Have you always wanted to plan your own healthy homemade meals but just don’t know where to start?  Are you tired of feeling tired? Ready to take charge of your health? Don’t wait for another year to roll around – now is the time to get organized and start meeting your goals!  Our very own Tabitha Colie, Professional Organizer and Holistic Health Counselor will be teaching sessions on Healthy Meal Planning Made Easy. 

No matter your age, you can have your best, most energized year yet. Learn valuable tips on how to purge your pantry, makeover your meals, and savor the flavor of healthy and sweet success. Walk away with time-saving techniques for meal planning and preparation, ideas for streamlining your kitchen, and savory recipes that will make every mealtime both delicious and nutritious! 

Tabitha’s first session will be Thursday, February 16, 6:30-8:30 PM in White Salmon, WA (Columbia River Gorge area) at D’Lish Delivered kitchen: 521 E. Jewett Blvd. Cost: $40
To register, email Tabitha Colie: tabitha@itssimplyplaced.com but hurry, space is limited!

Look for more Healthy Meal Planning Made Easy classes coming to a venue near you this Spring and Summer – please let us know if you would like to attend a class in your area.

How do you plan your meals at home?  We want to know!

Welcome to our new feature: Tech Talk Thursday! Since technology is such an integral part of our lives, we are going to bring you tools, tips and tricks to help you stay organized in your digital domain.

Today we encourage you to gather your old cell phone, laptop, external hard drive, digital camera, computer peripherals – even DVDs – that you no longer use but haven’t tossed yet. Then, visit Gazelle.com and trade them for cash! Gazelle is a “reCommerce” company that recycles and resells more than 250,000 electronic and digital products.

To find out if your old things may still have value, simply visit their website and search the database.  Gazelle also has a great FAQ page if you want to know more about how it works. 

First, they will make you an offer and make arrangements to ship your item to them at no cost to you. Then comes the fun part: getting paid! They will send you a check, Amazon gift card, or Paypal the funds directly to you. What could be better than that?

How do you recycle and resell your technology?  We want to hear about it!

If you have ideas for a Tech Talk Thursday topic, please let us know! In the meantime, check back weekly for a new topic and make sure to join in the fun. We look forward to hearing about how you use technology to stay organized in your life.

Time for the Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge!  RIGHT NOW spend 10 minutes tossing items from your kitchen utensil drawer.  Do you have an overflowing kitchen utensil drawer in your home or office communal kitchen?  Ten minutes is enough time to toss broken or badly damaged/stained items and to collect ones you either don’t use or have multiples of to donate.  Embrace our challenge this week and reduce the amount of useless utensils in your kitchen!

Ready, set, TOSS!

How do you organize your kitchen utensils?  We want to know!

Thanks to Simply Placed community member, Jackie Dales, for the great idea for today’s challenge. If you have ideas for a Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge, please let us know! In the meantime, check back weekly for a new challenge and make sure to join in the fun. We look forward to hearing about how you do with the challenges.

Time for the Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge!  RIGHT NOW spend 10 minutes tossing your useless subscriptions and go paperless!  Are you recieving magazines or catalogues that you no longer value? Mailings from an organization that you are no longer interested in? Periodicals that are no longer relevant to you? Paper copies of bills, statements and advertisements?  Ten minutes is enough time to unsubscribe from a physical mailing list you don’t read material from and/or change your bill  or statement status from ‘paper’ to ‘paperless’ .  Check our previsou blog post about ways to eliminate junk mail for more ideas.  Embrace today’s challenge and reduce the volume of paper coming into your home or office! 

Ready, set, TOSS!

What steps have you taken to go paperless?  We want to know!

If you have ideas for a Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge, please let us know! In the meantime, check back weekly for a new challenge and make sure to join in the fun. We look forward to hearing about how you do with the challenges.

Special thanks to our friend Dan Faulkner, Jr. from John L Scott  for these great ideas.

