gettingthingsdone

This week’s Workspace of the Week is H Sterling Cross’ simple setup:

Cable management is what makes this desk beautiful. If there were cords hanging beneath it, you would never notice the stunning wood desk. Its smooth, clean lines and unadorned hardware could easily be missed if clutter were in the way. H Sterling has attached a small power strip to the back panel of the desk so only its cable runs down the leg and off to the outlet. Additionally, the model of the SR-71 Blackbird is the only decoration on the desk, which makes the red Swingline stapler appear to be more than a utilitarian tool. The desktop wallpaper, set against this streamlined space, even looks like curated artwork. Thank you, H Sterling Cross, for your submission to our Flickr pool.

Want to have your own workspace featured in Workspace of the Week? Submit a picture to the Unclutterer flickr pool. Check it out because we have a nice little community brewing there. Also, don’t forget that workspaces aren’t just desks. If you’re a cook, it’s a kitchen; if you’re a carpenter, it’s your workbench.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

I’m currently reading the ninth edition of the Culinary Institute of America’s textbook The Professional Chef. I don’t have any desire to be a professional chef, I simply decided to read it to help me step up my game in my home kitchen. I’m only a few chapters into this book, and I’ve already learned a wealth of information.

Much to my surprise, the book is full of fantastic organizing advice. In hindsight, I should have expected this since having an organized restaurant can be a key component in a restaurant’s survival. A poorly run kitchen can produce health code violations, waste money on unused or overpriced food, make for a bad dining experience, and create high employee turnover. The better organized a kitchen and its staff, the more a restaurant can focus on the food and quality of service it provides.

The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) teaches the “Kitchen Brigade System,” which was initially “instituted by [Auguste] Escoffier to streamline and simplify work in hotel kitchens.” His system gives specific responsibilities and work stations to each person in the kitchen, so there is less duplication, cross contamination, and confusion about duties. The system is led by the chef (known as the chef de cuisine in French or the executive chef in English) and can include up to 18 positions that report to the chef (such as the sous chef, saucier, grillardin, all the way down to the commis, who is an apprentice who is learning how to work a kitchen station). One of the most interesting stations in this system, at least to me, is the cold-foods chef, referred to in French as the garde manger (which translates from French into English as pantry).

The cold-foods or pantry chef is “responsible for preparation of cold foods including salads, cold appetizers, pates, and the like.” In many kitchens, the garde manger is also responsible for all the foods stored in the pantry and walk-in refrigerators. In our family, managing the food in the pantry and refrigerator is my job, and it’s a lot of work for just the three of us. I can see how this is a full-time job for someone in a restaurant or hotel, which is feeding hundreds of customers daily. Instead of being just the guy who makes salads, the garde manger is an inventory and organizing guru.

Based off the information I’ve gathered from reading this book and specifically the sections regarding the garde manger, I’ve collected some notes to help you organize your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer (and to help improve the way I manage mine):

