I LOVE a gift card and use them up pretty quickly (which is why it baffles me as to why I find so many unused gift cards in my work as an Organizer.)  I knew you could mail them in to cardpool.com, but only just learned that Cardpool also accepts cards at thousands of Gift Card Exchange kiosks & cashier-assisted locations formerly owned by Coinstar.

Last month I gave a workshop on decluttering - not just offices and paper, but decluttering as it applies to everything in the house. In planning it, I knew I had to share an excerpt from a new favorite book, Goodbye, Things by Fumio Sasaki. It gave me pause when I first read it because of all the reasons there are to hold on to things, this one was brand new to me: 

Creatives, especially artists, get a bad rap for not being organized.  I know one though who is quite organized now that we’ve worked together, and was fairly organized before we met. She’s also an art teacher who is in a relatively new position.  With that new role, she reached a critical mass of teaching materials for school, teaching materials for various other classes, and her own work over the years.

Last year my accountant recommended I start using a mileage tracker app on my iPhone to keep accurate records of how much I was using my car for client work.  Since August I’ve been using MileIQ.  It came in extremely handy when sitting down with her to work on 2017’s taxes.

Everybody wants to know “how long should I keep records?”  Each time I’m asked I refer clients to the IRS’s answer to this question to draw their own conclusions.  

Most are surprised to learn that they are keeping tax documents for about 4 years longer than necessary.  

According to consumer psychologists in CNN’s article The life-changing science of photographing your clutter, 

"In studies conducted online and in person, we found that participants reported that they would experience less identity loss from donating a cherished item if they had photographed it or preserved the memory of it some other way.”