Organizing my digital life

My employer offered a 'time management' course right before the holidays.  It wasn't your typical spiel on using a particular system, not carrying around a binder with all your life history in it.  It was just good advice about tweaking whatever system you like to use to help you find some peace - and hopefully a little more time to do the things that are important to you.  I've always considered myself a pretty neat and organized person.  Sometime between a family of 2 and a family of 5, though, things have become out of control!  

When my husband and I married, we combined two complete households.  We still have two of a lot of things.  Like irons.  I can't tell you the last time I used an iron, much less two of them!  We have two crock pots, 2 vacuums (OK, that's handy in a 2 story house) and 2 lifetimes worth of accumulated junk.  Oh yeah, we have 3 kids somewhere in this mess too.

Aside from getting healthy one of my biggest goals for this year is to get this place organized!  With the extra hours at work, and the addition of exercise into our nightly routine I've not had a lot of time to get started on this goal.  So instead of feeling a sense of peace I've been stressing over something additional.  Good plan there ace.  I've finally taken the first step.  Its a small one, but I feel better already.  

I've organized my blog reader!  You didn't see that coming did you?  I use Bloglines, and this is what it looked like last night

After about 30 minutes worth of work, I wittled my blogs down from 203 to 140.  The majority do not update daily - I'd be doing nothing but reading blogs if they did!  

I have six general catagories

• Food - recipe and baking blogs
• Photos - photographer blogs and photo editing help 
• Money - to assist with my efforts to be more frugal and become debt free
• Scrapping - anything scrapbooking related
• Weight Loss - yeah, blogs about weight loss
• Mom Blogs - pretty much anything that doesn't fit in one of the above and is written by a woman!

I am SO happy I took the time to do this!  I often only have a few minutes to read and I'm looking for specific inspiration but I have to hunt through 200 blogs trying to pick out the weight loss or money or whatever.  I like that I can expand each list and click on individual blogs or I can just click on the subtitle and it will show new posts all in one window.  

My next computer organization project is to get the 103GB on my laptop and 149 GB on my EHD tagged in ACDsee and purged of digital scrapping supplies I'll never use.