• Cut down on food waste by clearly marking when you purchased an item and when you opened it. Knowing these dates can help you to use food before spoilage and to be sure you only throw away food that can make you sick. Blue painter’s tape and a Sharpie are perfect for these tasks. You can stick a piece of blue painter’s tape to reusable containers and then write the information on the tape, or if the packaging isn’t reusable (like a can or box) simply write directly onto the top of the product. Label the dates as “Bought” and “Opened” so it’s clear what the dates indicate.
• Refrigerate and freeze foods at their proper temperatures. Use a thermometer to ensure all parts of your refrigerator and freezer are maintaining consistent and proper temperatures. Your refrigerator should around 36ºF, unless you regularly store fish and seafood, and then it should be a couple degrees cooler (in the 32ºF to 34ºF range). Produce can be a little warmer — lettuce, carrots — at 40ºF, but those temperatures are too warm for all the other foods (meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, etc.), so it’s best to aim for 36ºF. Typically the front of the refrigerator is warmer than the back, so store produce at the front of your shelves and meat, poultry, and fish at the back of your shelves.
• Never store cleaning supplies in your pantry so no one ever makes a mistake and puts cleaning chemicals into food. You also don’t have to worry about cleaning supplies spilling and ruining your stored foods.
• When putting items away, arrange the items so the oldest items are at the front of your pantry shelves and the newer items are at the back. This will help you to use the food item before it goes bad. The book calls this the “First In, First Out” rule.
• Group dry foods in your pantry by type. You will likely have categories for: flours, rice, corn products (cornmeal, corn starch), leaveners (baking soda, cream of tartar, baking powder), thickeners (arrowroot, gelatin), oats, other grains (barley, quinoa), pasta and noodles, legumes (lentils, beans), nuts and seeds, spices, sweeteners (honey, brown sugar, sugar cubes, powdered sugar), oils, vinegars and other non-perishable condiments, cooking wines, extracts, coffee and teas, and fruits and vegetables that do not require refrigeration (potatoes, apples). You may also have a section for packaged snacks and canned items.
• Clearly label shelves so that it is obvious where items belong. This helps improve your ability to maintain order in your pantry, and also helps other people to find items and properly return them. You can use a label maker or adhesive shelf label holders for this task.
• If possible, adjust shelf heights to best accommodate your goods. Strangely, this is an easy step to skip but will likely increase your pantry’s storage capabilities.
• Store the items most often accessed in your pantry on shelves at heights between your hips and shoulders. Heavier items you access less frequently should be at heights between your knees and hips. Lighter items you access less often can be stored on shelves at heights above your shoulders. You may want to keep a step stool in your pantry or nearby, so getting to your food is a simple endeavor.
• Do not store anything on a pantry shelf at floor level. This is a good place to keep reusable boxes, paper grocery sacks, and other non-food pantry items that won’t have future contact with food.
• Keep shelves clean and immediately deal with any spills to ward off pests and spoilage. I recently heard a tip to line refrigerator and pantry shelves with Press’n Seal Food Wrap. When it’s time to clean the shelves, pull up the dirty wrap and press down clean wrap. It’s much easier than spending the day scrubbing milk rings off refrigerator shelves and much less expensive than doing the same thing with Contact Paper.
• At least once a week, do an informal review of your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry. Get rid of spoiled and expired foods, make notes about items that are running low, and clean up any spills you may have missed when accessing items.

If you’re looking for visual inspiration, check out Better Homes and Gardens’ slideshow on how to store more in your kitchen. My favorite images are: Use Clear Containers for Dry Goods (I love how the cooking instructions and nutrition facts are taped to each container), Store Stuff on the Doors (the additional storage is perfect for teas, sweeteners, and other items accessed frequently), Pantry Drawers (perfect for homes without traditional pantries), and Cubby Organization (marvelous for small appliances).

Stay tuned for an article next week with dozens of interviews from large families talking about how they organize dinner preparations, cooking, feeding, and cleanup on a nightly basis. The strategies they employ to feed their families of five, six, seven, eight or more can help everyone — and that includes singles and small families like mine — to get a nutritious meal on the table every night without stress or breaking the bank.

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Beginning with the ScanSnap S1100 and later with a software update for other ScanSnap models, Fujitsu has provided Evernote integration built into ScanSnap Manager.

This works well, but perceptive ScanSnappers may have noticed something strange: there are two different settings for enabling searchable PDFs (aka Optical Character Recognition, or OCR). Why on earth would they do this?

Well, I can’t answer the why, but I can at least shed some light on what the different settings do, as far as I can figure out.

The OCR Settings

To access your ScanSnap Manager Profiles, right-click on the ScanSnap icon on your Dock (Mac) or System Tray (Windows). Choose Settings or Scan Button Settings, depending on your OS.

Application Tab

On the Application tab, when you have one of the Scan To Evernote applications selected, there is an Application Settings… button.

When you press it, you will see there is a Convert to Searchable PDF checkbox. That is setting #1.

File option Tab

When you go to the File option tab of your ScanSnap Manager profile, you will see there is also a Convert to Searchable PDF checkbox. That is setting #2.

So, What Is The Difference?

