Picture Perfect Folders

I live in four main places. 

     1. My Apartment

     2. My Job

     3. The commons at school 

     4. My phone

Yes, it's a little silly to think you live in a phone, but in reality, I always have it with me and I manage to spend a good chunk of my time there as well, so theoretically, yes, I live in the little plastic box next to me. 

I will be the first to admit I haven't moved into the iPhone world yet. I'm not sure that I ever will. However, even though I don't have an iPhone, I still want to keep my Android Galaxy S III pretty organized, so I can find things on the go. 

The one area of my phone that I could never figure out how to de-clutter a little bit was my photo library. It was a cluttered mess of downloads, images I had taken, photos from my previous phones and my Instagram photos. I always cringed a little when I had to go in and search for a specific picture. 

That is until one day I found Android updated their software and included this nifty little tool in photo library that allows you to create folders and move pictures to whichever folder you would like. 

AMAZING!

Here's how you do it. 

1. Go to your photo gallery
2. Tap a folder where the picture you would like to move is located 
3. Hold your finger on the specific picture you would like to move. A small green check mark will show up in the right hand corner
4. Hold down on the same picture again until the picture shrinks. You now have the ability to move it to whichever folder you would like! 

To create a folder:

The create-a-folder button is on the first page of photo gallery. in the upper right hand corner there is an icon of a folder with a little plus sign in the left hand corner of the folder, this allows you to create and name a new folder. 

How easy was that?! Way to go Android!

Where's All My Money Going?

For a college student, I make fairly decent money. Well, at least that is what my pay stubs say every two weeks when I pick them up from my employer. Sometimes I just stare at the number wondering where in the world all that money could have gone. Did I really go out to eat that much? How many tanks of gas did I need to put in my car? Should I have extreme couponed a little bit more? 

Needless to say, I realized I needed to take a little bit better look at where I was spending money the most. If I wanted to be in control of my life, I needed to be in control of my finances a little bit better than what I was doing. 

What's an easy way to do that, though? How can I find out where all my money is going?

A weekly task I had already been taking part in was a weekly food diary to document what I was eating and where I was eating the most. 

For more information about the Food Diary, check out the blog post on the Food Diary. It'll be helpful for the rest of this blog post!

In the same section where you write down the foods you are eating each day, leave a little section to tally up a dollar amount for what you spent money on. It can be incredibly eye opening to see what items you spend the most money on. 

After two weeks of writing down what I was spending money on, I came to some conclusions. 

1. I put roughly $40 of gas in my car every two weeks. Maybe I should cut back on driving when I can!

2. I go out to eat at least 3 times a week at fast food restaurants. The same amount of money (roughly $30) could be spent on fresh, healthy foods from a grocery store and would last twice as long.

3. I spend an average of $15 on Twix every week. Can you say addicted? Because I can. I spend a lot of money on Twix candy bars. Roughly $60 a month actually. That's more than a whole tank of gas! My new goal is to cut back to a Twix candy bar every few weeks, rather than once or twice every day. 

After looking at what I was spending my money on, I figured out areas I could cut back on and set a weekly budget of $30 total for gas, groceries and extras. It's hard starting out, but thinking of all the money I might have left over is a very motivating influence. 

I suggest you try it out too! See where your money is going! Learning things about yourself can be insightful and kind of fun! 

Getting Back To Normal After A Vacation

Vacation is for spending much deserved relaxing time doing whatever one's heart desires. If a vacation is successful, it can feel a lot like the ultimate bliss. However, vacations, sadly, do not last forever and getting back into the swing of reality can be difficult, very difficult.

Here's the trick to making the transition back a little bit easier. 

I recommend having a day of recovery. Now before you say I'm on the crazy train for suggesting cutting vacation a day short, don't think of it as a day short of vacation, but rather as a day-after-vacation-lazy-day.

For example, if you have to go back to work on Monday, take Sunday as a recovery day. Don't fill it with seeing your coworkers, neighbors or friends, you can see them tomorrow. Just take some time to yourself. I make my recovery days movie days. What better way to spend a day than to catch up on all the movies you've missed out on. Need to find a Redbox to rent movies? Redbox it!

Also, make sure you try to eat regularly and get up close to the time you normally would. This helps your body get back into the normal routine.

This past week was my vacation week, so Sunday will be a great lazy-movie day for me.


By the time Monday morning rolls around, you'll be a little bit more ready to take on reality.

That doesn't mean you can't start dreaming for the next vacation though! :) 

Take a Look At Your Diet

It is a scary moment when you open your fridge and you realize you can't remember where the heck all your food went. One tip for this is to simply write down what you eat every day. There are multiple benefits to this food diary approach and you never know, it might be pretty eye opening to find out just what you're all eating! 

