Get Organized

It's over for another year!

Wild and woolly or sane and sedate, we've passed through the holiday season and into a new year. Breath caught, it's time to debrief.

You know debriefing, right? The astronauts do it, spies do it, pilots do it: a measured after-the fact evaluation of the mission or flight.

Smart holiday planners should do it, too--because taking time now to note what worked, what didn't will be a road map to a more organized Christmas next year. Here's how:

Christmas magazines and catalogs are fabulous resources for seasonal decorating, gift ideas, and Christmas recipes—but en masse, they can become too much of a good thing.

When the piles avalanche from every side table, finding an article or a recipe that caught your eye a few weeks ago can be an impossible job.

How do you keep all that good information without being crushed by stacks or drowning in paper? Answer: a set of tear files.

We’ve all experienced this seasonal panic: it's the night of the office holiday party and a spouse’s good white shirt has gone missing!

Calm the chaos with a pre-holiday wardrobe check. Assessing the State of the Closet for all family members before the holiday begins means never having to say, "It's in the wash!"

To sort out whether each family member has well-fitting and appropriate holiday-season clothing, use a lined blank page in the Christmas planner, or print a free Wardrobe Planner form from our Forms Library.

Add a name for each family member to the form, click it into the Christmas Notebook, then check the calendar to focus on the clothing needs the season will bring.

For many families, the Christmas season causes more than usual chaos on the home front.

Do you shove stacks of mail and magazines into dark closets to hide them from drop-in visitors? Does your dinnertime schedule fall off the rails when faced with multiple evening rehearsals?

Does Mount Washmore raise itself to new heights in the laundry room, only to be scaled in panic an hour before the Nativity play?

Forewarned is forearmed! A simple housework plan--and family cooperation--will keep things humming at home, holiday or not!

Built upon the concept of the Magic Minimum, this rock-bottom list of must-do chores can keep life at home afloat, even during busy times.

Coupled with accountability in the form of a chore checklist, a housework plan is the secret to holiday sanity, even during the busiest days of December.

This weekend's furniture ads are hard to avoid when you browse the Sunday paper--and they're symptoms of a serious holiday disorder: Pre-Holiday House Fever! Have you come down with it?

Look around the house. Is your temperature rising as you see stained carpets, smudged switch plates and faded window coverings? Gotcha!

With Christmas on the horizon, it's tempting to want to dive right in to a long list of home improvements. Stop! Wait! Biting off more than you can chew on the home front is a sure-fire recipe for holiday stress.

How to avoid going overboard with pre-holiday home improvements? Try this Holiday Home Spruce-Up exercise! It'll cut the chore list to the seasonal sweet spot: those do-able, achievable projects that will give the house a seasonal lift--without making you lose your mind.