Before getting into the difference, I do need to point out one quirk of the way that ScanSnap Manager Evernote profiles work.

When you scan, it will upload your document (or image) to Evernote, but it will also save the PDF in the location specified on the Save tab.[1]

As far as I can tell, here is how it works:

• If you only check the Application tab checkbox, the file that is uploaded to Evernote is searchable, but the file that is saved to the folder specified on the Save tab is not searchable.
• If you do not check the Application tab checkbox but do check the File option tab checkbox, the file that is uploaded is searchable, and the file that is saved to the Save tab is searchable.
• If you check neither checkbox, the PDF that is uploaded to Evernote and the PDF that is saved to the Save tab location are not searchable. At that point, what happends depends on your status as an Evernote Premium customer.

So there you go, mystery solved. Either way, being able to scan to Evernote is a great feature, and I’m glad Fujitsu opened it up to all 2009-and-later ScanSnaps. Thanks to user Leothe3rd from the Evernote forum for the inspiration for this blog post.

Related posts:

1. ScanSnap + Evernote = Chocolate + Peanut Butter
2. OCR Your ScanSnap PDF Before Sending It To Evernote
3. How To Scan To Lucion FileCenter With The Fujitsu ScanSnap

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

I’m fairly certain our Unitasker Wednesday feature could exist entirely on kitchen gadgets that do the same thing as knives. There are so many of these doodads and geegaws that you might be able to avoid using a knife in your kitchen completely if you had an unlimited supply of money and storage space. Sure, knives are incredibly functional and built to handle all your chopping, slicing, and dicing needs — but why use an incredibly simple knife with products like the over-engineered Avocado Cuber on the market:

My word. Are people really so rushed for time that they can’t watch a one-and-a-half minute YouTube video to learn how to cut an avocado with a knife, but somehow have enough time to drive to Williams-Sonoma to buy this thing? What confuses me the most is that you have to use a knife to cut the avocado in half just so you can use this device. Therefore, you dirty a knife and the Avocado Cuber, creating twice as many dirty dishes. Any time you might save using this device (which, my guess, is not that much) you then waste when you have to wash twice as many gadgets after slicing.

Well, if you like extremely specific kitchen tools made for just one purpose, don’t forget to buy an Avocado Pit Removal Tool, an Avo Saver (you’re apparently saving the “avo” half, not the “cado”), and an Avocado Knife to go with your Avocado Cuber. Who only knows how you will function in your kitchen if you don’t have all four specialty gadgets?!

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2010

• Use your mac as a television The elgato EyeTV Hybrid lets you watch televised programming on your Mac without needing a dedicated television set.

2008

• Stop hoarding magazines Many magazines are now putting their entire publishing history on CDs or DVDs.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

This video on redacting sensitive text with PDFPen is part of a series of quick videos on paperless tips and topics. View more in the series here.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the subject for this video was ripped off from an ad that Katie Floyd did on the Mac Power Users podcast.

If you have sensitive text in a PDF that you don’t want someone to see (think account numbers, amounts, names), many people just use an annotation tool to put a rectangle over it.

The problem with this approach is that it is not actually removing the text from the PDF, it is just covering it up. If someone gets the document, they can get at the text “behind” the image.

This video uses PDFPen’s great redact tool to remove all evidence of a piece of text from a PDF. You can even remove all instances of text with one command.

View the video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube. If you are able to, I recommend that you watch it with HD turned on.

Oh, and apologies to the Boston Bruins fans out there. All in good fun.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Video: Use PDFPen To Stamp Your Signature On A Document
2. Video: Password Protect PDFs On The Mac
3. Video: Find All PDFs On Your Windows Computer

I have written about ways to electronically put your signature on a PDF quite a few times (for example, using PDFPen or in Preview), but they have all been on the Mac. Today it is Windows’ turn.[1]

The latest version of Adobe Reader X has added the ability to drop your signature into a PDF. Previously, you needed the rather-expensive Acrobat X for this. Here is how it works:

Go Into Signature Mode

When you have your PDF loaded, the first thing you want to do is click the Sign button in the upper-right corner of Acrobat Reader.

