If you want to learn how to get organized easily, you need to know what to avoid. After that it’s plain sailing.
The 5 common pitfalls below stand between you and success. Avoid them and you will be on your way to an organized home in no time.
1: You don’t have a plan
Without having all of your problem areas written down, you will just charge about like a headless chicken.
You can achieve more in less time by focusing your efforts on one area at a time and you will feel greater motivation if you see your list get smaller over time. Just make sure that your problem areas are broken down into baby steps as tasks such as ‘the garage’ are not going to get done in one session.
2: You have not scheduled regular organization time
Like brushing your teeth, organizing should be scheduled into your daily routine. Find pockets of 5-30 minutes and do a little bit every day. You want your organizing to become a habit and this will only happen if you do it every day.
3: You haven’t conquered how to throw stuff out
Do you keep things that you don’t use because you might use them in the future, you might fit into that dress in the future, your kids might play with those toys again in the future or you might read all those books or magazines in the future?
If so, you need to make friends with the ‘donate’ and ‘trash’ bins and start to use them. If you don’t, you may never get organized and you may waste money on organization products that you don’t need. Why buy a magazine rack if you are never going to read the magazines – just recycle them.
The key is to clear clutter BEFORE you organize.
4: You haven’t allocated a place for everything
With ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’ you will always know where every item in your home belongs. Things that don’t have a home, by definition, do not get put away.
So when you have allocated a storage space to a group of items label it and then everyone will know where to put everything.
5: You/your family do not put things away
Having gone to the effort of organizing, you do not want to let things slip by thinking “I’ll put that away later”. Do it straight away.
Your family of course may be less inclined to buy into the new ‘putting away’ habit, so will need re-training. An initial family meeting to discuss the benefits of being organized along with regular ‘review’ meetings will probably help during the initial ‘change’.
Photo credit: jurvetson.
