OrganizingLA Blog

Organized Minds Dine Devine

Organizing Blogger, Office Depot Spokesperson and Finalist in the 2007 Los Angeles Organizing Awards, professional organizer Monica Ricci was in Los Angeles last week.

Monica is always such fun.  On a nationwide tour through Tampa, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Tallahassee, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, Palm Springs and Atlanta, she took time out of her busy Office Depot schedule to stop by and dine at French 75 in Burbank, a stone's throw from NBC, where they film The Tonight Show (and where on-strike writers were picketing.)

So what did we talk about?  Besides the Coq Au Vin and chocolate souffle, we talked about how much the writer's strike is killing the Hollywood economy, and the exhiliartion Monica feels when she gets up at 5am for a 5:30am interview with Spanish-language Univision.

The Atlanta-based organizing expert and I also chatted about her upcoming trip back to Los Angeles to attend and present, at the Los Angeles Organizing Awards on February 1st.  Monica will join organizing colleagues Peter Walsh and Julie Morgenstern at the LA-area fundraiser.

Related Post:

• The Tonight Show's Ross the Intern Tries to Get Organized

Slamdance Film Festival Screens My Mother's Garden

Cynthia Lester, the documentarian who details the life of her mother's hoarding disorder in My Mother's Garden, wrote to us today about her film being shown at the Slamdance film festival this coming weekend.

My Mother's Garden - Screening Schedule:

• Saturday, January 19, 2008 - 3:30pm
• Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - 4:30pm

Slamdance Film Festival
Treasure Mountain
255 Main Street, Park City, UT

In quiet, tree-lined Granada Hills, California, Eugenia Lester's hoarding disorder has entered a dangerous and life threatening stage.  The film opens with her mother climbing through her own home's window, stepping on top of stacks of newspapers, piles of debris, rotting material, clothing, and toys; a living mass of waste that has literally pushed her out of the house and into her garden.

• For more information on the screening, click here for ticket information.
• Click here to visit the film's official website.

Images courtesy the filmmaker and Slamdance website.

Related Post:

• My Mother's Garden trailer (2/07)

FeedM8 Now Offering Our Content - on Your Mobile

We've been mobilized!

FeedM8 ("Feed Mate") has allowed us to mobilize our site so OrganizingLA Blog can travel with you on your phone's mobile browser with friendly graphics and text via the RSS feed.  Here's how it works:

1. Click on the "Get Mobile Version" button below.
2. A new window opens.
3. Open your phone's browser and go to:
4. http://feedm8.com/organizingla
5. You're connected!

Click here, here, and here to test the functionality of a sample screen.  FeedM8 is quite amazing, you can still maneuver around the posts, scroll up and down and see basic images.  We're also setting up a permanent button on the blog's side bar.

Feel free to leave us any feedback if you try this service!

A Perfect Mess - Out in Paperback This Month

Inc. Magazine is reporting that A Perfect Mess is coming out in paperback this month.

David H. Freedman, frequent writer for Inc., including this month's cover story on Bob Cramer, submits evidence in the book that being an organized person may actually be a bad thing, it stunts creativity.  We can see for some it can happen.

As you can imagine, the book caused more than a few waves through our community one year ago as a result of some rather insulting mentions of colleagues across the U.S.

Not everyone took it badly though.  In a review in the San Diego Times-Tribune, organizing authority Harriet Schechter reviewed the book like this:

"A treasure trove of stories and anecdotes about fascinating people who have made their mark in business, science, medicine, technology, urban planning, art and music in part by being what I'd call idiosyncratically organized. From Alexander Fleming's fabled accidental discovery of penicillin in his cluttered lab to J.S. Bach's little-known propensity for rampant improvisation, the book overflows with interesting details...."

Now that a year has passed, would readers care to make a comment?

Related Posts:

• Today Show hosts a Perfect Mess
• A Perfect Mess is a get out of jail for free card

Southwest Airlines Debuts Productivity Ad Campaign

Southwest Airlines is spending millions on a new ad campaign targeted at productivity, and controversy.

The ads haven't caught on yet, but we think they're funny.  At the Annual Productivity Awards (not to be confused with the Los Angeles Organizing Awards) highly productive young businessman Nick Pudder wins an award, but he's accused of taking "productivity enhancers" to augment his office and sales strategy.  We did a double take when we saw this, will you?  If it's true, we want some.

Here's the commercial Southwest is airing, as "reported" by Karen Jacobs of Be More Productive News.  Check out the other spots on YouTube.  How they dream up these things we'll never know.

Readers-- we'd love to know your thoughts.  Use the comment tag at the bottom of this post.  Would you ever sneak a "performance enhancer" behind your office cubicle?  What is your favorite enhancer anyway?

Related Posts:

• Supersized traveler tips

Organize Your Toy Legos and Build More Stuff

This just about takes the cake, er, um, Legos.

Now, we're a huge fan of Lego's.  Sitting on our bedroom floor in 1976 listening to Top-10 WABC Radio in New York City, this Jersey boy managed to keep his pre-teen sanity by building large-scale Lego projects galore.  Such fun.  Our collection resembled the box above.  Except back then, we didn't have all the high-tech small pieces.

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a post today on How to organize your Lego bricks for efficient building.  What has this world come to?  If you're into Legos, you've got to check this out.  If you're not, you've got to check out the passion this writer has for "efficient building." They've analyzed:

• Why storage drawers won't work;
• Which Legos stack better than others;
• Why stacking bricks of like kind together make it easy to pick them out of a large bin;
• How alternating stacked bricks will save you time when pulling bricks apart.

Our most favorite comment is from Tim T. who says:

"It is always such a relief to find other people as enthralled with organization as I am. When we bought our house, which for all intents and purposes has infinite space (at least compared to our previous apartment), I spent about 2 weeks sorting all of my Lego's for easier access. Previous storage consisted of a gigantic purple plastic bin, plus a few smaller additional bins."

2 weeks separating his Legos?  Now, that's dedication!

Read - Evil Mad Scientist

Related Posts:

• How to organize a playroom - leave it be?