30-Day Persistence Challenge: Speaking of organizing--taxes

Monday, June shared how important persistence is in maintaining an organizational system. I thought now would be a good time to piggy-back off that and talk about taxes.

Yes, taxes.

I'm not talking today about how to pay them or how to save for them. Today, I want to talk about how to organize for them. This is a questions coaching clients often ask and something all freelancers have to deal with. The good news is, if we create a system and persist in using it, tax time will take less time, and, while you may still feel panicky and a little queasy, you'll feel some calm and sanity underneath that.

Creating a System

So, start with this:

• 23 manilla folders
• A marker
• Some kind of storage device: A filing cabinet is my preferred solution (you don't have to look at the files every day and I already had one), but you can also use an accordian file, a hard-side lock box or a simple pair of book ends on a shelf.
  
• Your receipts for so far this year.

Now label the files. One each for:

• Paid Invoices (you'll put your stubs in here)
  
• Accounting
• Bank charges
• Car/truck rental
• Continuing education
• Dues/organization memberships
• Health insurance
• Internet costs
• Mileage
  
• Office expenses
• Other insurance
• Other interest
• Parking/tolls
• Postage
• Printing
• Publications
• Rent/mortgage
• Repairs
• Taxes
• Telephone
• Total meals/entertainment (business related, natch)
• Travel
• Web design/hosting

Your exact categories may differ. If you, like I, don't have a car, then you'll have a category for public transportation instead of mileage. This is just to prompt your thinking. Almost anything you buy for your business is deductible. One of the few exceptions is work clothes. Sure, you may work most days in your bunny slippers and robe, but that doesn't mean the slacks and blazers you buy for work meetings can be deducted. As someone I interviewed once said, "If you can wear it in public, you can't deduct it." It doesn't matter if you want to wear those clothes on your own time.

Next, go through your receipts so far this year and start sorting. Believe me, future you will thank you for having done this now. Add a note onto gas receipts and toll receipts for where you were going. On meal receipts, write who you met with and what you talked about. Then stick them in the folder and forget them.

The Persistence Part

So how do you keep up with it? Here are a few ideas.

Create a way station.
I don't file receipts every day. But having the files at the ready makes dealing with them easier. I keep them--and a bunch of other stuff I don't want to look at every day--in the bottom tray of a trio of clear plastic stackable trays. As I write this, It's bulging with articles to scan, receipts, old article files, etc.

When I have a spare minute, I can grab a handful of papers and file them away. I don't do it all at once. I don't spend 50 minutes or three hours on it. Little and often is my motto.

Place the piles where you can see them.
I hate looking at those ugly bulging piles. If I put the trays elsewhere, chances are, those piles would lay around much, much longer than they do now.

File while you talk.
Sometimes, I'll be on the phone with a friend or with a family member who calls during work hours--I know, poor discipline--and I'll take that time to put a few things away. Or I'll shred docs that need shredding.

The Payoff

Come the beginning of the year, I do something very simple. I sit down with the files and a calculator and I write the amount and date of each receipt on the outside of the file folder. Then, I tally it all up. Takes a few minutes while watching TV at night and I have my total spending. Score.

How about you? How do you do it?

Photo by D'Arcy Norman.

30-Day Organizing Challenge: Day 14

Today's goal: Skip the mistakes.

Have you ever noticed that your great organizing ambitions fizzle after a day? It might be because you've been too ambitious, too perfectionistic [Ed. note: Guilty!], or not intuitive enough. Today, we have a new guest post, from professional organizer Janine Adams, owner of Peace of Mind Organizing and president of the St. Louis, Missouri, chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers. She specializes in helping those of us who are chronically disorganized and also blogs on organizing on her own site, so be sure to check it out. Questions for her? Comment below and I'll get them to her.

We all make mistakes. Getting organized isn’t a precise exercise and there are lots of ways to approach it. But there are some things people tend to do that will actually undermine their efforts. See if any of these ring a bell:

Mistake #1: Storing things far away from where you use them.

Organizing systems need to be simple and convenient. Store things where you use them. The more steps it takes to put something away, the less likely it is to get put away.

Mistake #2: Buying organizing products before weeding stuff out.

For lots of people, the most fun part of organizing is going to The Container Store (or equivalent) and picking out products. That’s great, but wait to do it until you’ve after you’ve purged your stuff, so that you know what you need. Most of my clients have lots of bins and baskets before I ever get there. And they still have clutter. Save money by buying exactly what you need and nothing more.

Mistake #3: Not paying attention to your piles.

If you have stuff that piles up in a certain place on a consistent basis, maybe you need to use that particular spot for storage. A pile can become perfectly acceptable if you store it in a pretty container.

