid of the things that are still wrong-way-round.

Outbound Traffic

If you don't already have them, take a moment right now to set up places for things that are about to depart your home.

- You probably already have wastebaskets, but do you have a Recycling Area? The kitchen is a good spot. If you're lucky like me, you can put the recycling all together in one paper bag and just drop the whole bag in the big bin outside. Get in the habit of sorting your mail over this bag and spare yourself the stacks of junk mail around the house.

- If you use the library (and you should since it's FREE, after all), dedicate one spot for items ready to return to the library. A canvas bag on a shelf in the front hall is good. Save yourself having to hunt for something to carry Library Goodies away in and for bringing the new loot home.

- Set a Charity Bag (or box) up in a corner where it's handy but not in your line of sight from the spots where you sit to relax. Whenever you come across something that's not trash, but you also know you'll never really use it again, walk right over and put it where it belongs. Next time you're heading out for errands, grab that stuff and drop it off at Goodwill or wherever. (Personally, I rarely have anything making it worth waiting for a receipt, so it takes almost no time to make my home nicer and someone else's life better).

- Make a Give Back Basket and put in it all the things that need to go back to the person they were borrowed from. You can also put small gifts and your own loaned items there. When someone visits or you're heading to their place, take a quick look in the basket for anything to give them.

- Find, buy or make an aesthetically satisfying tray to act as your inbox for bills and receipts. Don't muddy it with non-financial stuff - get a separate inbox for that if you need one. The Bills Box is where you should keep the postage stamps.