January is always a great month — so much for each of us to look forward to over the next year. In addition, each January, the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO), celebrates GO month: Get Organized! Many of us make the same resolutions each December: We’re going to lose weight, get our finances under control and we’re finally going to get organized.  Being organized, though, is a continuous process with no real end date. Organizing your closet today means you need to continue to follow certain practices in order for it to remain organized tomorrow. Here’s some things to consider on your journey this year.

Review

An important start  to begin your journey is to look at your purchases. Out with the old before in the new will really help you to put an easy stop to clutter before it moves in with you and brings it’s friends along for the ride. If you buy a new pair of gym shoes, consider relegating your old pair to the garage for messy yard projects. Did you buy new towels? Donate your old ones. A simple way to make this process easy is to use a pretty basket or bin. Place it in a strategic place in your home. As you go through each day, try to find one or more things to toss into the basket. These are things you’re going to donate. If you’re diligent, you’ll be able to fill up your basket each week. This seemingly slow way to eliminate items will surprise you in how quickly you’ll actually be able to eliminate real clutter in your home.

Schedule

Schedule a day once a week, or even once a month. Set aside three to four hours. Take the time to tackle a problem drawer or storage area. You know what we’re talking about… the one you try to ignore as you open, grab and then shove closed? Yes, that one. We’re sure you have more than one of these in your home. Maybe in your kitchen, your bathroom, your bedroom or your office? Perhaps all of the above. That’s okay. All of us has a junk drawer (or three). By purposefully allocating time, you’ll begin to take care of these problem areas. Throwing away things that haven’t seen the light of day in years, and that you don’t know what are used for anyway, will make you feel wonderful. We’re sure you’ll also find hidden treasures or memories. Think of a better way to keep these items rather than tossing them into a drawer.

Create

Create a yearly memory box. This can be both a physical box and an electronic box. Remember when you were a teenager and kept all of your most precious things in a shoe box on the top shelf of your closet? Finding it when you moved away from your childhood home brought back a flood of good and awkward memories. But you wouldn’t, and didn’t, throw away that box ever. Create a box each year with mementos, cards, letters, photos, etc. from the year before. Buy a pretty box this January, and place it somewhere where you can see it. As your year unfolds, tuck things into the box. Things you’ll hope to not forget. You might even want to keep a stack of index cards nearby or inside the box so that you can jot down memories not captured anywhere other than in your mind. If you have children, make this a group project — let them decorate the box and help decide what goes inside. Next January, you can store this box wherever you’d like: put it on a shelf in a closet to later discover or create a shelf on your family bookshelf to store boxes neatly stacked to be pulled out whenever you need a moment of escape.

Create the same thing digitally — take time, again scheduled time, to look through all of the photos you took last year. Delete the ones that are blurry, or not something you’d like to keep. Create a folder for 2014, and place the photos there. Move other important documents, etc. from 2014 to that folder to keep handy in one place. For 2015, create a new folder. As you go through the year, when something comes up that you know you’ll want to keep, move it to the 2015 folder. Be sure to name things in such a way that they’ll make sense to you.

Simple, but purpose driven steps throughout your 2015, will help you to be more organized in this new year. Share your tips, and advice, with our readers below.

As we quickly enter the 2014 Holiday Season, we have so much to be thankful for. We hope that you do as well.

Big Savings on our Large Purse Perfector™

To get you in the festive, and organized mood, we’re having a big holiday sale. Now through December 7, 2014, you can get two large Purse Perfectors for $90 — that’s a savings of over 25% off the regular price. Would you like to take advantage of this offer? Enter promo code TWOFER at checkout, and it’s yours!

As a leader in handbag organization tools, we’re pleased to have been able to help so many women end handbag chaos. There’s no need to spend precious time digging in your handbag when the perfect solution is available.

Small Business Saturday

We’re proud to participate in Small Business Saturday again this year. This Saturday, November 29, will mark the fourth annual Small Business Saturday.

The perks of doing your holiday shopping on Small Business Saturday far outweigh those of Black Friday. Crowds should be more manageable and you can get some really great deals. And there’s a big bonus–you’ll be supporting your community in style.

When you shop small, it can lead to big things. The shop small movement makes an impact on small businesses and neighborhoods across the country. When you register your American Express card, spend $10 at a participating small business on November 29, you’ll get $10 back, up to THREE times. So why wouldn’t you shot this day? It just makes sense for you and the impact on small businesses is important.

