My grandmother’s address book was one of her most valued possessions. I remember it as an old tattered book with scraps of envelopes and bits of paper hanging out of it. Over the years, as people moved or passed away, she would have to rewrite and organize, in alphabetical order, every one of her contacts into a new book. The loss of her address book would have been devastating and would have taken a great deal of effort to recreate. How valuable is your contact information to you?
In order to save time and reduce the chaos that comes from having ineffective systems for handling contact information, my recommendation is to use an email program, like Google’s gmail or Microsoft Outlook, to keep all your contacts. Keep the contacts somewhere in cyberspace so that you can log into it from almost anywhere to access your contacts. Keeping the contacts only in a spreadsheet is good until the hard drive crashes or a disaster strikes and you lose everything. Exception: you use a remote backup service. If you have a business with a need for a large and specialized capacity for customer management there are Software programs like ACT that can be used.
The kids make something “special” for you, a picture or craft item, they bring home a paper from school with a good grade and you put it in a place of honor, you keep it. As parents you want to keep it all! You want the kids to know that you honor their creativity and their accomplishments. Then there are the toys, the books, something grandma bought them. You want to keep and preserve it all! What you are doing is trying to preserve that moment, that memory, that feeling FOREVER!
When living multifamily in a single family home, space can be at a premium. Finding a place to store everyones personal items is challenging. There are many organizing tools and techniques that can be used to maximize the space that you do have.
If you are facing the challenge of multifamily living having some basic guidelines for everyone in the household to follow will be helpful to having a more enjoyable living environment. Basic guidelines and clear boundaries assist everyone to know what is expected, helps to prevent misunderstandings and disagreements from developing in any living situation. With guidelines in place there is a better chance of having peace in the home.
