If you really stop and think about it, the decision to get organized is a hopeful one. We hope that by decluttering our homes, sticking to a new routine, managing our time more efficiently or writing a To-Do list, we will finally, FINALLY gain control over the uncontrollable and attain peace of mind in our chaotic world. I may be a professional organizer, but as the mother of two (three if you count the big kid I'm married to), I am the first to admit that "being organized" is a matter of relativity. There's no such thing as a "totally organized" life, and even if there were, I seriously doubt you'd want to live it. One of the most common issues I uncover when I go to a new client's house is that they have at least one large, unwanted, unneeded object sitting right in the middle of the most important area needing organization...their minds. The object is a negative thought that they keep tripping over. It takes up space that could be put to much better use. It obstructs easy access to other things sharing the space. It inserts itself into every task, and creates unwanted "noise". It detracts from the peacefulness of the space and, let's face it, it can be downright unappealing. Obviously, the first step is to remove this negative thought from your mind. Do any of these sound familiar?
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Let's just face it: keeping up with everyday life is not for sissies. No matter what your station is in life...student, professional, parent, retiree...your must do/should do list always seems to outweigh your available time. As a working mother, my list seems to grow exponentially with each item I cross off. I've found that the key to keeping your sanity is organization, and the first step in getting organized is to trick yourself into a sense of control over your environment. Quieting the "visual noise" that surrounds you will help you focus on what you need to do to actually take control. Are you with me? No matter how messy your house is or how much you have on your plate, spending just 10 minutes each day to tidy up first will help put you in the right frame of mind and allow you to turn your attention to more important things on your list. Start with the things that will make a big visual impact while requiring little time/effort:
"Instead of spending time being bothered by things that you cannot control, invest your time and energy in creating the results you desire." - Jensen Siaw I recall the look of complete amazement and bewilderment on the face of my British friend as I described to her, sometime back in the late '80's, how a drive-thru bank worked. I'm not sure if she was impressed by the ingenuity of such an idea or astonished at the sheer laziness of an entire culture where such a phenomenon would even be needed, much less commonplace. Indeed, we Americans seem to be almost obsessed with an ongoing demand for more and more "convenience". As though drive-thru restaurants, pharmacies and dry cleaners are not enough, we now have curbside pickup, hands-free concierge service on our cell phones, and remote controls that open our car trunks for us from 50 feet away. Of course, being the queen of laziness, I love it all and can't wait for the day that someone invents an exercise machine that allows me to burn calories and tone muscle while napping. But if we aren't careful, our never-ending quest for convenience can become downright inconvenient, particularly when it comes to all those "convenience" kitchen appliances: juicers, bread makers, rotisseries, countertop grills, food dehydrators and vacuum sealers. Look around you. Are the appliances that are intended to conserve your time just consuming the valuable real estate in your home? As with anything else, it's all about choices. Choose which convenience you want...drive-thru burgers, or easier homemade burgers? Vacuum packed groceries you can freeze for fewer trips to the store, or door-to-door grocery delivery? Be realistic and consider your lifestyle and current needs to determine which you will really use. If you want to keep the food dehydrator, fine. USE IT! Commit to it. Let go of that notion that you'll use it "someday". If "someday" ever does come, the newer models will be better, even easier to use, and probably worth the cost of buying a new one, so there's no need to keep this one around and in your way until then (unless it's Grandma's old ice cream maker and you are keeping it for sentimental reasons...but that's another post). Realize that there is nothing convenient about having to move the juicer every time you need to find a glass for your store-bought juice. ALL conveniences require some type of sacrifice--time, money, space, accessibility--so choose wisely. I have a bread maker I bought about 15 years ago but rarely used because it was too big to store on the counter and required too much effort to get it out when put away. Storing such a large and infrequently-used appliance in my tiny kitchen was a luxury I could no longer afford, so I gave myself an ultimatum: either start using the bread maker regularly or get rid of it. Thus I re-organized my kitchen to make it easier to access my bread maker and have started using it at least weekly to make homemade dough for pizzas, pita bread and hamburger buns from pre-measured, homemade mixes I toss together once a month or so. I am choosing the convenience of having easier homemade pizza over the convenience of ordering pizza delivery, but that's a personal choice. The point is, you need to evaluate your current needs and priorities and stop allowing your convenience appliances to inconvenience your life by either finding a way to make using them easier or getting rid of them to make room for a different kind of convenience. By the way, unused space is a pretty versatile convenience of its own. Just saying. Update 1/5/2014: It's been five months since I originally posted this and I'm happy to report that I am continuing to use my bread maker very regularly. If you have a bread maker that's collecting dust, start using it to make home made pizza dough, rolls and pita bread from one of our EasyPeasy Mixes. You'll save money and will be amazed at just how quick and easy it is. Trust me! You'll never go back to eating that store-bought cardboard again! I'm lazy. There, I said it!
