Put it away.

Being tidy involves putting things away. And I have found that putting things away is actually a two-step process:

Step one: Determine a good place to store your thing.

Step two: Whenever you are done using the thing, put the thing in that place.

Corollary to step one: When you purchase or otherwise obtain a thing, think about where it will be kept before you bring it home.

Corollaries to step two: (1) Inform your family and roommates of where that place is. Otherwise, the people you live with will believe you are just hiding the thing. They will not be pleased. (2) If you find that there's a better place to keep the thing, start keeping it there.*

These are the steps that work for me! Do you have storage strategies that work for you?


* We keep the spare tabletop behind the bedroom door. I know someone else who keeps theirs under the bed. Wherever works, dude. Wherever works.

More on Money

Last month, I blogged about a system for tracking expenses and my friends Sasha and Emily* mentioned some great ideas in the comments. I decided that I would list here some of the shifts I've made to be more mindful of my spending. I am also still really interested in any of your tips and tricks!

Changes in Mindset: 

• Consider cooking and mending to be hobbies. They are free and rewarding AND save money. 
• Avoid rushed decisions. "Let me check and get back to you!" is a totally acceptable response when invited to plans that may or may not fit into my budget. 
• Walking instead of taking the subway is good for my wallet, my health, and my love of the city. 
• Inviting friends over for an activity instead of meeting to eat a meal in a restaurant is ACTUALLY AWESOME.  For instance, I had my friends Jesse and Sarah over and we MADE CHEESE AND THEN ATE IT. 

Pictures by Sarah Brown who now seems as addicted to this collage -making app as I am. 

Changes in Habit: 

• When I'm reading online, I leave a tab open to the New York Public Library page and just add things to my holds list as they appeal to me. Novels, comics, movies, music - all available for free. 
• I still do much of my shopping online, but I am building the habit of checking sites like www.retailmenot.com for online coupons and discount codes before making any purchases. 
• I am also trying to plan ahead for purchases more successfully. For instance, after this week I'll know what books I will teach in the fall semester. I should order desk copies in April to avoid paying for the books at the last minute because I forget to order desk copies in time.
• Relatedly, I really need to keep better track of my travel budget at work because once that is exhausted I don't get reimbursed for conference expenses. Perhaps I'll devote a page in my long-term planning notebook to this. 

* You can tell the difference between that Emily and me because that Emily is tall and blonde and has a law degree and has run a 5k. 

Reading list

Here are a few of the blog posts I've really enjoyed reading recently - and I'm always on the lookout for more reading recommendations, too:

• Sasha of A Sasha Party wrote a post about a party I threw! If you would like to read a very complimentary account of this one time I had a lot of fun, here is a place where you can do that. 
• Ali of Tag Sale Style wrote a post about her company's system for early arrivals to sales. It is far from any system I might need in my daily life and therefore fascinating. 
• Get Rich Slowly has a post about developing criteria for when to spend money on things that are not strictly necessary. I'm not sure I'll use this system, but I find it interesting. 
• A reader submitted a LOVELY to-do list to UnF*** Your Habitat recently. It's inspirational. 

Filing for the classes I teach - Work in progress.

Ladies and gentlemen, the system I am about to discuss is TOTALLY a work in progress. I welcome thoughts and suggestions.

I used to make three files for each class every semester (I'll use 101 as an example) - 101 Spring 2012 extras and originals, 101 Spring 2012 student work and 101 Spring 2012 notes.

This semester I have changed my system. NOW I keep one folder per course that is semester-specific: 101 Spring 2012 student work and extra copies of handouts; and one folder per course that is a perennial: 101- notes, teaching copies and originals of handouts. That way I can store the student work and recycle the extra copies easily at the end of each semester while keeping easy access to the handouts and teaching copies and notes I reuse semester after semester.

BUT IS THIS THE BEST WAY? I welcome your thoughts.

On Triage and Maintenance

I noticed recently that my main computer was very full. Sluggishly so, in fact. And when I ran J Disk Report (free!) I was shocked, shocked! to realize that almost half my hard drive was taken up by my iPhoto library. I had over 28,000 photos. I am not sure if that will sound like a lot to anybody reading this, but gosh, it felt like a lot to me. I had transfered library after library, to computer after computer, sloppily. There were, like, eight copies, four of them corrupted, of the same photo of a kitten I'd downloaded from the internet in 2004. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't even KNOW that kitten.

I had over ten versions of this picture of a miniature horse from  my hometown.
The picture is from 2005, so I obviously hadn't even seen any of the Li'l Sebastian
episodes of Parks and Recreation yet. 

