Recently I organized a client's finely furnished home office where she had not one, not 10, but ALL of Oprah's signature O magazine collection. "I won't give those up for anything," Victoria declared. She even had them in red leather magazine holders, showing they were truly a prized possession.

 

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I thought that was perhaps taking a magazine series a little far — until I started to go through my personal collection of Real Simple magazines. I had every one, from the first issue in 2003! With almost 300 pages and very beautiful covers, they were enticing to keep, yet they filled about three feet of precious shelf space. I knew I needed to downscale, but I also needed to use the collected information. For what? To start my next book, Simplify Your Space. How ironic.

Library of Knowledge or Household Clutter?

If you have more than three magazines in a collection, know that there isn't usually enough time to read them all.

Are the collections good for something? Yes, if you use them within six months of receiving them, after which the information is dated.

One woman had every National Geographic for years in her basement collection. One night she and her husband were awakened by a loud crash. The shelves holding them had collapsed!
 
I called the library the next day to help her part with her treasures. "Do we collect National Geographic magazines?" the librarian chuckled. "Only if they are 75 years old or more."

That confirmed it. Even the libraries are flooded with magazines. Use them and pass them on right away. Sooner is always better than later.

Steps to Freedom

Try these steps to catch up on your magazine reading this summer:

 

• Evaluate: Gather all your magazines on one table. Put them in neat piles by title and year. Count how many you have of each kind. If it takes 30 minutes to read each one, how much reading do you have ahead of you? Now you can more easily decide what to do with them.
  
  
• Speed up the cleanup: Recycle anything older than this year. Vow to read the current year and keep up from now on.
  
  
• Start a new habit: "New one in, old one out." Even if you have to read the old one on the spot, keep just the current issue on hand.
  
  
• Pick your favorite articles: Instead of tossing issues, keep the articles that interest you and toss the rest of the magazine. Try this:

1. Score the table of contents page by running an open pair of scissors down the page, close to the spine. Gently tear it out from top to bottom.
2. Circle the articles you want to keep and look for their pages.
3. Cut out each article with the same "scoring" technique. Staple the article pages together.
4. Take a deep breath and cut off the cover the same way (gasp — yes, it's really okay to do this!)
5. Paperclip or staple the articles under the cover. Now you've got several months of magazine reading distilled into a fraction of an inch. You'll be amazed at how little space your new collection takes up and how many good articles you missed while thumbing through whole issues all these months!

Today's Paper Tip

Be generous with your magazine subscriptions by calling your local hospital, school, doctor or dentist office to see if they would like to use your magazines once you read them. Once you find a good home for them, you'll be motivated to read and recycle them to a worthy cause regularly.

 

 

 

About Marcia Ramsland

Marcia Ramsland is well known as "The Organizing Pro" for her practical skills and tips to manage busy lives. As a national speaker, author and consultant since 1985, Marcia delights her audiences from New York to California with tips and secrets to organize their time, home, paperwork and life. Her tips have been in Woman’s Day and other national magazines, radio interviews and TV. She can be reached through her Web site www.OrganizingPro.com, and her books can be ordered there.