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…

Thank you Michelle! My closet is beautiful and organized. I can see everything and can get it just as quickly. Even better, I’ve been able to keep it that way for 2 months. Thank you so much.

— Kim R.

Michelle has great ideas to help you get organized and keeps it simple. I will definitely use her services again in the future.

— Dana B.

A well managed business by an extremely organized person. Well worth obtaining the professional assistance from [real neat]

— Diane B.

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).

Earlier this month, I was honored to be interviewed by Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni :

I had a great call with Xobni user Michelle Deo today. Michelle is a professional organizer from Georgetown, Kentucky. As you can expect, a professional organizer would be pretty excited about Xobni.

As a professional organizer, Michelle helps families and companies organize the processes by which they run their lives and their businesses. This ranges from new organizing systems for their closets at home to filing systems and work-flow management systems for the office.

While Michelle focuses on organizing people’s physical information, she uses Xobni to organize her digital information.

Michelle gets a lot of personal and business email and loves that Xobni organizes her inbox around people. She enjoys the automatic contact information extraction, the photos of her contacts, and having all of the conversations and attachments from a contact in one place. Michelle has been using Xobni for 6 months, and regrets not finding it earlier!

Read the full article »

Next time you’re packing up your suitcase for a much-needed vacation or business trip, consider using old buttons to organize your earrings… just push the wires through the holes and secure them at the back.

In fact, if you don’t own a fancy-schmancy jewelry organizer for your earrings at home, you can use this idea to keep pairs together in your jewelry box (or wherever else you store your earrings).