There's no shame in making mistakes. We're human. We make the them. The difficulty arises when we don't learn from our mistakes.

So, I'm going to share one of my recent mistakes with you so that you can learn from it.

I subscribe to several magazines. Most of them, I read and either recycle or pass along to a friend who works in a pre-school. (The kids love to use the magazines with lots of photos for art projects.) But some of the magazines I read include recipes or craft ideas or great household hints that I want to keep handy. But I don't need the whole magazine. So, a while back, I decided to attach a note to the front of each magazine listing the recipes/ideas/hints I wanted to keep so that I could cut them out and file them.

Do you see my mistake yet? I'll give you a minute.

The basic rule in efficient working and organization is to never add unnecessary steps! Why do more than is absolutely essential??!!! So now, instead of neatly arranged folders of recipes, etc., I have a stack of magazines I still have to go through to cut out the pages I want and file them away. Annoying — and it takes up too much space!

So that stops now. I am making the folders I think I'll need as a start and, as I finish with each magazine, I take out the pages I'll need, file them appropriately, and send the remainder of the magazine on to its next life. There is no way station for trash and I don't have to try to remember what magazine had the great chicken recipe.

As time allows, I'll dig through those back magazines I labelled. Fortunately, that's something I can do while watching a movie on a rainy day.