So what is the motivation to use a food diary, besides to monitor your refrigerator? One of the reason's I use a food diary is to monitor my gluten intolerance. For some people, like myself, there are certain foods you just can't eat. If you're first starting the process of finding out just what foods those are, again like me, having a food diary can help pin point what foods you're body can't use. 

A few other reasons to use a food diary: 

• Find out how much you're eating a week! Make sure it's a healthy amount, not too much or not too little. 
• Finding out where you can add some variety to your diet.
• Analyze your eating times. It can be really eye opening to find out when you eat during the day. Maybe there's some links between eating time and productivity?

But there are so many more reasons! You just have to find out what your reason is. Use it as a motivation to get where you want to be in your healthy lifestyle. 

It's easy to start a food diary, too. First of all, my recommendation is to start the food diary in your handy dandy planner that we talked about a few blog posts ago. This way you don't have to have multiple notebooks that you carry around with you throughout the day. If your planner is always with you, then you'll never have to forget to write down what you have. 

The food diary lay out:

1. Write the time when you eat. This can come in handy if you're analyzing your food eating patterns. 

2. Write down what it is that you're eating. Even if it's just a candy bar

3. Keep your morning, afternoon and night meals separated out. I recommend writing them in different colors or keeping a line between intervals of the day (ex: 6 am - 12 pm, 12 pm - 6 pm, 6 pm - 12 am, 12 am - 6 am)

4. At the end of the week, tally it up. Revisit what you ate and evaluate your weekly diet.

To evaluate, ask yourself some questions:

     What are you eating? 

     Are there things you can cut out or are there certain food groups you should be eating more of? 

     How much is healthy and how much is unhealthy?

     What do you want to change about it?

My challenge for you this week: Take a go at it. Try writing in your food diary for a week and see what revelations you might find from your eating habits. Share your experience with me on Twitter at @life_ceo. 

You've Got Mail!

In this crazy digital world, it can be incredibly hard to keep your online presence organized. People have multiple social media networks, multiple virtual address books, and not to mention all the fluffy pictures and videos that we tag and save on our cloud space.

I have witnessed, as I am sure many of you have, the horrifying email inbox that has 3,045 some unread emails and countless pages of read emails that have long been forgotten. The average email inbox has become the digital black hole where information is lost. It can seem impossible to organize your email, but alas, there is in fact a way with Google's Gmail!

Gmail is Google's prodigy and it runs just as clean as Google's search engine. If haven't already transferred your email over to Gmail, I definitely recommend it. Not only is Gmail very easy to learn, but it can be very easy to transfer current contacts and emails over to your Gmail account. The compatibility with other email sources is also pristine. If you use Outlook, it can be very easy to access your Gmail account through your Outlook system. For more information on this merger, About.com has a great step by step process of setting up everything.

OK, back to organizing. One of the best settings in Gmail happens to be the ultimate online organization tool. Gmail has the power to automatically filter your incoming emails into separate folders based on folder topics of your choice.

Here is how to set up filters in Gmail

1. On the Inbox page in the right hand corner by your name, there is a drop down button that allows you to choose your theme, settings, or access help. We want the settings button.









2. The settings tab gives you a lot of options to chose from. We want the filters tab.


3. At the very bottom of the filters page is the "create a new filter" button. This is where you create the filters.

4. Creating filters is completely personalized. You can choose if you want to filter by email address, who it was to, keywords or subject titles

5. After you have chosen the source of your filter, you chose where to send it to. These options include sending it to a folder (recommended), automatically read and many more.








6. Finally, after you create your filter it is stored in the filter gallery. This is where you can edit, export and delete all the filters you have created.

Filters in Gmail are a very useful tool to keep any busy inbox organized. Creating folders that automatically receive specific emails can make sure important information never goes to the email graveyard.

Pinterest Perfect: No Longer a Procrastination Passtime

Post Disclosure: This post may cause severe motivation loss in certain individuals who are susceptible to social media addictions. Symptoms may include time loss, lack of focus, motivation out the window and finger cramping due to scrolling threw endless pinned images. Yes, that's right, Pinterest. An endless sea of how-to's, organizations, fashion advice, social causes, cooking ideas and much, much more.

Why is Pinterest so cool?











According to the Pinterest website, "Pinterest is a tool for collecting and organizing the things that inspire you." The ingenuity of Pinterest lies in the pinning power. First of all, you can customize the pins that come up on your home page are all customized to the topics you linked as most related to you. This means that everything should be of interest to you. The images that come up are endless. You could literally scroll through your home feed for hours and still not run out of things to look at. However, if you do have a new, or more specific, subject that you want to look up you can use the search bar to specific topics.

