Hi, everyone, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Danielle, and I'm a 20 year old college student. I found unclutterer last December, and have been reading the site and forums ever since. I finally decided to register, so I could post.
I've always been a fairly disorganized person, and I realized last semester that my habits were adding a lot of unneeded stress to my life. I started uncluttering my apartment in December, and got a lot of it done before I left to go spend Christmas with my family (I had only been living in this apartment since Mid-August, and my room and bathroom were the only things I decluttered since most of the living room/ kitchen stuff belongs to my three roomates.) However, when I got back in January, the semester got really busy really fast. On top of that, I got a really bad cold two weeks into the semester. I quickly discovered that my life wasn't organized well enough, as my systems fell apart when I got sick. I'm better now for the most part (still have a lingering cough, but I'm hoping it goes away soon, and I've finally gotten back on top of my schoolwork. Now, I'm going to try to start organizing more, and trying to develop better systems. I don't need to get rid of more stuff, besides taking a few bags still in the back of car to goodwill, which I'm planning to do on Sunday. I just need to organize the stuff I do have better and streamline my life more efficiently to try to keep on top of things. Here are the things I want to concentrate on right now:
1. Develop a cleaning Routine - When I lived a suite-style dorm last year, my roomates and I had a cleaning schedule that worked well. I don't have anything like that this year ( I have different roomates) and I'd like to set up a personal cleaning routine. I got an iPad for Christmas, and I've looked into getting a routine/ chores app to help me set up the routine/ remember to do it. I've looked at Home Routines, as it has good rrecommendations, but i really dont't if I want to spend that much on a routines app right now, as I'm a college student on a limited budget. Can anyone recommend a cheaper, hopefully free, app that can help me?
2. Organize my files better. I currently use a plastic, mobile file holder that fits my needs currently, because I don't have that many files. Howevere, this file holder sits across the room from my desk, which means that I have to get up to file stuff, which means that Papers get put into a stack instead of getting filed. On addition to moving this to the book shelf next to my desk, I also want to reorganize the files in it, to make it more efficient.
3. Organize my emails. I do have folders set up, but right now I only sort my emails into them every couple of month I also haven't cleaned out these folders, since I got my school email almost two years, save the folder that holds emails about classes, which I totally empty at the end of every semester. I know there are probably emails saved that I know longer need. I do have a few filters set up through outlook, but when I got my iPad and started using mail.app too, I found that the filters do not integrate well with the app. I discovered that microsoft exchange puts the email automatically into the folders, but mail.app doesn't download them unless I manually open these folders on the app, which I never do. I use mail.app as my main way to check email now, and this causes me not to get these emails until I open Microsoft outlook on my laptop, which may be several days after the email was sent. Therefore these filters will probably get deleted.
Sorry this post was so long! I usually don't talk this much.
