Today's Heart of the Matter meme asks us for ideas of how we deal with clutter.
If my sister reads the title of this post, I know that she will simply laugh and laugh. She is an organizational diva, and, you see, I am clutter challenged. Once in our childhoods I paid her to clean my room. I have forgotten what I paid her, but I do remember that she said that it wasn't enough (and, of course, it wasn't).
In spite of my innate messiness, however, I have found a tip or two that has helped to corral the clutter, paper clutter, at least.
In my years of teaching and now my first as a home educator, I have found that notebooks are wonderful! I used notebooks to organize papers for each course back when I was teaching, and I have naturally gravitated toward them as we begin our homeschool journey. I love that you can customize the covers and spines, create your own organizational system within and so easily pull out and put back papers (especially with those handy page protectors!). Right now we have three big notebooks at our house.
Within the Harris Home Planner are various sections to help organize our life and home. This notebook contains my calendar, printed out from Outlook in weekly format for several months at a time. Also included from Outlook is a printout from our Contacts, which is our address book. There is a section for our monthly budget, which my husband wishes I would be a little more diligent about updating. I've included a grocery checklist and space for menu planning. The biggest help in clutter control, however, are a collection of page protectors at the back of this notebook where I can stick those flyers with information that I need to save and that would otherwise stick on my fridge for so long that I would get so used to seeing them that I would overlook whatever they were about!
The next notebook is the Seven Pillars Academy notebook. This notebook has dividers for each subject that we study, as well as a section for our homeschool co-op information. I have printed out the lesson plans that I keep on HomeSchool Tracker, but you could cut down on papers even more by not printing them out.
The final notebook that we use is Emily Anne's notebook. I resisted the temptation to create a cute cover for it and let her color her own. We have this notebook divided by subjects, too, and each completed worksheet or page goes in it.
For a review of a book on clutter, Nancy Twigg's From Clutter to Clarity, visit my other blog, Busy at Home.
Yellow & Blue by the Seaside
13 years ago
