Monday, March 21, 2011

Home Inspiration for the OCD

As you probably know, a large part of my day-to-day job is working with bloggers not too unlike myself. I am incredibly lucky to be able to professionally work so closely with bloggers that inspire me personally with their ideas and lifestyles.

Y'all know I am a blog-reading addict. Beyond the reading and research I do at work, in my personal time I often can't help but cruise around bloggy world finding new sites to add to my Reader. I may or may not have time to actually read all of the blogs, of course, especially if I keep adding new ones! :) But add them I do, and on lazy weekends or downtime evenings, I like nothing more than skimming through and "meeting" each writer and their blogs.

What has begun to happen, however, is that I am becoming completely and utterly overwhelmed by the sheer GENIUS out there in bloggy world. There are just bazillions of creative ideas, tips and tricks, and I just can't keep up. My Reader's feed of Shared and Starred Items is unorganized and pure chaos, and then my Firefox bookmarks and Read It Later list are beyond any reasonable to-do status.

Recipe bookmarks aside (I am already overwhelmed by my Binder as it is), I am saddened to think about how many inspirational decor and organizing ideas I have bookmarked and then forgotten about. Yesterday's wrapping paper station post was easier to remember about, because it was a physical magazine page that I had torn out. But then that torn-out page was cluttering up my counters before I got a chance to write about it. There must be a better way to put this creative mindset into some kind of an order.

Seventh House on the Left (yes, yet another new bloggy find) has the perfect solution for me, and I can't wait to get started. Wouldn't you believe it, but she was having the exact same issue, except in hard-copy form with magazine stacks to infinity. Check out how she managed it:





This idea is utter genius. I have a lot of torn-out pages in a little folder at home, but if I was to print off a lot of the inspiring webpages, too, I could easily fill up a binder (or two!) with cute, home-y ideas. The added sticky notes and tabbed sections make it easy to flip through and remember what caught my eye with each page. Then, the next time I am feeling that too-familiar itch to snazz up the condo, all I have to do is open the binder to find some of the concepts and themes I had previously enjoyed.

This will be a perfect rainy-day project to have out on the dining room table, or something I might tackle during my upcoming vacation. I can't wait to share my results with you.

How do you organize your creative side? Do you use an online management method? Or is it all chaos like mine? 

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I NEED to do this. Even if I never looked at it again, knowing that all the pages were neatly filed and tabbed would would make me so very happy...

Unknown said...

Ariane - we will have to share and compare our binders when they are complete! :)