As I typed the words “Day 31 check in” yesterday on Facebook I couldn’t quite believe how fast this month, and the challenge, has sped by. It has been such fun to go through a daily detoxification step each day with all of you. I’ve been inspired by your ideas and your determination to complete an organizational task each day.

Better still, I feel like I’ve grown rich in added friendships.

I almost can’t believe I have to pick winners! If I had a million dollars, I’d give each and every one of you a grand prize for crossing the finish line! But alas…I have to keep playing the lottery a bit more to make that dream a reality!

So, without further ado…I used random.org to pick the following winners:

Grand Prize Winner

The grand prize is a fabulous Hoover Max Extract 60 Pressure Pro carpet cleaner. Hoover kindly sent me one last year to test and I now swear by it (I use it once a quarter on the most trafficked carpets in the house). My oldest son ground some pink slime he got at a birthday party into our brand new playroom carpet last summer – and even after it had dried, it was no match for the Hoover. So this is one machine I put my recommendation behind 1000%.

And the winner is: Heidi Foss

Well done!

Two Runner Up Prizes

We are awarding two runner up prizes – Hoover Presto 2-in-1 Cordless Stick Vacuums.

I personally have one of these that I keep out in the kitchen (hidden behind our high chair). My kids actually fight over who gets to “help” mommy vacuum. The stick vacuum is super light and yet powerful enough to get pretty much every bit of food my kids manage to throw on the floor. And the had vac is just always nice to have around for quick little jobs.

The first runner up winner is: Christy Olsen
The second runner up winner is: Cathy Gray

Congratulations!

Week 4 Winner

The winner of the $20 Walmart Gift Card is: Filomena Alves! Huzzah!

Well done to all who participated in the challenge. Whether you did the whole thing – or even just a few days – hopefully it helped you feel less daunted by organizational work and generally more buttoned up. We’d love to here what you thought of the challenge, so be sure to let us know in the comments below. And if you haven’t signed up for the February challenge yet – what are you waiting for?

Day 13 of our 31-day January GetButtonedUp Challenge was all about organizing spices. The problem most have with spices is that they lack an organizational structure for them, resulting (inevitably) in a big, hot jumbled mess.

A cluttered and disorganized spice shelf/drawer/bin wastes precious moments, which makes the entire meal prep process more stressful than it needs to be. It also is probably costing you money too; if you can’t find the spice you’re looking for, you’re more likely to buy duplicates. In fact one challenge participant admitted to having 3 bottles of cinnamon she didn’t even know about…

So what are the secrets to whipping a spice cabinet, or drawer, or basket, or…whatever into shape? There are really only two pieces to this puzzle: containment and arrangement.

Part I: Containment

Some people organize their spices in drawers, others in pantries, still others on cabinet shelves – or even along the back of a stove. No matter where you put them, you need a way to keep them from spreading out in a jumbled sprawl. Fortunately, there are a lot of ingenious ways to do just that.

An expandable spice drawer insert

I personally use one of these expandable spice drawer inserts in my kitchen and I love it. At $17.99 from Amazon.com, it is one of the best $20 I have ever spent.

A revolving spice rack
Whether you go with a specially made revolving spice rack, like this one from Pfaltzgraff, or a simple lazy susan, like Michelle does in the picture below, both make containing AND finding the spices you’re looking for much easier.

Plastic bins
Challenge participant, Elli, uses a simple plastic bin to great effect in her pantry. This is a wonderful option if you want to keep your spice jars from taking over precious pantry shelf real estate unnecessarily.

Other great options include wall-mounted spice racks, magnetic spice bins that you can keep on a fridge or even on a metal tray, or built in spice drawers (Sheila, yours made us jealous!).

Great ideas for organizing loose spices

Two of our challenge participants, interestingly both living outside the USofA, had loose spices to organize. Buying in bulk is a wonderful way to save significant amounts on spices – but it also poses an interesting organizational challenge.

Filomena cleverly recycled old fruit juice bottles as spice jars, which is a wonderfully inexpensive way to achieve a uniform look.

Joy also used recycled jars, although on a larger scale – think Folgers vs. apple juice. While not all the bottles she used were the same, they do have a useful degree of uniformity based on their relatively large size.

Other free upcycle/recycle ideas for containers include: mason jars, old jam jars, and baby food jars. Just be sure to go with jars that have a wide enough opening to fit in a tablespoon.

Another, albeit more expensive, option for containing loose and bulk spices that ensures uniformity is to purchase a set of jars.