If you don’t have a Sign button, you are probably using an older version of Reader. Head on over to Adobe’s site and grab Acrobat Reader X.

When you click the Sign button, you will now have three (ok, four, but we will deal with the fourth later) options:

1. Add Text
2. Place Signature
3. Finalize Changes

Add Your Signature

In our case, we want to add our signature, so we will hit Place Signature.

Once you do this, a pop-up window comes up with instructions. Like most of these types of applications, you will need to write your signature on a piece of paper and then scan it in or take a picture of it with a camera or mobile device.

In this example, I used TurboScan on my iPhone to take a picture and then transferred it to my Windows machine.

Once you have your signature file on your computer, select it and hit Accept

Place, Resize, and Finalize

Once your have added your signature, you move the image to where you want it, and then drag the sides to size it.

When everything looks just right, click on Finalize on the right-side of the Window, and it will check with you to make sure that you want to embed your signature in the PDF. Once you click Finalize Changes, it will save a new signed PDF that you can send out.

Send For Signature?

You may have noticed earlier that aside from the three options under Sign Now, there was a fourth option with a Send For Signature button.

All this functionality came about because Adobe acquired EchoSign, an electronic signature company.

If you want to have a more sophisticated signing workflow where the PDF is securely sent to the recipient and the signatures are tracked, you can click that button and try it out. That’s a topic for another blog post though.

All in all, Acrobat Reader X’s signature functionality works well, and it is nice to have this in a free tool that you probably already have.

Do you have another way that you “sign” documents on Windows? Let us know in the comments how it is working for you.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Use Adobe Acrobat To Create A Digital Signature Stamp
2. RightSignature lets you sign documents online
3. How To Set PDF Keywords In Microsoft Windows

Objects can easily go on walkabout and then hang out, as if on vacation, in whatever random location you left them. If this happens to you (like it does me from time-to-time), try these five strategies to help you to see and deal with the perpetually out-of-place stuff in your home and office:

1. Take photographs of all areas of a room and then look intently at the pictures. I’m not sure how it works, but analyzing an image can often help you see clutter you’ve become blind to in person. Dust bunnies under your monitor, stray toys under your dining room buffet, junk mail on your fireplace mantel jump out in photos but blend into the woodwork in person.
2. Invite people over to your house for a party. Again, I’m not sure how it works, but having non-immediate family in your home can often make you to see clutter you had been previously immune to in your space.
3. Become a stray stuff collector. Grab an empty laundry basket and see how many stray objects you can find in a room. Record the number, and then repeat the process in exactly one week. Do this task weekly in a room until the number regularly falls below two stray objects. Then, repeat the process in another room.
4. Notice repeat offenders. If you are constantly finding the same object out of place, you may have the “wrong” storage space for the object. Would you be able to store the object in a more convenient location so that it’s not constantly cluttering up a room?
5. A place for everything. Be sure everything you own has a permanent storage space. If it doesn’t, the object will always be out of place. This means you should have a permanent home for stamps, rubber bands, paper clips, spare change, bills, gift cards, medicine, etc.

How do you deal with perpetually out-of-place stuff in your spaces? Share your strategies — and your struggles — in the comments.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

At least for those of us in the northern hemisphere, January is a great time to make summer travel plans. You are able to beat the rush and still get some good deals on popular travel destinations, as well as you are able to think about things other than the cold and wind and snow currently going on outside. It’s also a good time to curl up under a warm blanket with a cup of hot chocolate and thumb through travel magazines or travel guides to learn as much as you can about the place (or places) you want to go.

When planning a trip, it’s best to start by analyzing your budget. How much do you already have saved? How much can you save before deposits and tickets need to be made or purchased? How much can you save before the actual date of travel?

Once you know how much you will be able to save for your vacation, you can narrow down the locations of where you wish to go, how you wish to get there, where you will stay while there, and what you wish to do when you’re there. Or, as you probably refer to it as, an Expense Budget. As you’re writing down your expenses, don’t forget that you may need to purchase a few special items before your trip — a new swimsuit or larger memory card for your digital camera or a travel jacket — and you’ll also need to eat while you’re on the road. If you’re someone who buys a trinket or two while traveling, budget for these expenses, too.

