Welcome to my blog’s new series… I will be featuring (and maybe even reviewing) some of my absolute favorite organizing tools and products on Fridays! Here’s the first…

TasteBook.com is the best place online to discover, organize, and share favorite recipes—then turn them into beautiful personal keepsake-quality hardcover cookbooks.

You can search more than 100,000 recipes from major lifestyle magazines and leading recipe websites, upload your own favorites, or shop professionally edited TasteBooks created by top cookbook authors and food editors.

TasteBook.com is free to use, and personal cookbooks start at just $19.95 each. Every TasteBook can hold up to 100 recipes. Order them all at once or in batches. It’s easy to add more pages to TasteBook’s expandable hardcover binder system at anytime.

• Custom covers: Choose a beautiful cover image and edit the title of your cookbook.
• Cooking notes: Add helpful hints, cooking tips, and personal notes to any recipe.
• Personal photos: Upload your own pictures along with your personal recipes.
• Colored tabs: Organize your recipes any way you want with ten tabbed chapters.
• Perfect gift: Create one for bridal showers, family reunions, and holidays.

So, fill a TasteBook with all your family’s favorites, and you’ll soon discover just how “easy-breezy” it’ll be to get dinner on the table every night of the week (now that your recipes are finally organized)! Mmmmmm…

Having a baby is a far more complicated endeavor than you could ever imagine when you first get pregnant. To help you manage the influx of baby’s clothes (and all the size changes as baby grows), here are a few tips…

Supplies Needed:

• clothes dresser
• drawer dividers
• children’s hangers
• closet dividers
• paper bags
• plastic storage bins

Organization Tips:

1. Store socks, mittens, hats, and other accessories in separate sections of the top dresser drawer.
2. Fold all onesies and store in two separate piles in the second dresser drawer: whites and colors.
3. Fold all gowns and sleepers. Store in two separate piles in the third dresser drawer.
4. Hang up baby’s outfits in the closet. Separate them by size and/or season using closet dividers.
5. As baby gets bigger, toss any outgrown clothes into the corresponding paper bag at the bottom of baby’s closet (labeled “sell,” “donate,” and “keep”).
6. Once the “donate” bag is full, take its contents to your favorite local charity.
7. When the “sell” bag is full, take its contents to your favorite consignment store.
8. When the “keep” bag is full, place its contents into the corresponding plastic bin (labeled by size and season, plus gender as necessary).

Before I start a writing project, I generally do as much research as I can about the topic at hand, which I’m sure most of you do as well. So, today’s task was to gather some ideas of what to include in my brief autobiography for this month’s GCC MOPS newsletter.

A search on Google.com for “autobiography outline” led me to an interesting website: OurStory.com. It’s a collaborative online environment where you can collect and share all kinds of media: letters, photos, videos, audio recordings, and more.

OurStory is an online service where family and friends collaboratively create, share, and preserve their family history, life stories, anecdotes, photos, and videos in an organized visual photo-history timeline.

OurStory combines the best of blogging, photo sharing, digital storytelling, and family history with rich features such as an interactive visual timeline, privacy controls, collaborative email requests, guided templates, and a library of over 2,000 prompting interview questions.

OurStory helps family and friends share and preserve their stories from life’s shoebox in a lasting format online, backed up to a home computer, and/or made into heirloom-quality books, CDs, and DVDs.

OurStory is a full-featured free service on the web. It is also available as a premium subscription for $39.95 (USD) per year, which adds features such as multiple profiles and timelines, unlimited privacy circles, style embellishment, and discounts on books and CD/DVDs.

What a great way to organize your memorabilia… an organizer’s dream! Learn more online.

Courtesy of Lorie Marrero, creator of The Clutter Diet, owner of LivingOrder:

People hear that I am a Professional Organizer and they read some of my writing, and they often assume that my home and office must be “perfect.” Let me assure you, with two kids, two parakeets, a dog, a husband, and two companies, it is far from perfect—but my life works for me. And I would not want to aspire to perfection, as it is an unattainable and futile goal.

Instead we teach people to aspire to be NEATER*:

• Not perfect, but…
• Effective—your systems work well for you and your family
• Always improving—you look for how to do things smarter, faster, and better
• True to your style—you work with your own preferences, not someone else’s standards
• Efficient—your systems minimize waste of time and energy
• Ready for anything—you are well-prepared with what you need for life and work

Our definition of what it means to be organized is realistic and defined—it does not mean your house has to look like Real Simple magazine and that you have to become Martha Stewart.

So, is it possible to be TOO organized? Absolutely. Just as in business endeavors, when setting up any organizing system you want to ask yourself about the Return On Investment (ROI). Is the time, money, or energy you are investing in this process going to pay off by offering you more time, money, and energy in return? If the answer is no, you need to think very hard about whether you should bother.

One example of this that we run into fairly often: People think it might look neat to have all matching plastic containers in their pantries that all nest nicely together and present a picture-perfect shelf. But for the ROI of simply having a pretty pantry, you have to spend a lot of time transferring every new food item from its original store packaging into the containers. It’s just not worth the time (especially if your kids go through cereal like mine do! We’d hardly be able to transfer the contents to the container before it would be eaten up). This example also plays into a common myth that if something looks really neat it must be organized and must be better. Maybe not!

Another thing we see is people creating folders by vendor for their common household bills, such as the phone company, the electric company, and the cable company. What we typically recommend instead (if you even want to keep the paid bills) is to file the bills by month in an accordion folder. The time it takes to parse each bill out into the proper vendor folder rarely pays off. In the unlikely event that you need to find something, you can invest the time on the other side of that problem instead of consistently investing it up front.

We like to work on the “Good Enough” principle, meaning that the level of organization is appropriate to provide a return that is worth the investment. Is there something you could cut out today that would be “Good Enough,” and actually gain some time back in the process?

*NEATER acronym © 2005-2007, LivingOrder, Inc.