by Erin Doland of Unclutterer

I have an affinity for books that borders on an addiction. I usually read three books a week or more, and those books come in many forms — audio, digital, checked out from the library, and purchased. Even with relying heavily on audio, digital, and library books, I continually fight book clutter in my home.

If you’re a bibliophile like me, you may have more printed books than you can (or should) store in your home. Try these five tips from Unclutter Your Life in One Week to decide which books to keep and which ones to let go:

1. Give away any books that you don’t plan on reading or referencing again, are in the public domain, and can be found in their entirety online.
2. Keep the leather-bound copy of The Scarlet Letter that your grandmother gave you on her deathbed.
3. Give away or recycle out-of-date reference books. They’re full of inaccurate data.
4. Keep books that you love and books that provide you with significant utility.
5. Give away books that you’ve been storing for the sole purpose of impressing your houseguests. If you’ve never read the complete works of Shakespeare, and you never plan to read the complete works of Shakespeare, get rid of the complete works of Shakespeare.

These tips also work well for books you may be storing in your office at work. Unless you are an executive with office walls lined with bookshelves, you might be sacrificing valuable storage space with books you never reference. Keep the books you regularly need, and take home, sell, or recycle the others.

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Erin Rooney Doland is Editor-in-Chief of Unclutterer.com and author of the book Unclutter Your Life in One Week.

Take Welcome to Organization Blog Fest 2010! I thought the best way to start the week would be with Meredith Schwartz of Penelope Loves Lists, and her advice on how to handle a Daily To-Do List. Take it away Meredith!!!

-Becky
We all make the Daily To Do List. Problem is, most of the time, we do it wrong. There, I said it.

This list, which should be our problem solver, becomes the problem itself. Like some huge, looming, cartoonish thing from our nightmares, the incomplete items from each day’s lists grow until we feel defeated under their collective weight.

Instead, you should have two To Do Lists, one called the “Daily To Do List”, one we’ll call the “Overall To Do List”. You can think of your own pithy names when you adopt this system.

The first step is to know, each day, what your most important tasks are. If you don’t know what your true priorities are, either at work or at home, your list will be a meaningless schedule of tasks. If you’re unsure as to how to prioritize, read this book. If you know what you truly need to do each day, you can then set about step two.

Each evening before finishing work, make tomorrow’s Daily To Do List. This should take less than 5 minutes to do.

This list should have 3-4 of your highest priority items on it, each one with SPECIFIC goals, like this:

1. Check in with pending clients  - 10 clients
2. Get product shipment ready for Monday
3. 1pm Meeting with Jennifer

…If I get that done, I’ll move to:

4. Work through sales leads – 12 calls
5. Emails – spend 1 hour getting email inbox cleaned out.

See how specific each item is?

Also, notice that, by separating it into items 1-3, and then 4 and 5, you give yourself room for the day to actually happen. Things take longer than we expect. Emergency items come up. You set yourself up for success by ensuring your top 3 items get done. Then, if you are able to move to items 4 and 5  (which are also very specific and serve to “chunk out” larger projects) you can feel you got ahead by the end of the day, rather than always feeling overwhelmed and behind.

While I use my favorite Bob’s Your Uncle grid paper notebook to keep my daily to do list in line, I’ve also had great success with the online tool Teux Deux. I like that it doesn’t try to be all things to all people. It’s super simple graphic interface just enables you to quickly and easily do what you’re there for: keep and update your daily task list.

Whether you use paper and pen to create your list, or an online tool, if you know what your priorities are and are specific with the items you put on your list, you’ll end each day with a feeling of effectiveness. And, maybe, you’ll have just enough extra energy to go get a margarita. Wouldn’t that be refreshing?

What strategies do you use when creating your Daily To Do List? What’s working for you and what isn’t? Please share them with us in the comments section.

Meredith Schwartz is the Founder and Editor of Penelope Loves Lists, an organization inspiration blog. She’s a girl with a To Do List and she knows how to use it. Meredith and her fellow readers make no apologies for their love of lists, notebooks, pretty office supplies and all manner of cool organizational tools. Are you a Penelope?

• Datebook image via See Jane Work
• To Do List Image via Teux Deux

As I perused our Fresh New Spaces pool, this great vignette caught my eye:

This shot is from flickr member Alyn Carlson. She’s a graphic designer – you can check out her inspirations at her blog, colorgirl, and you can check out her work here.

Seeing Ali’s lovely open shelving yesterday reminded me of an Ideabook I created on Houzz full of beautifully organized kitchen cabinets. I wish I could keep things looking this lovely – all I can say is, thank heavens for wooden cabinet doors that no one can see through! To check it out, click here.

Do you have an organized cabinet/pantry/open shelf you’d like to share? Send us a link to a photo of it in the comment section!

first image via houzz.com, from Gast Architects

Next week we will be rolling out 2010′s Organization Blog Fest! Hooray! I’ve never organized one of these things before and I am really disorganized, so keep your fingers crossed for me! It’s been a lot of fun to correspond with those in the blogosphere who are much more organized than I am!

In addition to inviting some of our favorite bloggers from around the web, I’ve also asked everyone here at Design Public to share their favorite Organizational Tips/Products/Gadgets/Whatever Keeps Their Acts Together with you. As a teaser to our event next week, here is a post from Ali, our superwoman of many tasks, who is officially known as our Vendor Liason. She’s been so busy that unfortunately, we haven’t seen her on the blog a lot lately, but I’m glad to say she’s got a post for us today!

-Becky

ALI’S TIP: PLAIN, CLEAN AND SIMPLE WHITE :

I might be cheating a little with my organization tip since my photo is of our dinnerware and normally dinnerware automatically looks organized because it stacks in neat little piles, but I have a point…I think…

Nearly every item in my space is on display because we have very little closed storage. When we moved in to our loft we noticed the open shelving above the sink and made a pact (complete with the act of spitting in our hands and a solid handshake): “We are only going to buy white dishware and get rid of anything that isn’t completely white.” I’m not a big fan of matchy matchy anything but when it comes to items in white I’ll take as much as I can get. The end result has been one of my favorite portions of our space. Even though our shelving may not be completely “organized” it looks clean and neat simply because it isn’t super cluttered. We do have a few items in hues we particularly enjoy just to add a splash of color, which I love. Actually, now that I think about it, we’ve applied our “Plain, Clean, and Simple!” pact to our sheets and towels as well which makes the organization of our closets clean looking without really trying and it has drastically kept our clutter buying to a minimum.

-Ali