7 Secrets of the Super Organized. A few years ago, my life was a mess.
So was my house, my desk, my mind. Then I learned, one by one, a few habits that got me completely organized. Am I perfect? Of course not, and I don’t aim to be. But I know where everything is, I know what I need to do today, I don’t forget things most of the time, and my house is uncluttered and relatively clean (well, as clean as you can get when you have toddlers and big kids running around). So what’s the secret? Are these obvious principles? If your life is a mess, like mine was, I don’t recommend trying to get organized all in one shot. So here are the 7 habits: Reduce before organizing. If you take your closet full of 100 things and throw out all but the 10 things you love and use, now you don’t need a fancy closet organizer. How to reduce: take everything out of a closet or drawer or other container (including your schedule), clean it out, and only put back those items you truly love and really use on a regular basis.
Make the Contents of Your Drawers Organized and Easy to Find with Two Paper Tricks. Add a “Vide Poche” Next to Your Door to Avoid Clutter Around the House. Start a “Mail Basket” and Process It Weekly (110/365) On a typical day, I’ll open the mailbox and find several letters inside.
On my way into the house, I’ll shuffle through them and see if there’s anything obviously important, of which maybe one or two will be. The rest are probably junk mail, but with supper to be made and kids running around, I usually don’t have time to evaluate them all in that moment. The easiest thing to do would be to just drop the mail on a side table or something and get to work, but if you adopt that as a regular habit, several bad things happen. First of all, you start to get an awful pile of clutter on that side table. It begins to look messy pretty quickly. The worst part? This was actually a pretty consistent problem for us for a long time – and we certainly weren’t alone in that problem.
One of my friends lost a property tax notification in his mail mess and almost had his house go into a tax auction. It took five minutes and a commitment to a simple routine to fix the problem. Hone Your Organization Skills by Helping Others with Their Messes. 10 Uses for Pillowcases. 50 Ways to Make Your Home More Organized, More Attractive, and More Efficient. The modern home is far bigger than the home of just 30 years ago – and far more cluttered!
How can that happen? Basically, our demand for stuff is outstripping our ability to buy space – no wonder self-storage is one of the leading growth industries in the United States. Questions about runaway consumerism aside, what all this excess stuff means for most of us is more time spent maintaining our living spaces to keep some semblance of order in our lives.
Most of us don’t want to spend our evenings and weekends – and more for work-at-home types – knee-deep in clutter, never sure where anything is, and constantly stepping over all those things that, for one reason or another, we just had to have. We fight a constant battle against clutter around Chez Dustin. That’s why I asked you, our readers, to share some of your tips in one of the contests in the Great Big Summer Giveaway. General Household Tips Hide a cluttered bookshelf with a spring-loaded curtain rod and a set of curtains. 8 Spots To Get Moving Boxes Free-Of-Charge. Free Moving Boxes.