The Quattro Stagioni Spice Jars available at The Container Store for about $2 each have a wonderful shape and mouths wide enough for a tablespoon.

Take your organizing one step further by creating labels for each one. Cut out a little round sticker for the top or a rectangular one for the front and write what’s inside with a sharpie. If you want each label to have the same shape, use a label template like this one we created. Print out on a sticker sheet and cut around the outlines.

Part II: Arranging them intelligently

To alphabetize or not to alphabetize, that is the question.

Fundamentally, it comes down to you and how your brain likes to categorize and organize. Personally, I’m a fan of organizing by type of cuisine. So I arrange the Indian curry spices together, the sweet baking spices together, and so on. But the bottom line is: whatever is more intuitive to you is what will work best. The one thing you can’t do is skip this step. Trust me, it’s the fastest route to spice perdition.

Cathy, a challenge participant keeps weekly spices on the lower shelf, large jars on the next shelf up and the ones she only uses occasionally up toward the top. Looks pretty darn organized, doesn’t it.

{feature photo via: Dav.I.Son – amazing tutorial on how to transform baby food jars into magnetic spic holders}

Tell us about your spices? Are they organized or a mess? If they’re buttoned up, what’s your system? If not – how much time (and money) do you think you waste because of it? Challenge participants – how long on average did you spend organizing your spices? Has it been worth the energy?

A few years ago, Disney Pixar released the movie Up. It’s a sweet little film about a rather crotchety old widower and a young scout who accidentally end up on an adventure together. Not long after they touch down in a far-off land they are greeted by a dog named Dug. He’s a loveable golden retriever who bounds affectionately into their arms and then shocks them both when he speaks English via a special collar translator worn around his neck. The only trouble is, he often interrupts what he’s saying mid-sentence, shouts “squirrel,” and points for a second or two.

In a lot of ways, we humans are a lot like cute, furry Dug. Only our “squirrels” are the bings and buzzes emanating from our digital devices. One minute we’re working productively on something, but the second our phone vibrates, we will drop everything and turn to it…squirrel!

These constant interruptions literally torpedo our productivity. It is estimated the average person wastes 2 hours/day on email, 40 minutes/day on Facebook, 12 minutes/day on Twitter, 10 minutes/day on LinkedIn – and an additional 96 minutes/day switching back and forth between tasks. That means all of our squirrel chasing is costing each of us about 22.5 hours in lost productivity a week. That’s a staggering amount!

Why are we “addicted” to our phones, email, and other e-communications?

There are two big reasons why we feel compelled to incessantly check our phones, emails, facebook pages, twitter accounts, and the like.

The first is because there is a powerful conditioning loop at work. Our digital devices often “reward” us with feelings of belonging and significance when we respond to them; that email from mom, the high-five from a boss, they make us feel good. These two emotions are paramount to humans. If we were rats, they would be our cheese. When a stimuli, like an email ping, is paired with a powerful reward and then delivered at unpredictable intervals, just as happens with our digital devices, we will literally become addicted to the behavior associated with getting the powerful reward. In this case that means we literally can’t resist the urge to check email or grab our phones when they beep at us.

The second reason we’re addicted is because of a little human trait social scientists call reciprocity, or the compulsion to respond in kind to others. It is a trait that enables individuals to make contributions to the larger social group without worrying they are losing out. We are all taught from a very young age to return favors, lest we be shunned as an ingrate. Guess what, it applies to communications too. One social scientist, Professor Robert Cialdini, actually conducted an experiment a few decades ago in which he sent holiday greeting cards to a few hundred people he chose at random from the AZ white pages. Low and behold, he was soon inundated with holiday cards from them, even though they had no idea who he was. You see, our compulsion to respond is hard-wired.

4 strategies for overcoming your compulsion

Although the pull to drop everything and respond is strong, we are not at the mercy of our digital devices. Here are four, relatively simple strategies for resisting their siren call.

1. Reduce the intrusiveness of the stimuli.

Since the stimuli trigger a conditioning loop most of us are unable to resist, one of the most effective things you can do is reduce the intrusiveness of the stimuli when you need to focus on something. That means, turning off all alerts, buzzes, dings, pop-ups that could distract you from your work at hand. If you have a Mac, you can also “hide” your dock while you are working on something, so you won’t see any visual indicators that you have mail. We recommend turning them off for good because you don’t ever really need to be at their mercy.

2. Remove the reward dispensers from your environment (temporarily).

There are programs, like Freedom, and Concentrate that enable you to lock yourself out of “rewarding” programs like email social media sites when you need to really focus on a task. The programs are $10 and $29 respectively, but worth their weight in gold. Using them elevates you from rat in a cage being conditioned by external forces to that of the scientist who is actually doing the conditioning.