They say that "necessity is the mother of invention", but my cleverest organizing ideas are born out of pure laziness. The truth is that the reason my home is so organized is because I'm just too darned lazy to live in clutter. I will literally spend hours organizing one cabinet in just such a manner as to never have to lift something up in order to get something else out. I clean out my closets very regularly because I figured out a long time ago that the less stuff I have, the greater percentage of that stuff can occupy the prime real estate in my home. The more stuff occupies prime real estate, the easier it is for me to find it and put it away. Laziness... the secret key to an organized home. Who knew? I may have mentioned this before, but I am a huge Pinterest addict. I spend most of the time I save from not having to look for stuff and lift stuff on surfing Pinterest for new ideas on how to be even more organized and efficient. It's pretty pathetic, I know, but I really enjoy seeing all the clever ideas people come up with for storing things in non-conventional, super-accessible ways. Using a cupcake stand to store tiny craft embellishments without having to open any containers... stuffed animals hung conveniently on the wall in a mounted planter where they won't fall out easily and have to be picked up... pocket shoe organizers for holding the entire contents of a cabinet where you can see it all at once and not have to move anything...Brilliant! But there's danger lurking among the boards, too. In the pictures, the cabinets always look so nice and neat and orderly with their matching containers and coordinating labels. It can be a little intoxicating and make you forget yourself a little. Before you know it, the quest for efficiency can turn into a Martha Stewart Living nightmare. I recently saw a photo that made me shiver. A professional organizer had helped someone organize their linen closet and attached beautiful labels indicating the sheet size to each sheet set using safety pins. Say what?!! Oh, it looked gorgeous, but it failed the laziness test immediately. Who on earth is going to un-pin and re-pin those labels every time the sheets are used or put away?!!! Not me! Never underestimate the power of the slightest inconvenience to prevent you from doing something you don't want to do anyway. If your drawers and closets are too full, you won't put things away, so you may as well just pile everything up on the tables and chairs instead, because that's where they're going to end up anyway. Closet door broken? Sock drawer stuck? Can't reach that top shelf? Maybe it isn't such a coincidence that the things that live there never made it back home last time you finished using them. Take a good look at your biggest pain points and ask yourself why they are so painful. Dig deep down into your subconscious and identify the problem. Nine times out of ten, it's because of some minor obstacle you've tolerated (or haven't) for too long without even acknowledging its existence. Let Martha keep her matching hang tags and adorable zippered pouches. She's got a whole TV crew to put stuff away for her! Lazy works just fine for me. In fact, I'd even say "It's a good thing". I am blessed to have two children who love to read! In fact, my 7-year-old son is known for swiping his Dad's Playstation Magazine and hiding it under his bed before my husband has had a chance to read it. We knew his zeal for reading had reached new heights when he started making off with his nursing journals too.
