Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve got an exciting post for you today, all about home office organization. I love reading about other people’s organizational systems, and thought I’d share my own.
Let’s start with a tour of my office.
Tag Archives: organization
How I Manage My RSS Feeds
If you read the title of this post and thought “What the heck is an RSS feed?” you need to start here.
As part of my New Year’s resolution to organize my digital assets, I spent some time recently cleaning up my RSS feeds in Google Reader.
I’m currently subscribed to 234 feeds and have over 1000 new items waiting to be read. I know for a fact that I will never read all those articles, and there may be some feeds among those 234 that I haven’t looked at in months. So why keep them around?
I use Google Reader as a bookmarking tool to help me keep track of blogs that I’ve found interesting, inspiring, unique, or well designed. I also use it to keep up on the latest news, and to follow my friends’ blogs.
I like things to be neat and tidy, so I’ve organized all of my feeds into categories:
See that first category there? The one called Daily Reads? That one’s important. So is the fact that Google allows you to put a single feed into multiple categories.
Every feed I subscribe to gets put into one of ten categories: Education, Entertainment, Freelance and Business, Life and Home, Music, News, Personal Blogs, Tech Blogs, Tech Pundits, or Web Design Blogs. (Just to be clear, these are categories I’ve created for myself. You can create your own categories in Google Reader and name them whatever you’d like.)
The feeds I read every single day also get put into the Daily Reads category. Using this system, I can open my Daily Reads folder when I sit down at my computer every morning, and I know I’m getting the content most important to me. 174 articles are a lot easier to get through than 1000+, and I still don’t read every one. I skim the headlines and the photos until something catches my eye.
If I happen to have extra time, I then peruse through my other subscriptions. I have enough varied content that I can always find something interesting to read no matter what kind of mood I’m in.
That’s it. That’s the secret to my blog reading success. How do you manage your RSS feeds? I’d love to hear about your feed management system in the comments.
This post was inspired by the Lifehacker article: “How Can I Organize My RSS Feeds So They’re More Manageable?” I suggest you read through the comments section of that post for lots of great tips and tricks.
Goals and Resolutions
1. Be better organized with bills, paperwork, and planning.
I have always been a meticulously organized person. I write everything down. I am a compulsive list maker. I have a notebook for everything. However, since we moved 5 months ago, I’ve found myself becoming very disorganized. I’m neglecting my notebooks. My lists are outdated. Chaos is starting to take over my life. I need to get back on track, reorganize my life, and create a new organization system that fits our new home, our new lifestyle, and our new obligations.
2. Organize my digital assets (bookmarks, files, rss feeds, etc.).
In addition to organizing my physical paperwork, I also need to organize my digital assets.
3. Budget.
Dan and I have never followed a budget. When we lived in the city, we were young and had disposable income; we didn’t pay attention to how we spent our money. As long as we could pay our bills every month, we were happy. Now, things have changed. We’re homeowners planning to have a family one day soon, so money is going to be tight. This year, we need to set a strict budget for ourselves, and stick to it.
4. Start planning for things early.
I hate when things like Christmas and tax season sneak up on me, and I’m completely unprepared. This year, I want to start planning ahead.
5. Continue work on our house.
Have you seen the massive list of renovation projects we’re planning for our house? This year, I’d like to knock as many things as possible off that list.
6. Be a better friend.
I really suck at maintaining friendships. As much as I love my friends, I hate talking on the phone, I hate leaving my house if it’s not to go to work or run errands, and I make a lot of promises I don’t keep. This year, I want to make more of an effort to keep the friends I have in my life, to rekindle old friendships, and to form new friendships with people I meet throughout the year.
7. Be a better blogger.
I just bought Kaelah Bee’s e-book PR + Marketing for Bloggers. I’m only half way through it, but so far, it’s great. Lots of good insight into how Kaelah works, what made her blog so successful, and how she got to where she is today. I’m hoping to incorporate some of her tips into my blogging routine this year, and update my blog on a much more regular basis.
8. Establish a better morning routine.
I consider myself a morning person because I like waking up early and getting right to work, but I’ve never been able to establish a good morning routine. After my alarm goes off every morning, I just kind of flail around for an hour until I rush out the door, and I always end up forgetting something. Not anymore.
9. Continue learning.
Ever since I graduated from college with my bachelor’s degree in 2009, I’ve wanted to continue my education. At one point, I started a graduate program, but dropped out because it wasn’t the right fit for me. Now, I’m on the lookout for programs that suit my needs and my lifestyle. There are a lot of great programs out there – from mini-MBA courses to online certificate programs – that I’m starting to get very interested in.
10. Use my time wisely. Take on side projects. Do more work around the house. Contribute to society. Stop being lazy.
When I come home from work at the end of the day, there’s nothing I love more than putting on my pajamas, sinking into the couch, putting my feet up, and zoning out in front of the television for a few hours before going to bed. But when I actually stop and think about what I could be accomplishing in a few hours a day, I wish I was more productive. This year, I hope to be.
What are your goals and resolutions for 2012? Tell me about them in the comments.