Grouping, labeling, sorting, removing, ordering and arranging our precious treasures, at home or work, is an ongoing process or an awful mess.

The reality of it's better to practice "staying" organized than "getting" organized, especially if you want to avoid that overwhelming feeling you get as you "step up" into your child's bedroom, spend 15 minutes trying to locate an operational pen from under the mountain of paperwork on your desk or lose 30 minutes trying to locate your car keys.

Staying organized requires a positive attitude, motivation and consistency and a few "quick tips" to achieve organizational success:

RULE OF THIRDS

When sorting and organizing paper files and folders, the "old school" rule of thirds recommends throwing out one third of the paper that is probably too old to be valuable, archiving one third of the truly important papers, leaving one the third of the paper to be filed and organized. Not only will there be less to deal with, with the cost of file folders and filing cabinets, it will keep the costs associated with filing to a minimum.

USE SIZE AND COLOR

When organizing clothes, put dresses with dresses, shirts with shirts, etc. and then arrange by color. This cuts down the chance of mismatching clothes while getting dressed early morning "in the dark" while making it much easier to pack for last-minute business trips.

When organizing paper, using color-coded labels or file folders can make it very simple to locate important papers. Most office supply stores offer file folders in various colors so people can store all insurance information in blue folders, banking information in green folders, car maintenance information in red folders, etc.