3. Reward yourself for good behavior.

Use the powerful emotional rewards of significance and belonging to strengthen new, more productive behavior. For example, if you currently respond to every email, text, etc. the second it comes in, try rewarding yourself with a peek at those emails after you finish a task successfully.

4. Send fewer emails/texts and make what you do send brief and to the point.

Did you know that you can use the power of reciprocity to actually curtail the amount of email you receive? Consider this, Kim Davis, a woman we interviewed for our book Pretty Neat, tried a little experiment. She added a signature line to all of her emails that simply said, “Please keep our email boxes uncluttered, only reply all if it is critical everyone receives your reply.” She immediately noticed a drop in reply all clutter in her inbox. She also noticed others in her department, and then in other departments, adopting her signature line as well. In that spirit, if you send fewer emails, you will receive fewer emails. And if you make a point of sending brief, concise emails, you are more likely to get that same kind of missive in return. Make reciprocity work for you, not against you.

Do you have these four areas buttoned up? If not, which of these areas do you struggle with? Have you ever tried a program like Concentrate or Freedom?

The answer is: it doesn’t matter as long as it is functional!

Nonetheless, here are some very simple and chic options from some of the people who have checked in so far today.

I love, love Jen’s milk glass display that doubles as a key drop.

Eileen scored a winner on Craigslist with this Pottery Barn classic. Loving the lack of junk mail too!

These “domestic pirates” sure know how to put a mail station & key drop together. That dish is beautiful – looks like a cross between a shell and a sculpture.

One basket for collecting mail, another for dumping keys. What’s not to love about Dana’s setup?

Cathy gets a gold star for adding an emergency planning twist to her key drop. Can you spot the emergency gas shut off key?

Why not use a pretty tumbler as a key drop? Looks good from here!

Bonnie’s wine cork board is neat, isn’t it? I want one…

I love how Tiffany’s mail drop is literally the first thing you hit on your way in from the garage! Without a mail sorter there, I’ll bet it ends up all over that side area next to the steps.

Finally, Filomena keeps things very simple & chic. I wonder if the smaller mail basket is actually better because it forces you to deal with the clutter before it becomes an overwhelming pile… Is the junk mail as much a problem in Portugal as it is in the USA?

Last night we got an interesting question from Shirley on Facebook:

Does anyone have any interesting and crafty ideas for me collecting “board” [rent] from my kids and marking it off weekly…I thought of an envelope with a calendar on it to mark off…but thats as far as I got.

I trolled Pinterest a bit for ideas, and thought these options looked pretty interesting.

You could create a custom clipboard using Wallies chalkboard stickers to record incoming payments. You could affix hooks at the bottom of the board and hang envelopes off of the bottom – one for each child. If you want, you could have a clipboard for each child and then arrange them in a pretty way on the wall.

Another Facebook reader suggested looking at Advent calendars, which I did. When I saw this clothespin-based one, I thought it could also be a neat way to collect the rent. All you would need is one pin for each week of the month. You would probably also want to have a chart or checklist above the pinboard to note payments due and received.

Here’s a pinboard with a string stapled on for clothespins

And another with binder clips on strings.

What do you think? Do you have any good ideas for Shirley?

It’s exciting to see some of the images of cleaned out mailboxes coming our way on day 2 of the #GetButtonedUp Challenge.

Here are a few to inspire you!

Sarah Simply Me’s clean inbox

Dana’s lovely basket brilliantly hiding functional, but ugly, metal mail slots

Bonnie’s binder system for mail

Whitney’s empty inbox

Janice’s ingenious pinboard solution

The Mom Maven’s mail station

Jessica’s desktop before & after (she doesn’t have any junk mail so she cleaned up her desktop instead)

Tiffany’s full bins

Jen’s shredded junk mail

Terri’s pile before…

…and after!

I think Terri wins the gold star today! That was quite a job.

We’re thrilled to share the news that the amazing Amy Suardi, our savings expert, has a makeover series on TLC! In the series she works with a variety of families facing different savings challenges. As always, she’s warm, helpful and full of insightful tips.

Here’s her latest video – helping a growing family reign in their weekly spending.

We highly recommend following Amy’s series over on TLC.

Get Organized in 2012

Hoping to turn over a new, organized leaf in the New Year? If so we’re excited for you and here to help. We have just put the finishing touches on our first ever Get Buttoned Up Challenge. What is it exactly? Well, it’s one part “get organized boot camp,” one part cheerleading squad, and best of all, a serious accountability system that will ensure you follow through on your good intention.