WiseBread.com has a terrific round-up of travel websites that can help you to save money, “40 Most Useful Travel Websites That Can Save You a Fortune.” The article is a few years old, but most of the websites are still in business. When making your plans, you want to be sure to get the best deal possible so you aren’t wasting any of that money you so diligently saved.

With the money part of the equation settled, turn to the internet and/or your travel guides for itinerary inspiration. Save articles to Instapaper or Evernote. Pictures of destinations can be pinned to Pinterest. Maps, hotel reservation numbers, flight plans, car rental receipts can also be saved to Evernote. Services like TripIt work, too. If you are traveling outside the U.S., you may want to keep a file folder of this information to carry with you, especially if you don’t plan to have an international data plan for your smart phone when you’re overseas.

As the months pass and you get closer to your time of travel, check out travel expert Chris Guillebeau’s article “Stress, stuff, and world travel.” It’s crammed with extremely useful information for jet-setting in an uncluttered fashion.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

2011

• Unitasker Wednesday: Tea-Boy Penguin Tea Timer This just may be the cutest, most precious unitasker ever! Introducing the Tea-Boy Penguin Tea Timer.

2010

• Netflix streaming on your Nintendo Wii Beginning later this spring the Nintendo Wii will support on-demand streaming of content from Netflix.
• Boston Herald reporter finds calm after uncluttering Last Wednesday, Boston Herald columnist Darren Garnick publicly admitted that his previous love of disorder may have been misplaced. In his article “Pride in messy desk replaced with ‘sinking, drowning feeling’” on January 13, Garnick professes his new appreciation for being organized.
• Unitasker Wednesday: The Nuvo Ritmo Pregnancy Sound System The stuff being marketed to first-time pregnant women and parents is about 1/4 necessary, 1/4 might-be useful to some people, and 1/2 scams and clutter. As proof of the scams and clutter category, I present the Nuvo Ritmo Pregnancy Sound System.
• Doing more with less: Dogme 95 and self-imposed limitations The Dogme 95 movement shows us how self-imposed limitations can help us focus on what’s really important in our work.
• Ask Unclutterer: Processing the possessions of someone who has passed Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all response for how to handle the possessions of someone who has passed away. That is why I almost always recommend contacting a professional organizer who specializes in exactly these types of cases.

2009

• Storing board games and puzzles If board game and puzzle organization has you stumped, here are some suggestions for getting your games in order.

2008

• Book review: One Year to an Organized Life If you’re in the market for a comprehensive, concrete, methodical guide to home organization, Regina Leeds’ latest book is an excellent place to start.
• Keep your tax documents organized When it comes to clutter the federal government has all of us beat. The tax code alone is over 60,000 pages and continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Here are some of our posts from this week in years past.

2011

• How To Find PDFs That Are Not Searchable If you want to find the PDFs on your computer that have not been OCR’ed here is how to do it.

• Reader Story: Accessing Documents On The Go This was the first of the popular reader stories series staring Brandon Smith from Oregon.

• Can You Read A Book In A Browser? Interesting how far e-Reading has come just in the last year. This was before the Kindle Cloud Reader.

2010

• How To Encrypt Evernote On Microsoft Windows

• How To Encrypt Evernote On Mac OSX Encrypting your data on Evernote is a common concern. Here are some things you can do.

• Windows 7 Update For Fujitsu ScanSnap S510 and S500 Is Now Available When Windows 7 came out, there were some issues with Fujitsu ScanSnaps. Eventually, they were cleared up with some software patches.

(Photo by Ayleen Gaspar)

Related posts:

1. DocumentSnap Time Machine
2. DocumentSnap Time Machine
3. DocumentSnap Time Machine

Reader Lirpa submitted the following to Ask Unclutterer:

I have something that I love that recently broke by accident. It has sentimental value (passed to me from an aunt), it is aesthetically my style, it was useful, and it made me smile whenever I saw it. It is still all those things, except that it can no longer be safely used (nor repurposed). It’s also not reparable, and I don’t know where I could get another one to replace it.

