5 Organizing Projects You Can Complete in 5 Minutes

Don’t have hours to get organized? Here are 5 things you can do for 5 minutes to get your home in order.

1. Recycle junk mail. Stand over your recycle bin or a paper sack and toss old newspapers, extra catalogs or clippings you no longer need.

2. Sort through a kitchen drawer. Set a timer for 5 minutes, grab a shopping bag, open the drawer, pick through anything no longer needed and donate it.

3. Make a clothing donation bag. Go through your clothes closet and choose 5 articles of clothing you never wear. Put them in a donation bag to be given to your favorite charity. Stop at Goodwill on the way to get these out the door.

4. Five minute toy pick up. Enlist your kids to help. Put on energizing music and have a pick up party.

5. Delete email. Take 5 minutes to delete email from your sent box, especially if it is older than a month.

Feel accomplished? Organizing is not about finding the perfect time or creating the perfect system. It is about the baby steps to create a level of order in your world that works! Share with me your 5 minute organizing project!

About Ellen

Certified Professional Organizer and Family Manager Coach Ellen Delap is the owner of Professional-Organizer.com. Since 2000, she has worked one on one with her clients in their home and offices streamlining their environment, creating effective strategies for an organized lifestyle and help prioritize organization in their daily routine. She holds ADD and Chronic Disorganization certificates and specializes in working with ADD and ADHD adults and students. Ellen has been featured at The Woodlands Home and Garden Show, on ABC13 Houston, in the Houston Chronicle and regularly contributes to national blogs and publications. To learn more about her and her work, visit www.professional-organizer.com, tweet her @TexasOrganizer or become a fan on her Facebook Fan Page Professional-Organizer.com.

Have a happy holiday with stress-less tips by Ellen Delap, CPO

To Do... Or Don’t? We all have a full schedule heading into the holidays.  Host a family meeting to decide on the holiday traditions which are most meaningful. Have each member voice their personal favorite.  Combine this list and write it in on a month at a glance calendar. Seeing conflicts on dates or other tasks? Right away decide which is going to take priority and eliminate what won’t work. Post this calendar where your family can see it each day.  Meet weekly during the holiday season to update and keep your kids and spouse up to date. 

Save the Date. Planning a holiday gathering for family or friends? There are few Friday and Saturday nights in December. Send a quick e-mail to friends, and follow up later with real invitations or by evite.com or paperlesspost.com.  Perhaps a Sunday afternoon is an alternative party time?   Start a family tradition with your extended family meeting on the same weekend each year, but not the holiday itself.  Many families enjoy the opportunity of spending Christmas Eve or day on their own.  

Share the fun.  It is more fun to share the holiday experience in sharing the holiday operations.  Create family partnerships with mom/daughter baking, dad/daughter outside light installation, all kids gift wrapping together or any combination of family members with assigned jobs to get tasks accomplished.  Projects are completed with more fun and less stress. 
Collate a Holiday Notebook.
Choose a notebook with holiday theme color, add tabbed dividers with labels for:

• recipes you make each year

• gift lists and catalog pages of gift ideas

• a pocket for receipts

• printouts of online orders

• holiday card address list

and perhaps some pictures of each room fully decorated (so you know what goes where each year.)
Now all your holiday ideas and more are together!

”Delap” Family Inexpensive Holiday traditions: 

• Tour your neighborhood after dark and look at the lights

• Drive through the downtown of your cit and look at the lights

• Have a puzzle set up on a table throughout the season

• Make holiday cookies as a family and decorate

• Read holiday stories, Frosty the Snowman or Polar Express

• Watch White Christmas, National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, or the TBS or Hallmark channels with all the holiday movies 

Happy organizing and Happy holidays!

 

Making a difference for others has always been important to Ellen Delap. Ellen has worked in a major volunteer capacity organizing efforts for two charities, Mothers Against Cancer, a fundraising effort for children’s cancer research funds for Texas Children’s Hospital, and Kingwood Women’s Club, a philanthropic women’s group working in the Northeast area of Houston, Texas. Ellen’s passion for organizing, as well as her desire to assist and empower others, led her to create Professional-Organizer.com (www.professional-organizer.com) in 2000. In May 2007 Ellen earned the highly esteemed and lite title of Certified Professional Organizer (CPO®) through the Board of Certification for Professional Organizers. Ellen has trained with Coach Approach for Professional Organizers™ and is a Certified Family Manager Coach™.

Working along side her clients, Ellen encourages and teaches her clients simple systems and routines leading to personal organizing solutions for home, school, work and life