When teaching clients about our organizational methods and tricks, often times we hear “you must have the most organized home.” And every time I answer the same. Well, yes we do, we’re perfect! Ha ha. Just kidding! I say “believe it or not but professional organizers are people too, we are not perfect.” I repeat, NOT PERFECT. And like many people, we often have our own clutter issues. I myself have one. Not a big one, not anything you would notice, but I know it’s there. What is my shameful secret? Magazines! Dun dun duuuuh!

I can’t help it! I like the pictures. I like the brief but informative articles. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid! It probably dates back to the days of Highlights. You know, those magazines you find in the waiting room at the dentist or pediatrician’s office. Those hidden picture games were the best! Anyway, it got so bad in college, that I found myself lugging around boxes of saved magazines from apartment to apartment. And those boxes were heavy! Finally I had an epiphany. Why torture myself and my roommates any longer, when a simple solution was but an extra step away.

I realized that more than 50% of a magazine’s content is advertising. And that I really didn’t want to read EVERY single article. So I came up with a method. Before reading a single line of text, I would sit down and flip through every page, tearing out anything that looked interesting, from pictures to 3 page articles. I would then put those pages into a folder titled “articles to read,” which I would then peruse and discard (aka recycle) at my leisure. What this did was remove any unnecessary distractions from my reading time, and allow me to keep only the articles I wanted, rather than stacks of magazines with ones I didn’t.

I’ve even taken my method a step further. From time to time, I will revisit my “saved articles” file, (which is where the good stuff goes from the “articles to read” file) and discard the ones I no longer wish to keep. For the ones I still want, I’ll do a quick Google search to see if I can find them online. At which point I save them electronically, and recycle the printed version. Such is the case with this article I found from 2008, which I like to forward to people in efforts to get them to recycle everything down to their toilet paper rolls. If you have a moment, check it out.  LA YOGA Mindfulness Challenge

brooke