parenting

Organization: A Simple Solution for Disorganized Moms

parentinghome management

I have two personality traits that make organization difficult for me. First of all, I’m a piler. I really dislike clutter (not that you can tell by the look of my house these days), so I tend to put everything in a big pile. This includes papers. Secondly, and probably even more annoying, I discard everything. When I finally manage to really clean, I’m usually so frustrated that I throw everything away or recycle it. Sadly, this often includes important paperwork.

 

So you can imagine how annoying it is when I need to find tax information, or some paper with instructions from my daughter’s school, or the dog’s rabies vaccination certificate. If you can’t imagine, trust me, the search is generally accompanied by a symphony of four letter words. You don’t want to be anywhere near me when that is happening, I assure you.

I’ve struggled with this my entire life, and now that we’re in the digital age (What? I’m old!), you’d think I would have gotten better at this, but I haven’t. Sure, I have a file of stuff on my computer desktop that holds the forms I most often need—I’m self employed, so I have a filled out 1099 tax form, a copy of my driver’s license, and a voided check scanned—but that’s about it. When it comes to things like that receipt from the tree service when a third of our massive maple tree fell on our house—it's in the piles.

Which means when the home insurance claims office calls, the weeping and cursing and gnashing of teeth happens until, at last, it’s found. Seriously, that story is totally true, and do you know where I found that receipt? Apparently, in a cleaning frenzy I took a pile of papers, stuck ‘em in a tote bag, and then hung the bag in the closet out of sight.

What is wrong with me?

I realize that I could scan everything right away, when I get it, and stick in some cloud storage box somewhere. But that’s not much different than sticking that tote bag in the closet. It’s just a tote bag in a closet on the internet.

So here’s the part where I can’t help, but totally sound like a commercial. I’m sorry for that. Really. But the thing is, there’s a perfect solution to my problem, and I know this because I work for the company that created the solution. AboutOne is like the perfect digital filing cabinet that also has a personal assistant.

Of course, I still have to take that critical step and scan (or use the app to photograph) all the forms, so they actually end up in my AboutOne account, and that’s the real mountain to climb, isn’t it? I have to believe, though, that if I set aside a bit of organization time each week, that I will save myself hours of frustration and fury. And that’s worth it, right?

Next up? Tackling the garage. I don’t think there’s yet an app for that. Alas.

What simple solutions do you have to keep your life organized?

Featured image courtesy of Flickr.

Cecily Kellogg is the mom of nearly six year old daughter, a wife, and the social media strategist for AboutOne, an online family organizer that turns your phone into a remote control for your life, working with your existing calendar and contact tools so you can automatically organize, store, and share family memories and household paperwork. Through web and mobile apps, AboutOne guides you along the path to organization, rewarding you along the way for meeting your organizational goals.

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