Many people avoid setting goals for themselves simply because they are faced with a few common challenges.  We have three tips to overcoming these barriers to success so you can being achieving your goals today.

1.  Set Practical Goals.  Often times, people set unrealistic or impractical goals for themselves that they are unable to achieve in the immediate future.  Instead, break large goals up into smaller short-term goals and reward yourself along the way.  For more tips on how to reward yourself check out our recent Goal Setting Success post.

2. Don’t Fear Failure.  While some of us set the bar too high, it is also possible to set the bar too low.  Trying to avoid disappointment by making your goals easy to obtain can stop you from moving forward.  Studies have shown that the additional effort and motivation that is required for challenging goals makes them more fulfilling to accomplish.  Need more motivation?  Try looking at our tips for visualizing success.

3. Have a Plan.  A big part of making goals is coming up with a plan of action to achievement.  You can improve your chances of making your goals reality by creating a deadline and sticking to it.  Deadlines both hold you accountable to yourself and keep you on track to your target.

How do you overcome the obstacles in the way of your goals?  We want to hear about it!

Time for the Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge!  RIGHT NOW spend 10 minutes tossing items off your computer desktop.  Ten minutes is plenty of time to remove old shortcut icons you no longer use, organize documents into easy-to-locate folders and sort or arrange your icons into a system that makes sense.  Take back the desktop and make it functional once again by taking this opportunity to embrace our challenge!  Tell us how it went!

If you have ideas for a Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge, please let us know! In the meantime, check back weekly for a new challenge and make sure to join in the fun. We look forward to hearing about how you do with the challenges.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find everything you needed to learn in ONE place?

Get the benefit of advice, brainstorms and business shortcuts from global business consultants and coaches, who are bringing their ‘best game’ to the table.  There are 20 experts lined up to help you fire up your business – and reclaim your life – in 2012.  Seekers of organization and productivity wisdom can go to Fire Up Your Biz and Enrich Your Life  and sign up free to hear over 20 global experts share specific strategies and tactics that helped them gain control and purpuse in their business.

Thanks to to organizer of Fire Up Your Biz – Enrich Your Life, Stephanie Calahan, starting on January 18th, you can listen in on interviews with 3 experts a week for 6 weeks.  You can listen to our own Debbie Rosemont discuss productive meeting techniques on January 25th in We’ve Got to Stop Meeting Like This: How To Run Meetings That Actually Get Things Done!  Each interview will deliver practical, actionable strategy and tips.  You can join in on one call or all of them!  The more you listen in, the more you will learn…and, if you attend live, you just may win a great business boosting prize.

Join us for this amazing interview series and you will:

Fire up your personal performance

Unleash your profit potential

Discover new strategies to manage the demands of running your own business

Have a profitable business and more time to focus on what’s important to you

Simply Placed is honored to have been asked to serve as a Featured Expert for this series. We look forward to sharing valuable information to help you have more productive meetings. In addition, we look foward to listening in on the other expert calls, where we don’t doubt we’ll learn and benefit as well.

Join us, won’t you?

This year, we’re sharing our tips on goal setting success for New Year’s Resolutions. This is the sixth and final post in our series. So far we’ve posted tips for rewarding yourself, visualizing success ,  focusing on goals that are important to you, sharing your goal to gain accountability and staying positive.  Today’s topic is keeping your goals SMART.

Tip #6 Make it SMART – each goal you set needs to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time Sensitive.