How the January #GetButtonedUp Challenge Will Work

Each day during the month of January we have a specific organizational task for you to complete. Download 31 day calendar by clicking on the link below.

Get Buttoned Up Challenge – January

When you complete the task, let the buttoned up team know your status by commenting on the Facebook check-in post for that day and either email or Tweet the picture of your completed task. Each week participants who successfully complete all 7 of their daily tasks will be entered into a drawing for a prize.

We’ll also enter anyone who has completed all 31 days of the challenge successfully into a grand prize drawing. All winners will be selected using random.org.

Participating in the #GetButtonedUp Challenge is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Let us know you’re in by commenting on this post below. Be sure to tell us your Facebook name in your comment!
2. Letting us know you completed your daily task by commenting on the Facebook GetButtonedUp Challenge Check-In post each day
3. Sending a picture of your completed task to Sarah – via email sarah @ getbuttonedup dot com OR via TwitPic to @SarahButtonedUp & using the #getbuttonedup hashtag.

Weekly prizes will be awarded to a participant who has completed all of the previous week’s tasks successfully and let us know by checking in on Facebook and with pictures.

Weekly & Grand Prizes

Week 1 Prize: Signed copy of Pretty Neat
Week 2 Prize: Weekly.agenda + Greetings.stash
Week 3 Prize: $20 Target Gift Card
Week 4 Prize: $20 Walmart Gift Card
Grand Prize: Hoover Max Extract 60 Pressure Pro
2 Runner Up Grand Prizes: Hoover Presto 2-in-1 Cordless Stick Vacuum

Join In By Commenting Below!

NOTE: All are welcome to join in the challenge, but all prizes except Buttoned Up products are for US participants only.

]]> http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/22/join-the-january-getbuttonedup-challenge/feed/ 197 http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/19/geunius-idea-a-failure-wall/ http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/19/geunius-idea-a-failure-wall/#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:32:58 +0000 Sarah http://getbuttonedup.com/?p=18421

Last week I stumbled upon a wonderful post on Harvard Business Review blogs (yes, I am a giant nerd) titled: Why I Hire People Who Fail.

In the post the author reminded readers of something we all know to be true – that failures teach us more than successes because we are forced to look back and figure out exactly what happened. He then explained how he created a wall for memorializing failures, and the lessons learned from them, in his office conference room.



It got me thinking.

As a parent really want to teach my kids to embrace failure as one of life’s greatest teachers. My oldest is a bit of a perfectionist, a trait that he probably inherited from me. I didn’t really grasp the potential of failure to teach until I was well into adulthood. I grew up sweeping my failures under the carpet with embarrassment and shame. I don’t want my children to waste precious learning opportunities doing what I did.

Plus I want them to understand the concept of imperfection to their toes – and embrace it wholeheartedly.

So I am thinking of creating a little failure wall of our own at home too. A place where dad, mom, and eventually the boys, can post our failures publicly and share the hard-earned wisdom gained from the experience. It’s a powerful visual reminder that success comes from picking yourself up after you fall and try, try, trying again.



{Brilliant #fail main image via: 1x.com/photos}

I’m curious what you think about this idea. Let me know if you would ever have the courage to do it at work…or at home.

]]> http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/19/geunius-idea-a-failure-wall/feed/ 6 http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/02/cool-find-instagram-photo-book/ http://getbuttonedup.com/2011/12/02/cool-find-instagram-photo-book/#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:00:26 +0000 Sarah http://getbuttonedup.com/?p=18202

Ever wonder what on earth to do with all of those instagram photos you take with your iPhone?

Me too. I have a few hundred lurking somewhere in the hard drive space on my phone. Their mostly candid snapshots I’ve taken while out and about with my phone, like this one of my oldest son in absolute heaven sitting in a real fire engine:


Or this adorable series of my littlest polar bear playing in the melting snow:


I love scrolling through them on my phone when I’m standing in line or waiting around. But it made me a little sad that these snapshots of random cuteness seemed destined to a digital existence only.

Now a neat little company called Keepsy makes it easy to actually DO something with all of those instagrams on your phone. With a few mouse clicks you can create a beautiful, glossy album of your favorite instagrams very inexpensively (starting at $30).

Here’s a little video from their site so you can see more.


This would make a great Holiday gift if you’re scratching your head & wondering what to get a spouse, roommate, or even a parent…

I think this is pretty neat. What do you think?

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