Once you've found some images that you enjoy, instead of having to remember where they were or who pinned them, you can pin them to your own "boards" on your personal profile. This gives people a way personalize their experience by only pinning the pins they like. Plus, you can like your friends' boards or find other people to follow.















OK, so how can we turn this from a procrastination pass time? Pinterest is a great forum to share creativity and there are multiple boards everywhere that share how to organize life! Imagine that! A few examples of great boards all about organization are:

• Easy Peasy Living
• Get Organized with Bridges
• All Together Now Organization Services

These are usually ordinary people or business that are sharing their organization tools with everyone else. You also can just search for "organization" and individual pins will come up for you to pin to your organization board. 

Have a specific need for organization?

There are pins that are designated to "Automobile organization", "Business Organization", "Desktop Organization" and many others. Anything you could be looking for is somewhere in the Pinterest universe. 

What are you waiting for? Start pinning! 

Planning the Planner

I am terrified for when I am in a job that requires me to attend multiple events, meetings, interviews, lunches, teleconferences and returned phone calls while simultaneously finishing projects, email correspondences, research, presentations and the plans of all the events I have to attend. Worst part? I tend to be a pretty forgetful person. Not good. However, there is a silver lining to my forgetfulness. I, at least, recognize my forgetfulness, so I have had to try to figure out the best ways to keep myself organized with all the things I have to do during the week.

*Drum Roll* In walks my personal life saver: the planner! 

I will admit I am a kook about my planner, but it really does work. Plus, there are planners free online and paper planners tend to be pretty cheap. 

As society is evolving into the total-tech absorbed society it is, many people have started putting their planners online. Google Calendar has a great program for this. It allows you to share your calendar with your coworkers, create and share events and best of all it is linked with your email account, so if you set up a meeting through email you can automatically make it an event on your calendar. There's even a mobile app to take it on the go. A+ for organization!

Here's an easy step by step tutorial from Google on how to use Google Calendar. Definitely worth a read. https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/2465776?hl=en

Unfortunately, I am awful at remembering to add things to my digital calendars. I hardly ever check them, because I have to log on and wait for it to load. Although it can be really fast, I have to rely in the connection of the Internet to be able to use this and I don't always have access to Wi-Fi when I need it. Therefore, I am pro-stone age planner. Sometimes there's nothing better than good ol' pen and paper. You can even use digitally inspired organization tools to keep the paper planner just as organized. 

•  Use different colored high lighters or pens to keep events separate. I recommend the use of different colored pens, because highlighting can get a little out of hand and run together to create this murky brown color that isn't useful. 
• Buy a planner that has time separation lines within your paper planner to keep every hour of your day scheduled out. 
• Tab specific events that are important or projects you need to remember. You can buy little Sticky Notes at Wal-mart for incredibly cheap. Put the Sticky Note at the edge of your planner to draw attention to it. This also helps minimize the Sticky Notes that can end up covering your computer, desk or wall. 
• Make yourself some happy "notes" to keep your spirits high. 

It doesn't matter which planner, digital or paper, you decide to use. Either way the most important part of having a planner is that you use it regularly and religiously. You have to make sure you are always adding everything that needs to get done as soon as you can get to it, otherwise it isn't worth it. You won't believe just how much of a difference planning your day can make on your stress level. Think of it as a mini head massage every time you look at it. 

Plan Desperate

Life is a fickle non-cycle. Yes, non-cycle. Despite the patterns of getting up, going to work and eventually going to bed, life is anything but routine. We create plans, but just when things are going down the predicted path, life has to throw in some curves to keep things "exciting". Being in control is often a feeling that gets lost amongst these curves. When plan A fails, it is often followed by plan B, plan C and finally plan Desperate. We have all been to plan Desperate way to often. The trick is to find the small moments of clarity amid the chaos. 

The beautiful thing about clarity is that it is different for everyone. For me, organization is my clarity. Planning hardly ever works out. I try to make sure the rest of my life is organized enough that when the plan changes, I can still pick everything up and keep moving on. Don't get me wrong, I still lose my keys every morning, I couldn't tell you where my work schedule went after moving to a new apartment this past weekend and I hardly ever know where any of my hair ties are. Organization is not a fool proof plan. However, with a little work and a little practice, even the most inexperienced organizer can become a pro.

We can easily relate life to a new business. We have to help the business grow in order for it to be successful. Organization is one tool that can help us feel as though we are not actually floundering in the waves of change that constantly surround us. With some helpful tips and a little bit of organization, it is easy to begin your self entrepreneurship. 

Take control. Be the CEO.

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The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.Albert Ellis