From: Kristi
Now that you refrained from join swaps during the holidays, did you go overboard and over-commit yourself to a bunch of new swaps once the New Year was under way? :-) Or perhaps you have a lot of birthdays or anniversaries coming and have several projects on your to do list right now. I've found a new way to handle these things that seems to work pretty well.
Aside from having a detailed to-do list where I break down parts of a project so it's done before the mailing date, I am using several paper trays to organize the supplies needed for each project. These are the types often used as In/Out boxes on desks. I have a set 5 wire mesh ones sitting on my desk.
In each tray are all the supplies I need for a given project - the card stock, stamps, inks, specific color markers or colored pencils, brushes etc. The one supply I don't keep in there are my adhesives unless it's a very specific one that needs to be used. I have my adhesives all within arms reach on the desktop. This saves me a lot of time of having to pull out things and put them away each time I sit down to work on a project. Instead, everything is right there when I have 5 minutes or 5 hours to work on a project and not wasting the majority of those 5 minutes rounding up the supplies I need. Then, once the project is completed, I can carry that tray around my studio to put the various supplies away where they belong, which also makes my clean up easier.
If I have projects that use the same ink pad, for example, I keep the ink pad in the tray of the project that is most pressing and stick a post-it in the other tray telling me what other project it is being used for and thus I know which tray it's in. When I have small bits, like beads that I need to keep track of, I slid a shoebox lid into the tray. I also make little post-it note labels that I stick to the trays telling me the drop-dead date for that project and the name of the project.
I hope you find this small organization tip useful!