My daughter insists on saving all of her birthday and Valentine's cards and routinely reads through her current stash. She reads our Webster's dictionary quite regularly, and I had even encouraged her to share a "word of the day" with the family each night at dinner until I started noticing a disturbing pattern in the words she chose...Adder, Anaconda, Asp, Cobra, Copperhead... Last Fall, we had to confiscate her Harry Potter book at bedtime in order to keep her from reading it in the dark. After discovering that she had been sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to read in secret, we had to tell her that an alarm is set to go off if anyone is creeping around downstairs after Mom and Dad go to bed. (Of course, this backfired on me months later when I wanted her to run downstairs to fetch something for me after we'd all retired upstairs for the night.) Whether it's library books, greeting cards, yard sale finds, magazines, or another generous Amazon shipment from Grandma, there seems to be an abundance of reading material circulating in our house. Even the shortest car trip requires a traveling library, and I want to encourage their bookishness. To contain all this fabulous print, we have bookshelves strategically placed in every major room of our house and magazine baskets in all the bathrooms. Yet it remains a struggle getting my little bookworms to re-shelve with adequate frequency. Thus I have introduced the "book basket", where reading material can be tossed with ease by the day's appointed "librarian" during our quick evening tidy-up. Every couple of weeks, the kids re-shelve the contents of the basket and I slyly seed it with a few neglected titles from the shelves upstairs to encourage them to select a variety of different texts to read. "So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, A lovely bookshelf on the wall." — Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I have a 7 year-old son and a 9 year-old daughter. They both insist--rather frequently--that they plan to never leave home. This is sad news, because I really had my heart set on A) seeing them happily married with children of their own some day; B) replacing all the scratched up furniture and stained rugs at some point once they were no longer around to ruin the new stuff. I'm reduced to hoping that my son will eventually revert back to his original plan of becoming a hobo. Maybe then I could at least get some new end tables.
Don't get me wrong. I love my children very much, but I'd be lying if I said that boarding school never crossed my mind when I read "The Chamber of Secrets has been opened" scrawled in red crayon on my daughter's dresser. For some reason, I was under the impression that once she was old enough to watch Harry Potter movies, she'd be past the stage of coloring her bedroom furniture. Apparently I failed to figure the need for proper set design into the equation. Anyway, the point is that I love my home and want it to look nice. I feel good when I can look around my living room and see all the pretty things I picked out to decorate it. It makes me smile to see the framed photos of the people I love sitting atop the sideboard, and I enjoy sitting on the comfy sofa watching a favorite TV show or blogging on my laptop without being surrounded by chaos, dirt or mess. Sure, there's a small price to be paid to maintain this order, but 10-15 minutes here and there to tidy up is worth it to me. Like everything else in life, it is a choice...just like the choice I am making to keep my son, despite his recent failed attempt to make a ghost costume out of one of my pillow cases using scissors. Once upon a time, you made an important choice too. You chose your home, and you were excited about it. You chose the color on the walls (probably), the sofa you sit on, the rugs you walk on, the desk or table you write on. And you were excited about them too. When you look around your home today, what do you see? Are you still excited about it? Are you still able to see all your favorite things? Is it the environment you chose, or just the one you tolerate? Life is short. Make sure the set design is appropriate for the story you hope to live. Germantown Woman Hits Head and Dies After Getting Feet Tangled in Husband's Dirty Underpants6/2/2012 This was nearly a headline in my local newspaper this morning. Talk about going out with a bang! I am forever chastising my husband for leaving his dirty clothes on the floor at the foot of our bed, and last night I had a rude awakening from my half-slumber as I got tripped up in his skivvies on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Dirty clothes on the floor is just one of the many hazards I have faced in our seemingly-innocuous three-story suburban household. A barefoot stroll across the living room can feel like walking on broken glass because of all the stray Legos, and one misplaced Boys' Life or American Girl magazine on the stairs makes a heck of a slip-and-slide. So in the interest of home safety, I've set up a small basket on each set of stairs in our house and do regular sweeps throughout the day to keep the floor clear. It only takes a few seconds, and anything that isn't in current use but belongs on a different level of the house gets tossed into the appropriate upstairs or downstairs basket. You'd be amazed at how much neater a room looks with a clutter-free floor. The kids need occasional reminders to empty the baskets and put things back in their proper place, but I find that they are fairly good about it. So if you want to cut down on trips to the ER and save your vacuum cleaner, give this a try and save your 15 minutes of fame for something a little less fatal. “The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” –- Linus Pauling5/6/2012 I try to make a point of going through my storage area at least once or twice a year to pare down things I no longer need and to stem the tide of the post-Christmas or post-party chaos that sometimes creeps in and threatens to take hold in there. I have a couple of "memorabilia" bins that had been added to quite a bit since the kids started school and had not been looked through in quite a few years, so I decided it was time to take a look and pare down the contents to just the items that were really worthy of taking up that valuable space.
