Monday, January 5, 2009

A Label Maker Can Be Life-Changing

brother label maker

Is it worthwhile to use a label maker when doing your filing? Patricia Burroughs thinks so! Here's what she posted to the Getting Things Done Yahoo group, reprinted with her permission.
For me it has changed my life. That may sound silly, but I have horrible handwriting, just horrible. And for some reason when I'm "organizing" I want things to look neat (even though I'm not a neat person). All my previous attempts at filing had scribbled/scrawled/ugly files.

Once I used the P-touch I found that going into my files felt calming. It looks like it's organized and orderly, and creating new files and tucking them into place always feels very satisfying.

So count me in the "believer" column!
[Photo of one of my own label makers; yes, I've used the label maker to create a reminder that I put on the thing itself.]

Related Posts:
Why You Really Might Want a Label Maker
Be Your Own Professional Organizer, Part 3: Label

4 comments:

Michele said...

I resisted getting a label maker for a long time. It seemed like something I didn't need, after all I can hand write labels. But once I got it, I was wondering why I waited so long. I use it often, and even my husband who is not a big fan of organizing uses it too. It really does make a difference in creating order.

Unknown said...

Which P-Touch is that in the picture? I love mine, a really old PT-65 "Home & Hobby" (the ancient green one), which I've used almost every day since Spring 2002.

I, too, have less than stellar handwriting, but I find that it's the uniformity, more than anything else, that makes labelmakered labels work so well. The starchy, impersonal nature of a printed label lends an air of authority...one might discount a handwritten label, but a printed label means business! :-)

Jeri Dansky said...

Julie, it's a PT1950/1960. One nice thing is that it takes the TZ tapes, which have the split back and are easy to peel. (And I love labelmakered as an adjective.)

Michele, I think a number of us resist at first, thinking it just doesn't matter - and then change our minds.

Unknown said...

Glad you like labelmakered. :-) It's a contraction of labelmaker-made, without following any of the rules of contractions.