If you’re like most people you’ve spent more time at home this year than you, honestly, may ever have. On top of that, now that school is getting back in swing, many families are choosing to do partial school or completely take the dive into homeschooling. Regardless of the education situation, one thing most of us have done at some point this year is looking around our home and said “I need to get organized.”
Here are some helpful tips for items that can aid in the quest for organization and with a little help from the Mopria Print Service app, you can print them right from your Android smartphone or tablet.
Organization Labels
Printing labels around the home can make organization super easy. If you’ve ever been holding a jar of preserves wondering if they were peaches or nectarines—you could use a label. If you want the hats to go in one bin and the gloves in another, you could use two labels! If you want to assign a box for bags, a pail for pens, a pot for paper clips, a bucket for bottles, and a container for crayons … well, you could use a LOT of labels.
For even more inspiration, check out 50 ideas to label things at your home. And for instructions on how to get that label to print just right, here are Microsoft’s directions for printing labels from Word.
Make Goals!
“Goals not written down are just wishes.”-Anonymous
Why do so many companies have their corporate goals framed and posted in their lobbies or on the executives’ walls? Because goals provide a benchmark for employees and their managers to measure their success. Similarly, we often hear world-class athletes talk about how they are motivated by setting and reaching their goals.
An article in Psychology Today links goal setting to higher achievement. Experts agree that the number one action a person can take to help them achieve their goals is to write them down. A 2015 study by psychologist Gail Matthews showed when people wrote down their goals, they were 33 percent more successful in achieving them than those who formulated outcomes in their heads. So, make your goals, print them out, and tape them to your refrigerator, bathroom mirror, and your car’s dashboard. This will keep them visible and top of mind and help you stay motivated to make it happen!
Calendar Your Life
Smartphones are handy inventions, these personal mobile devices help enhance and improve our lives in more ways than we can count. The challenge is they are, well, personal. When planning for the day, week or month, it’s hard for a family to gather around a tiny screen. The answer? Use the Mopria Print Service app to print out the calendar from your mobile device. That way, everyone can be (literally) on the same page.
If you really want to get organized, use your phone or tablet to input daily schedules each member of the family and print them on different colored paper so there is no question who should be doing what, when, and where they should be doing it.
Student Planners
For those taking a more active role in education at home, a major element of activating the organization gene is to make a plan and have an easy way to stick to it or pivot when needed. A helpful way to do this is with assignment sheets or more formal student planners. Not only does this help the kids know what is on the docket for the day, but it also empowers them to build good habits and prioritize their time.
A nice leg up is the Print & Go Student Planner. It comes with printable calendars for the year, weekly to-do pages, and much more. This nifty package is delivered in a printable PDF file that you can pull up on your mobile device, print, and store in a (color of your choice) binder.
Kitchen Clutter
If home is where the heart is, then the kitchen is the heart of the home. Even in the most pristine kitchens where there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place, there’s still one area that is often organizationally challenged—the recipe box. This is particularly the case when dealing with multi-generational culinary masterpieces.
Thekitchen.com published an article describing the challenge one family faced when inheriting family recipes. Everyone wanted to take certain recipes as their own. This would have risked missing out on that great meal that brought back priceless memories. Finally, one saintly family member offered to collect them and make a complete book for everyone who wants one.
You can do this too—and it’s easier than you think. Sure you could type out each line and ingredient individually or you can use your phone to take a photo or scan (using the Mopria Scan app), which you can print later from your device. That way you’ll always have the original and any hand-written notes to make sure your grandmother’s oatmeal cookies or chicken parmesan tastes just like how she made it.
