by Leah Ingram
The second Monday of January is always National Clean Off Your Desk Day, and I’m kind of lucky this year: we just redid my office and I haven’t moved back in yet. So that means that my desk isn’t even set up and therefore I have nothing to clean off of it to celebrate the day. However, I still have plenty of office decluttering I could be doing, albeit not in my actual office. Here are some of the tasks on my to-do list:
- Identify all the paper I have in boxes or piles that I can reuse in my printer. Since I’m working on another revise of my novel and need to print it out to edit, reusing paper for this task is important to me–my novel is 300+ pages!
- Catch up reading this new blog I’ve subscribed to called A Paperless Life. Hopefully, I’ll learn some new tips for culling my files.
- Thin my magazine collection.I plan to give away overruns on Freecycle or bring to my local doctor’s office for the waiting room. So if I find a magazine from three or six months ago and I still haven’t read it, it’s out of here.
- Inventory my office supplies. Last night my daughter needed Post-It Notes for a homework project. We couldn’t fine any but that doesn’t mean we don’t own them. When we’d renovated to create my new office space, I boxed up all my office supplies and now it’s time to find those boxes and go through them.
- Tackle each of these tasks in 15-minute increments. This is a trick I learned from FlyLady, which is all about “You can do anything for 15 minutes.” That is, you may not get everything done in 15 minutes but you can make a pretty significant dent in a project in just that short period of time.
What about you? How are you celebrating National Clean Off Your Desk Day?
YOU COULD WIN LEAH’S BOOK: Enter the Housewife Awards® by January 18, 2010, for your chance to win a copy of Leah’s new book, “Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less.
Most mothers teach their kids to cook and clean. Leah Ingram’s mother taught her to compost. These days she’s passing along this green message to her own daughters as they all try to live a green and frugal lifestyle as The Lean Green Family. Visit her blog, Suddenly Frugal.