One of the things I found in there was my old "idea folder" of holiday crafts, kid activities and recipes that I had begun collecting back when I was single and bored and hoping to someday have a family, which would naturally come with oodles and oodles of time and energy for executing all these brilliant ideas. It was pretty amusing to realize that there had once been a time when I actually thought I'd someday master the culinary expertise required for making individual edible violin desserts out of a pear half with chocolate frets and spun sugar strings like the one featured on the cover of a Harry & David catalogue. Seriously, Valerie?!!! Clearly I was living in a fantasy world where work, laundry, grocery shopping, menu planning, homework tutoring and ironing do not exist and motherhood is all about making homemade herb and cheese crackers, cupcakes that look like Sesame Street characters, and hand printed wrapping paper. I obviously didn't count on having children who were picky eaters with little desire to decorate sugar cookies and with more interest in finger painting outside in the mud and acting out a pretend episode of Scooby Doo Meets Darth Vader than creating faux stained glass Christmas tree ornaments out of tissue paper. If you had told me this cold, hard truth back then, I would have been devastated, but life has a funny way of changing your priorities. Sure, there are moments when I wish my kids shared my love of crafts and baking, but I wouldn't trade my little actress and Picasso for anything in the world. I delight in watching them show their creativity in a million different ways that are uniquely their own and take pleasure in surprising them with mine on special occasions. The truth is that now that I am a wife and mother, I would rather spend my time cuddled up with my kids watching The Lion King or using my imagination to come up with creative ways to teach them their table manners. Easy peasy living isn't just about getting organized and managing your time more efficiently. It's about keeping your goals in sync with your priorities and adapting them to life's ever-changing perspectives. I thought about keeping the "idea folder" for a time in the future when the kids are grown and I once again have time to indulge in learning how to make individual edible violin desserts, but I quickly realized that I would prefer to keep that space available for remembering what my children and I actually did do together instead of what I might (or, more likely, might not) do someday in the future by myself. How often do we hold onto things that might benefit us someday and by doing so give up something that most definitely will benefit us today? Throwing out the idea folder not only freed up about 6 inches of space in that bin, it freed me from my regrets at not having accomplished my outdated, unrealistic goals of yesteryear. And most importantly, it gave me permission to move onto new goals, to collect new memories, and to rid myself of all the "someday" stuff hogging up valuable space in my brain as well as my storage area. If you are storing materials for use in projects from your old someday idea folder, ask yourself these questions:
In my son's first grade class, they have a color coded behavior system similar to the Department of Homeland Security's terrorist activity alert system...a similarity easily understood by anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with first-graders. It goes something like this:
Ironically, he starts each day wanting to be on green. We talk about what it takes to stay on the "green path", which leads to privileges, play dates and being able to buy lunch at school, and how to avoid taking the wrong fork in the road toward "red land", where everyone has to go to bed early and there are no TVs. We've gone over it a million times, but being a child, he has difficulty remembering that his ultimate destination is dictated by all the millions of small choices he makes throughout his day. How often do we adults forget that too? We complain about how un-fulfilling our jobs are, how full our calendars are, how cluttered our closets are, how messy our homes are, or how tired or lonely we are. Yet we fail to recognize that these are the destinations we chose when we came to a fork in the road. When I was a young woman, I spent many years having my heart broken by one jerk after another, until I finally realized that the single common denominator in each of these failed relationships was me. Me and my choices. I finally figured out that what I had been seeking and what I was hoping to find were two completely different things. I had been dating men who came from