Getting Organized in The Home

My house maybe very umm out of sorts, but behind closed doors, in cabinets, and the filing system I use to store my files on my computer, I consider myself fairly organized. I’ll give you a few of the suggestions the speaker used today:

• Naming your file folders for pictures as YEAR #MONTH MONTH NAME (2012 01 JANUARY)
• Have a folder titled “Best of 2012” so that in 12 years when your child is graduating highschool and you want to make a memory book for them  you don’t have to search through all of the folders and you just have to look at the Best of
• GO AHEAD AND DELETE BAD PICTURES AND PIC THE BEST OF THE 20 SHOTS YOU TOOK OF THE SAME SUBJECT AT THE SAME TIME
• A tip from me: I have been scanning in all of the kid’s art projects so that I don’t have to keep them all
• Store clothes that don’t fit anymore, stuff you only use anually, and things you never use in well organized and labeled plastic containers.
• She brought up an awesome point (because she has 5 kids) that she has a checklist of things to pack for certain trips that she refers to every year and updates so she doesn’t have to reuse every time
• Pick a certain place to put your keys and purse
• Pick a certain place to open your mail and have a place where you put the things you will need to come back to and the things you don’t need to get to.
• I have yearly clear bins that I put all of the little momentous such as birthday invitations, Christmas cards, movie stubs, etc and I am going to burn DVDs with all the pictures and videos of that year and put them in there that way I have a back up

For those of you that know me, you know I am very passionate about my digital scrapbooks. I use the site www.mixbook.com because it is very easy to use and has a lot of preset layouts, backgrounds, and stickers. How I stay organized:

• I upload all of my pictures and videos off of my digital camera, video camera, and iphone to our external hard drive>Pictures By the Years>2012>2012 01 January that way I have ALL of the pictures in the same place.
• Then I have a folder on my desktop entitled Name’s Folder>Mixbook>Week 1 January 1-7 and in that folder I put all of the appropriate pictures for that time period. I also include scanned pictures I have of Name’s crafts, cards we have received  tickets to events, etc and a word document where I keep track of things that I’d like to include in that time period.
• So now that I have those pictures in that folder I can select my favorite pictures I’d like to include at that time or come back to it later.
• Then I log into Mixbook and upload a week at a time and just place it on the page how I’d like to group it.
• Now that I’m at the end of the year I’ve gone back through my Facebook to see if I have any important mile stones, funny quotes, or events that maybe I forgot my camera at and I am requesting pictures from my friends.
• Next, when I have time I just log in and do the decorating and I’m in no rush and don’t feel scatterbrained because it’s all right there in front of me.

The only thing I hope for is a tablet that I can work on my scrapbook on! Come on iPad all I need is for you to run flash!