How do I get rid of it? Any other object like this would go in the trash, but I love it so much. There’s really nothing that can be done with it even if I did save it—it would be clutter. How do I walk myself through this process of getting rid of it? Seems silly to be grieving such a simple object, but I am.

When accidents happen to objects we used faithfully and loved, it can be difficult to let them go. It’s certainly not easy for me. The objects feel like trusted friends who were there for you when you needed them.

I think the first thing you need to do is thank the object for its service. You could literally say something aloud to it, or you could just spend a minute or two thinking about all the good times you shared. It seems a little silly, but it helps to have the formal goodbye.

Once you’ve acknowledged its service, you can decide how to proceed. Obviously, you can just dispose of the object and be done with it. However, you might need a little more than this to help ease the pain.

You can make a visual tribute to it. Get a shadow box and decorate it with pictures of you and your aunt using the item and maybe a piece of the actual item that broke. Hang the tribute on the wall as long as you need to until your time of grieving has past.

If you’re a journal keeper, you could also glue a picture of it in your journal and then write down the things you thought about it in your formal goodbye.

Since you don’t say exactly what the item is, it’s hard for me to know if you sincerely can’t repurpose it. My guess is that you could break off a chunk of it, drill a hole into it, and make a small piece of it into a bauble on your key ring. If it’s soft, you might be able to sew a piece of it onto a quilt or something else that you use in your home.

I’m sorry you have lost a favorite item. Be sure to check out the comments where our readers may have even more ideas for you.

Thank you, Lirpa, for submitting your question for our Ask Unclutterer column.

Do you have a question relating to organizing, cleaning, home and office projects, productivity, or any problems you think the Unclutterer team could help you solve? To submit your questions to Ask Unclutterer, go to our contact page and type your question in the content field. Please list the subject of your e-mail as “Ask Unclutterer.” If you feel comfortable sharing images of the spaces that trouble you, let us know about them. The more information we have about your specific issue, the better.

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This week’s Workspace of the Week is Skorpion24′s self-made bedroom office:

According to the description on Flickr, Skorpion24 made the shelves and desk for this room. What is nice about making custom pieces is that you obviously get exactly what you want for your space. In a workspace, having the ideal setup you want can help you to be more productive because you want to be in the space and all of your supplies have a home. The office also incorporates an Ikea filing cabinet that fits perfectly under the desk and my guess is this piece of storage was figured into the construction design. The cable control is also very well done in this office. Thank you, Skorpion24, for sharing your office with us.

Want to have your own workspace featured in Workspace of the Week? Submit a picture to the Unclutterer flickr pool. Check it out because we have a nice little community brewing there. Also, don’t forget that workspaces aren’t just desks. If you’re a cook, it’s a kitchen; if you’re a carpenter, it’s your workbench.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland's Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

If you have read my Doxie Go review, you will know that I like the scanner but I felt the lack of OCR capability (the ability to make a PDF searchable) was a bit of a stumbling block.

I’m happy to report that with the Doxie 2.1 software update, the software now has OCR built-in.

How Does It Work?

When you plug in your Doxie Go and import your images, the process is the same as outlined in my reviews.

However, when you hit the Save button, you now have a two new options: Save As PDF w/ OCR (B&W) and Save As PDF w/ OCR (Color)

As you might expect, when you choose one of those options, the Doxie software saves the PDF but applies OCR when it does so.

How Are The Results?

I have only had time to do very limited testing, but so far the results are pretty great.

Here is a sample PDF that I just scanned with the Doxie Go (click the image to download if you want):

Here is the OCR’d text. Not bad at all.

So far, if you are a Doxie Go user, the 2.1 looks to be a great addition. If you’ve tried out the OCR, let me know how it looks for you.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Related posts:

1. Doxie Go Goes Cordless
2. Doxie Now Available On Amazon
3. If You Want To Get Doxie, Now’s Your Chance