• Specific: Your goals should be as specific and detailed as possible. For example, saying that you want to work on your marriage is too general. However, stating that you will hire a babysitter for each Saturday night to go on a weekly date with your spouse is more concrete and specific.
• Measurable: Write your goal so that it can be measured and tracked. If you’d like to save money for a specific purchase, state that you’d like to set aside a certain dollar amount per month, for the next X months in order to afford the new purchase. Or, instead of saying, “I’d like to lose weight”, a measurable goal could be stated as, “I’d like to lose 1 pound per week for the next 15 weeks”.
• Attainable: If you set a challenging goal, break it down into smaller pieces to realize and celebrate success more often. Don’t vow to get your home completely organized in one weekend. Focus on one area each week. Declutter for 15 minutes each day. (Visit our Facebook Page or search this blog for a number of decluttering projects that take 10-15 minutes a day – we’ve been posting a Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge for a couple of months now). Decide to enlist help where needed.
• Realistic: Make sure the goal is realistic for you, and you alone. This is not an area where you want to try to “keep up with the Jones’s (or even your friend, spouse, etc.). If you can barely jog around the block, it would be unreasonable to set out to run a marathon next month. Go ahead and challenge yourself to reach your potential, but set yourself up for success at the same time.
• Time Sensitive: Give yourself a deadline … don’t fall prey to “I’d like to do this someday”. Use start and end dates. You can even establish a “to do” timeline in between. Schedule time to work on your goal. Plan it on your calendar and treat that time as “appointment” time.

Are your New Year’s Resolutions or goals SMART?  How has our series affected your goal-setting strategy?  We want to hear from you!

Many of us are  lovers, keepers and collectors of books.   Have you  run out of room and are ready to let go of some?  We have three ideas that can help and you’ll finally clear out that bookshelf with our Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge!

1. Sell your books online.  All of us have experienced disappointment at a second-hand book store.  After you drive there and wait  for your book to be inspected for value you find that you are offered absolutely nothing for your treasured novel.  We’ve found a website that will save you the hassle and allow you to sell your old novels from home!  Cash4Books lets you see what your books are worth and what I like about this is you can check the ISBN numbers from home without having to lug your books somewhere.

They pay the shipping (you print the label they provide).  They also have an iPhone and android app where you can use a scanner and scan your bar codes for the ISBN number.  There is a good page with examples of types of books they look for and accept.  Here is a  “how to” video page, and an excellent FAQ page for beginners.

2. Sell your valuable collectible books.  A great starting point is the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA).  Do you have antique or collectible books you would rather sell than have sitting around your home collecting dust?  Maybe you know someone looking for a great resource for collectible books?   To get the association’s free directory of 466 booksellers, call (212) 944-8291 or visit them at www.abaa.org.

3. Donate your old books to the local library.  If you’re feeling charitable or maybe your favorite titles are not in demand with local second-hand book buyers, try donating to your local public library.  First, call the library to ensure they are accepting donations – sometimes their shelves are “full” and they turn them away for a period of time.

Time for the Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge!  RIGHT NOW spend ten minutes clearing out a book-stuffed book shelf.  Ten minutes is enough time to sort and organize your books into sell, donate, keep and collectible piles.  Heavy books can weigh down a shelf, keep your bookcase looking good and remove your unwanted books! 

If you have ideas for a Tuesday Ten Minute Toss Challenge, please let us know! In the meantime, check back weekly for a new challenge and make sure to join in the fun. We look forward to hearing about how you do with the challenges.

Take our challenge now and then tell us how you did!

This year, we’re sharing our tips on goal setting success for New Year’s Resolutions. This is the fifth post in our series. So far we’ve posted tips for rewarding yourself, visualizing success ,  focusing on goals that are important to you and  sharing your goals. Today’s topic is staying positive about your goals by removing the negative aspects and focusing on the solutions.

Tip #5 Stay Positive – Focus on the solution rather than on what you don’t want. The mind doesn’t translate words of negation, such as not, don’t, or stop, because it thinks in pictures. If you set a goal that “I will quit smoking,” it’s hard for your mind to see a picture of NOT smoking.  If you set a goal that “I allow myself to be a non-smoker,” you can picture being a non-smoker, as that’s something you can see — other people (or you) living a healthy life.   Create goals or make choices that the mind can visualize.

How do you picture your goals?  We want to hear about them!