And according to my fumbling internet research, it is either expensive or unreliable or both to use a program to remove duplicates from iPhoto. It kind of has to be done by hand, apparently, especially since not all the photos I need to remove are copies - many of them are slightly different versions of photos I took. Some poorly lit, some blurry, some with bonus thumb, you know how it goes.

So here's what I'm doing. I have made it a temporary policy to spend twenty minutes a day reviewing, labeling (and then trashing part of) my iPhoto library.

• I open up iPhoto. I pick up where I left off the day before. I look at EVERY PHOTO in an event and trash the blurries and duplicates and inexplicables.
• I look through the entire trash folder to make sure I'm not making any mistakes. 
• I empty the trash. 
• I email myself where to pick up the next day. 

This is a policy, not a rule. If I skip a day, I still know where to pick up the next day, and because I empty the trash every time, I am gradually increasing the space available on my computer. I usually end up deleting 200-600 pictures in a 20 minute session. 

Pretty soon, I'll catch up with myself. Then I'll need to develop some system to deal with all the iPhone pictures I sync weekly. That will be maintenance, but for right now I'm just doing triage. 

On one giant leap for Emily, a small step for Emilykind.

I have achieved a thing! It is not a major achievement in the grand scheme of things, but for me it was difficult and I worked a long time at it and finally did it, so that means I am proud of it even if it is minor.

I have very little upper body strength. Last semester I would have said VIRTUALLY NO upper body strength, but now I have graduated to "very little."

Many of you have probably heard of the 100 Push-Ups six-week plan, but that was laughably out of my reach. So I modified the program to do 100 wall push ups. It was not easy for me. It took far longer than six weeks for a number of reasons. I had to redo week five because I failed the strength test after it.  And, just as an aside, even if everything goes as planned, the program takes longer than six weeks because after certain weeks you need to wait a couple days, perform a strength test and then wait another couple of days before starting on the next week.

BUT, when I started the program I could do nine wall push-ups and NOW I CAN DO ONE HUNDRED. That is, like, a lot more! So I feel accomplished, even if wall push-ups are the wussiest of push-ups.

One nice thing about this program is that you are constantly keeping track of how far you've come. Now I am starting the program over, doing both assisted sit-ups and desk push-ups, and maybe after I finish this "six-week" (ha!) program I will graduate to The Real Thing and be able to do ANY sit-ups and/or ANY push-ups for realsies.

On Budgeting, Terminology, and Advice

Back in November I wrote about beginning to budget for the first time in my adult life. I was vaguely apprehensive that I was doing it wrong, and I still welcome hearing about others' systems! In January I revised my amounts for the new calendar year, but I think my system is working for me. Basically, I add up my "necessary" expenditures and keep track of how much of the leftovers I spend in a given month.

I have recently started reading And Then We Saved, and the writer there (Anna) refers to my system as a "spending diet" rather than a budget. By Anna's criteria, the only part of my system that would count as "budgeting" is the amount of money I set aside for groceries/household expenditures, since that's a category where I actively limit myself to a predetermined amount each week.

Anna dislikes the word "budget," so she invented a neologism to describe her system. I, personally, have terrible associations with the concept of dieting. I would be happy to discuss nutritional goals, food preferences, portion size, or a billion other things about eating delicious healthy things, but I'd rather not hear about your diet. It would NEVER occur to me to use that term to REDUCE anxiety when talking about money.

Even though we use different terms, it was exciting to see someone talking about a system I use because usually, online discussions about saving money are not applicable to my actual lifestyle. I mean, the money I am advised to save is generally already money I do not spend. In a recent challenge on Get Rich Slowly*, for instance, the blogger Ellen Cannon makes the following suggestions:

• "Scale back on the cable services you currently buy:" BUT I don't have cable. 
• Consider "carpooling:" BUT I don't own a car. 
• "Bring your lunch to work every day:" BUT I do that already. 
• "Make a hearty soup or stew and freeze it in portions:" BUT I do that already, too. This week it is white bean and chard stew with tomatoes and apple cider vinegar and believe me, it is delicious. I might make some crusty bread to go with it. But that's a digression. 

To save money, I am also routinely advised to get rid of my landline (I don't have one), cancel magazine subscriptions (I have only one and it was a gift), buy meat in bulk when it's on sale and then freeze it (I'm a vegetarian), do things to the outside of my house to make it weatherproof (I live in a seventh floor apartment), and the list goes on. 

One of the things that makes And Then We Saved particularly useful is that it is a technique rather than a list of specific expenditures. AND YET, if you have specific ways you've reduced your own spending, I would love to hear about those, too! 

*I really like Get Rich Slowly and these are good suggestions. But not useful to me.