Here are three things that we see holding our clients back all the time and a tip to overcome those hurdles and help you get organized in your office

1. Get your paperwork under control.  The number one thing that clients call us for is paper.  Paper piles, mail, to-do lists, business cards, ideas for projects, and on and on! To clear a back log, FAR your paperwork and make 3 piles: File, Action, Recycle.  File the things you need for reference, or you need to keep for the IRS or some other government department. Get tough with your action pile – if it’s something that might happen, someday, maybe, put it in the recycle pile and forget about it – you most likely would have forgotten about it anyway.

Is the paperless office just a fantasy for you? Do you struggle to find files on your computer like in the ""real"" world? How can you organize your computer?

One of the goals for any organizing project is to make it easy to find things when you need them. Thankfully computers have great search capabilities and by keeping a few tips in mind, it can be a snap to find any file within a few minutes, if not seconds.

Here are three things that we see holding our clients back all the time and a tip to overcome those hurdles and help you get organized in your office.

1. Get your paperwork under control. The number one thing that clients call us for is paper. Paper piles, mail, to-do lists, business cards, ideas for projects, and on and on! To clear a back log, FAR your paperwork and make 3 piles: File, Action, Recycle. File the things you need for reference, or you need to keep for the IRS or some other government department. Get tough with your action pile – if it’s something that might happen, someday, maybe, put it in the recycle pile and forget about it – you most likely would have forgotten about it anyway.

Once you have decided what you want to use your garage for, you may find there are items that need to be removed from the garage.  If you are keeping them, find a new home for them that makes sense.  If you are not keeping them, remember to reuse and recycle.

If you are not going to reuse the items, allow other people to reuse by selling items or giving them away.  Options for selling items include:

• Yard Sale
• Craigslist
• eBay - advice from a local eBay seller, Amy Weintraub of Shop It LA , suggests only selling something on eBay if it is worth over $100 - otherwise you spend a lot of time posting on line, packaging and posting the items for not much return.

Consider donating directly to charities in your area, but give them a call first to find out if they need them. Some great places to donate to in the Los Angeles area are:

The first thing to do when organizing your garage, or any space for that matter, is to decide what you want to use the space for.

The garage used to be the place to park your car, but more and more frequently, the car is being parked in the driveway and the garage has become essentially another room of the house.  Garages are turned into playrooms, entertainment rooms, exercise rooms, or just a place for storage.  Some people use their garage for a hybrid of uses - parking their car, storage and a kids craft area for instance.

However you use your garage, you do want it to be functional and not just a catch-all area for stuff you can't decide what to do with or will never actually use.

Is paper a problem in your life?  Does it end up all over the house?  Are there piles on your desk? Let's identify the problem and then look at some solutions.

First, the problem. Paper comes into your house or your office.  You have other things to attend to right away, so you drop your mail on the nearest horizontal surface on the way to your task. What happens is that over time, piles are distributed everywhere.  There is no semblance of order.  You don't know what mail is oldest and which is newest.  Time sensitive mail, such as bills, are mixed in with junk mail.  There is no method to the madness.  You are overwhelmed with the clutter.

Contrast this with the ideal situation.  You bring your mail in and deal with it immediately, each day.  It doesn't even reach a surface because it is dealt with immediately.  There are no piles, no overwhelming paper clutter. You can access any piece of information within 30 seconds.  Your bills and correspondence are up to date.

It is difficult to change our habits overnight, but there are steps we can take to move towards our ideal.

Control your mail - FAR your mail: File, Action, Recycle.

Do you have more paper than you know what to do with? Can you find a specific piece of paper when you need it? How do you manage the information contained in all the paper you have?

If you have piles of paper, try doing a pre-sort first. It's easier to keep only a few categories in mind to start with. I use the FAR method, adapted from Julie Morgenstern's FAT method. She uses File, Act, Trash. I take her trash and put it in the recycling. Now we're going FAR with our mail! This initial pre-sort can be done very quickly into two piles and the recycling bin.

The File pile consists of papers the you want to keep for reference or that you are required to keep for legal or tax reasons, or possibly that is memorabilia. These papers can be immediately put into your filing system, whether it is paper or electronic. Do not mix your filing with your action papers.

This seems to be the hardest part of “being organized” for many of my clients. So often, I see people put in a big effort to clear the clutter they have accumulated over many weeks, months or years without making the small changes every day that would help make their lives easier in the long term.

Being organized is all about the habits that you have and that you create. Habits that promote being organized will lead to an organized life, leaving you free from worries (at least, freer!) and the opportunity to live life in the moment – those Zen moments when you get to be totally involved in what you are doing, who you are being, or the experience you are having right now!

What could a small step towards a new habit be?

The garage is a great place to store infrequently used items and items related to outdoor use such as gardening tools and sporting equipment.

Unfortunately, the garage often becomes the place to store unmade decisions; the cute Halloween decorations your friend gave you that you didn't find a place to use last year, and you're not sure if you will use next year; the dehydrator that you did use when you first got it 5 years ago, but haven't touched for the last 4 years. All the "I might need it someday" items end up in the garage.

It's okay to have some of these things, but if they stop you parking your car in your garage, make it difficult to find the things you need, or worse, have expanded into a storage unit as well, it's time to be honest with yourself and decide whether or not to cost of keeping these items both in financial terms and in energetic terms is worth keeping them.

Do what you have time for

Decorating for the holidays can take up a huge amount of time, depending on the number of decorations you have. Plan a time to put up your decorations and a time to take them down. A friend of mine recently got out all her Halloween decorations. They've been taking up her dining room table for more than a week now, and she's super busy this week. Guess whether or not she's going to get her table back this week? If you have to decorate and you don't have much time, be judicious about the items you put out. Choose only the ones you really love (and consider giving away the rest).