At the end of the day, take a few minutes to organize your office space. Put everything away, make a "To-Do" list and please turn off your computer! Computers eat up a lot of energy when left on over night. Try about 2.8 billion a year and that is just the U.S! Computers that are kept on overnight and on the weekends omit 20 million tons of carbon dioxide. Yikes!
So please, start a new office organizing habit this spring and turn off your computer at the end of each day. Your computer will run better, you will save some money and get organized at the same time.

10 years ago it was common to see a train car or bus full of opened newspapers. Today my commute is predominantly shared with fellow commuters intently staring at their cell phones. Some are reading email, some are visiting websites, but the truly informed are using an RSS reader like the free Google Reader. Google Reader allows me to subscribe to dozens of news sources, aggregates all the articles into a single stream that let's me scan through the titles and teasers until I find the article I'm interesting in reading.

The best part is that I don't have to carry a newspaper around, have to maneuver reading it on the commute, have stacks of papers waiting to be recycled and am not limited to a single news source.

In addition I can save articles to my Google account for future reference and even share them out to friends or to me Facebook profile.

So if you are looking for a change that will save you a little money, lower your carbon footprint, keep you informed and prevent piles of papers in your garage or office; check out Google Reader.


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Yesterday I read an article in Wired magazine about how netbooks are changing the PC market. Netbooks are small, low performance laptops meant to connect us to the web and run a few small apps. These cheap computers have surprising popularity and have shown that consumers are evaluating their computer needs before purchase instead of simply buying the most power they can afford. Many are finding that they do not require a blazing fast gaming machine, tons of storage and big screens. Let's face it, many of us use e-mail, surf web pages, play around on web sites and apps like facebook. So why buy a thousand laptop when a three hundred dollar netbook would do?

In this organizing blog we often speak about getting rid of the things you don't need so they don't create clutter and distract you from the important things in life. But one step better than purging the items you don't need is to never buy them in the first place. Some critical thinking at the purchase stage can save money, and as evidenced by the rapid adoption of Netbooks consumers are. questioning the utility of those $1,000 laptops and realizing that when it comes to computing power, less is more...money in the bank.

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