similar backgrounds to my own, assuming that it meant they shared my goals for the future. I wanted a loving and caring man who was travelling on the same road as I and with whom I could share my journey through life. But I had somehow wandered astray onto a different path and had been looking in all the wrong places and getting lost. When I finally found him, I almost didn't recognize him. He was nine years my junior and living on the other side of the Atlantic, having been raised in a family vastly different from my own. Fourteen years later, we are (slowly but steadily) reaching our goals...shared goals based on conscious choices and reinforced by our mutual determination to help each other reach them. It has not been an easy or an even path, and sometimes one of us has had to carry the other over the rough spots, but the journey has made us closer and we both know the view from the summit will be spectacular when we reach it! I'm guessing some of you are saying, "But Valerie, what does this have to do with organizing?" Well, everything, to be frank. Being organized is nothing more than making deliberate, well-thought-out choices. What do I keep and what do I toss? Which things should be stored in the most accessible places? Should I store this item with these things or with those over there? My mother used to regularly complain that she did not have enough cabinet space in her kitchen. My sister reported that when she helped her move, she found no fewer than TWELVE muffin tins. I imagine the conversation went something like this: Sis: "Mom, why do you need twelve muffin tins?" Mom: "Well, I like to have some ready to go in the oven, some already in the oven, and some cooling all at the same time because it makes the baking go so much faster." Sis: "And how often do you need to bake 144 muffins at the same time?" And I would have argued that the amount of time she saved during one baking session a year (at most) because she could do all that at the same time was lost ten times over through having to move those tins around to make room for the things she used every day. I noticed when I visited her once in her small home that she had numerous sets of matching glasses crammed into various locations throughout the house. When I asked her why she needed so many, she replied that she liked to have plenty of pretty glasses on hand for when she was entertaining. I guess it never occurred to her that even if she filled every inch of her tiny trailer home with guests, she would have had to serve at least four or five rounds of drinks to use up all those glasses at once. She was making choices that didn't make sense without even realizing it. We all do it. Are you choosing to live in the past or in the present? Are you holding onto that dirty, smelly cast from when your now-grown son broke his arm when he was five in the vain hope that it will bring back that sweet little boy from your past? Because it won't, and it is taking up precious space in your present. If you must, take a picture of the cast and then throw it away. And what about those old acid-wash jeans from high school that you are hanging onto so that you can say "I did it" once you lose enough weight to wear them again? Do yourself (and everyone else) a fashion favor and get rid of them. A before and after picture is way more compelling, and you will have earned a brand new outfit you can actually wear out in public without embarrassing your companions. It may be "just one pair of pants", but added together with all the other useless items you are choosing to keep for the wrong reasons, they represent a lot of overhead. Life isn't something that just happens to you. It is something you make happen through your choices. If you are too tired, maybe you need to schedule some down-time on your calendar. If you are too lonely, reach out to others with similar interests through volunteer activities or hobby groups. If your closets are too cluttered, choose to give away the things you don't use to someone who will. If your job is drudgery, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your career choice. Remember that needs and priorities change over time so your choices should too. Once upon a time, that house you bought was your dream home, but it may be time to upgrade or downsize as you enter a new phase of your life. It's a lot easier to chart a course and choose the correct forks in the road when you know what your destination is. Where does the "green path" lead in your life? |
AuthorValerie Sheridan is a professional organizer, wife, mother of two, and Founder/Owner of EasyPeasy Living. Archives
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