Once your home is organized, maintaining momentum is what keeps it organized! It’s much easier to do small, consistent tasks as a part of your routine than to overhaul your entire home once it’s become cluttered. Here are some tips for keeping up your momentum.
Consistency
Maintaining your space is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Every day, every week, every season, every year, make a commitment to consistency. If putting items back where they belong when you’re done with them is part of your daily routine, your home will stay organized, and you’ll stay less stressed.
Your mindset is important to consider when it comes to organizing your home. Your values and goals, the way you think, and the way you talk to yourself all play important roles in how effectively you can make your space your own.
Values
First, let’s consider values. We each value different things, which means everyone’s dream home is unique. Think about what’s important to you. Do you value…
To organize your home can seem overwhelming, but if you break it up into manageable chunks and go through your possessions methodically, you can eliminate the stress! I recommend starting with a small area first, instead of trying to overhaul your whole house at once.
Find an area in your home you’d like to organize, and use the acronym I CARE to streamline the process!
I CARE
Identifying your goals streamlines the process.
Identify your goals. What does “organized” look like to you? If you know what you want before you start, you’ll be able to accomplish more.
Categorize your items.
Purge items first:
Return recent purchases if you find you don’t need or want them.
Sell items that are worth the time it takes to list on a website like eBay, or through a garage sale.
Donate what isn’t worth selling, but could be useful to someone else.
Recycle paper and plastic according to your local regulations
As a last resort, throw away trash that can’t be returned, sold, donated, or recycled.
Repair items that are fixable instead of buying a new one to cut down on waste.
The first step to any project is clearly identifying the scope of the project. Specifying what your aims are as a closed project will help you to know when it is complete. However, you don’t need to drill down into the details as you’re outlining your project.
“Getting organized” is not specific enough. Equally, a list a mile long with specific instructions such as “Create 43 hanging folders, each labelled with 3.5 inch tabs with 20 point Arial font with the following labels… and filing all the loose paperwork into those folders, being sure to purge any utility bills older than…etc” is probably too much detail at the beginning of a project.
How to Identify the Scope of a Project.
Choose an area to organize. It can be as small as a drawer in a bed side table, or a shelf in a closet. It could be as big as a whole room. (Again, “organize the whole house and the garage” is a bit too broad).
Imagine how you want the space to be at the end of your project, and make that your goal. You might want to specify that all horizontal surfaces are clear or with a certain number of decorative items remaining, or perhaps that all like objects are together, or that you only want one of each of the types of objects in the space. However you choose to state it, someone else should be able to come into the space and say, “Yes, you’ve done it!”
Know what you will do with the items that don’t belong in that space before you start. Dealing with these items should be part of your project – as long as they don’t expand the scope of your project. For example, you might need to move some items to the garage from the room you are organizing. If the new space is organized, then go ahead and put those things away. But if it’s not, it’s okay to put them in a holding place until you can organize them there. (See last week’s blog post about the domino effect.) The point is to come back to the project you started, not to get distracted by another space.
One of the biggest concerns people have when they start an organizing project is where to start. We call it the domino effect.
There are some clothes in the home office that need to go to the bedroom closet, but the closet is stuffed, so we’d need to make some space in there to put the clothes away. There’s some sporting equipment in the closet that really should go in the garage, but there’s no room in the garage unless we put the bulk supplies in the pantry. But the pantry had a few boxes of paperwork that used to be for current paperwork, but that are now so stuffed that you can’t fit any more paperwork in there and the stuff in the boxes is kind of out of date and could either be recycled or archived in the home office, except there’s no room in the home office unless we take out the extra clothes that should be in the bedroom closet ….
It’s like a slide puzzle. And we want to do it with the fewest moves possible.
Start with making sure you have some space in the room you are working in. So purge (recycle, donate, return, sell) items you know can go. If you need instant gratification to give you some momentum, focus on large items you know you don’t want so you clear the biggest amount of space in a short amount of time.
Stay in one space. Resist the urge to start moving things in other areas. That way your effort will produce the biggest visible return.
Once you’ve cleared some space, you can use the space for one category that makes sense in that space. Sometimes that is nothing, and that’s okay.
To extrapolate, to start any overwhelming project, start with a small do-able piece. The start is the most important part. It’s easier to keep up momentum.