Not only will you avoid the insane crowds of Black Friday, but shopping on November 29 gives you a chance to find that one of a kind gift that’s not sold at mass retailers. We’re proud to be a woman owned small business, and we’re excited to be a part of this years event. (And remember you can use promo code TWOFER at the same time.) Be sure to register your card today, learn how this works, and then see which small business are participating.

Free Shipping

If you’re just in the need of one Purse Perfector or prefer to purchase the medium size for gifts, that’s great! We’d like to offer you free shipping on your purchase. Use promo code SHIPFREE at checkout.

With so many great things going on in the next few weeks, we hope you’ll take advantage of one or more of these offers. We’d like to thank each of you for being our customer!

Keeping track of your own calendar can sometimes seem a daunting task. Having to also keep track of your husband’s, your kid’s, your grand kid’s, etc. can seem almost impossible — or at a minimum something that will surely give you a headache.

If you have a smartphone and a Gmail account, and you’re not also using Google Calendar, I challenge you to give it a try.

Basic Calendar Features

Start off by adding events to your calendar to keep track of your own appointments, tasks, outings, birthday’s, days off, etc. — I add events for anything that I would write into a paper planner. By doing this, I don’t need to remember to carry my paper planner with me (unless I’m attending a meeting). Wherever I am, I can quickly glance at my calendar on my phone to check my future availability, and I can add new appointments/events to my calendar directly from my phone.

To add an event to your calendar, click the date and time. A popup window will appear where you can add whatever details you’d like to include. You can be as basic or as elaborate as you’d like. You can also set an event to repeat. Do you pick you son up from tennis every Thursday after practice? You can set this as a repeating event. You can use this same feature for birthday’s and anniversaries you want to remember. When you create events, be sure to set a reminder — I use 30 minutes as a reminder for appointments, but one week for an out -of-town birthday which give me time to pick up a card and mail it to arrive before their birthday.

You can also invite people to your calendar events, and they can invite you to theirs. You can invite your husband to a party you both need to attend this weekend. You can invite him, and then pass off additional information such as: ‘I can’t pick up John from tennis on x date. Please be sure you arrive to pick him up by 6 p.m.”

Use your calendar to share the little snippets that you would share in a verbal conversation. I’m not suggesting you should replace talking to your husband or significant other, still share things with them, but also confirm the information through the calendar. This way, there’s not any room for someone not being where they need to be. We’ve all done it. Blissfully doing something when suddenly our phone rings or we jump up realizing we’re supposed to be somewhere else at that precise moment.

Share your Calendar

In order to invite others to your events, they don’t have to be using a Google Calendar. But, if they are, in addition to inviting others to your events to keep them informed or involved, you can also share your calendar with them. With a simple click, they’ll be able to view your calendar (you can choose which events you want to share — I prefer to share it all, that way there’s no chance of being double booked).

In order to view a calendar that’s been shared with you, you’ll need to select it from sidebar under the area which says “My calendars”. Click the small arrow next to that, and any of your calendar’s or ones shared with you will appear. This is also where you can create separate calendars if you’d like to color code your own evens/activities. You can create separate calendar for work activities versus personal ones. By assigning a color to each calendar, you can make your electronic calendar color coded just like you might do with your paper planner/calendar.

This is also the same area where you can share your calendar with others.  (For privacy issues – don’t make your calendars public – if you’re going to share them, share them only with specific people.)

Here’s an example:

The different colors on here are for different calendars. You can quickly see by looking at the calendar, and the color, who is where when.

Use Tasks to Organize your “To Do List”

Another neat feature in Google Calendar is the ability to create tasks. These can be found on the right hand side of the calendar. You can use them to remind you to do every day tasks or to remind you do pay bills, purchase gifts, etc. Whatever you would include on a paper list, you can create a task for. You can add due dates, reminders, notes, etc. The nice thing is when you check them off your task list, they get a nice big line through them. Talk about satisfaction!

Using Google Calendar is just like using any calendar – either paper or electronic. It’s a trial and error process to determine which features work best you and which ones don’t.

If you have tips on how to use an electronic calendar which isn’t covered here, please be sure to post them in the comments section.