For example, my husband leaves the dogs’ leashes on the table by the front door, rather than crossing the room to put them away. (I clearly had made Mistake #1 when deciding to store the dog leashes across the room from the door.) The pile of leashes was unsightly. I put a cloth-lined basket under the pile and now it’s an acceptable storage system. If you’re consistently leaving things in a certain place, there’s usually a reason and it’s usually convenience. Rather than fighting it, make it work for you.

Mistake #4: Delaying decisions.

Clutter is nothing but delayed decisions. Don’t pick up a piece of paper and put it right back down because you can’t decide what to do with it. Instead, decide to decide. Make that decision and then act on it. Get into the habit of making decisions about your stuff and you’ll keep clutter at bay.

Mistake #5: Trying to be perfect.

It’s kind of ironic that perfectionism can lead to clutter, but I’ve seen it over and over. Perfectionists don’t want to start the organizing process until they know exactly how they’re going to do it. They feel the need to know what systems they’ll put into place before they even start the process. While the perfectionist waits for the perfect system to materialize, the clutter accumulates. And overwhelm sets in. Rather than striving to be perfectly organized, I encourage you to try to be just organized enough so that you can find what you need without undue stress.

Life is messy; don’t try to make it perfect.

[Ed. note: Man, I feel called out! Janine, you nailed me! Perfectionist, unrealistic organizing plans, etc. But there is one place where I feel like I've made progress:

Today, I was at Bed, Bath and Beyond with my girlfriend, who is going to let me organize her room as my Christmas present this year, and she asked, "What do you think we'll need to buy? What will we need to spend?" I replied that I thought first we needed to figure out what to keep, then we could figure out what to buy.

There seems to be hope for me yet!

What about you? Which of these mistakes do you make regularly? Which have you learned to stop doing?]

Serenity Tip: Spring cleaning

First, an apology. What can I say? I got bogged down with work. And if I've learned anything from tracking my time, it's that prioritizing is important. So I prioritized other things. But I've been thinking about this blog this whole time.

So! Now for the fun part:

Do you need to do some spring cleaning?

You may be asking, How is this fun?

Well, I've written here before about how clutter can steal your serenity before. Here are the two main ways:

* By clouding your clarity about your work (Where's that article I printed out again? Where are my notes? I know I wrote that person's phone number down somewhere...)
* By potentially helping you lose bills and get behind in payments. As we all know, money stress will beat the serenity out of us every time.

It's all about focusing on what you can't control instead of what you can.

So try these steps for your business spring cleaning:

* Scan in old contracts and important documents from previous clients.
* SHRED those papers and recycle the file folders for future use.
* Go through old files and make a list of potential story ideas (if you're a freelance writer, like me) or potential new markets for your business.
* Save what you need from those old papers (anything that will be useful in future marketing) and recycle or shred the rest.
* Move tax documents from 2004 and before into files marked "Destroy on XXXX." Those XXXs represent five years after the tax year. That's, I believe, the statute of limitations on audits.
* OR, scan all your tax docs into your computer and shred the papers.

And finally:

* BACK UP all those newly scanned files. Once they're on your external drive, you can delete them from your computer's hard drive to save space.

You can also use this time to go through all old material:

* Do you really need all those books you bought over the past five years? Some are probably for issues or technology that's obsolete.
* Do you have office furniture that's broken and stashed in the corner? Look up your local hauling company or list the stuff on FreeCycle.
* Sell the stuff that's good enough to sell.
* If you've replaced computer equipment in the past year, chances are you have an old CRT monitor laying around. In many areas you can recycle those, too.

Have I inspired you? What's one thing you can do to toss out the old this spring?

Serenity Tip: Email Time

So yesterday we talked about why email might be blocking your serenity.

Today, let's talk about one way to put email in its place.

There's a new entry in my daily to-do list. This one says: "Email."

Here's how it works:

Every morning around 9 a.m., I got through the emails from yesterday and today (and, since I have a backlog of lots of emails, a week's worth of ancient emails). It's like de-cluttering:

* Look at every single email.
* Ask yourself: Do I need this? Do I need to respond to this? Can I throw it away?
* Respond to it/delete it/file it right away.

In doing this, I found old emails from prospective clients sitting in my inbox to which I could reply and remind them of my presence, filed away emails from old sources and remembered the marketing pitches that I needed to reslant and resend.

And, by the end of the half-hour, I didn't have any niggling emails hanging over my head: No guilt about unreturned emails, forgotten requests, etc. It freed me from constantly checking my email because I knew everything had been dealt with. And with that sense came the belief that I could even close my email program for a few hours and get work done.

Talk about serenity!

Has this worked for you? What are your other email troubles?