Jumpstarting Your Organizational Habits

Have you been drooling over professionally organized closets and homes? Who can blame you? It just doesn't seem real. These people have no junk! Or is their junk just cleverly hidden and organized? The best way to get your home organized is to focus on eliminating the "miscellaneous" piles of clutter. I'll tell you how I did it.

If you're saying it's miscellaneous, then you haven't thought through where it should be kept, or if you even really need to keep it. Resist the urge to pile things up in one basket, bin, or box simply to get it out of sight. People that do this often end up drowning in clutter because they are simply hiding the clutter all around the house, turning little piles of junk into huge ominous tasks later. Take a long hard look at each thing that doesn't have a place or category and decide if you really need it, or if you can possibly come up with a category for it.

Here's a great example. As I was cleaning my bedroom, I categorized everything and got it put away. All except this one pile. There was that one pile left, full of random things that didn't have anywhere to go. I really didn't feel like dealing with it, especially after I had organized and cleaned the rest of the room. I stared at it, and it seemed to grow. I wanted to put it in a box that I could go through later, and so I did. But then I discovered that my closet was full of these boxes. I realized that I had a really bad habit of cutting corners when it came to organizing my things.

Right then and there, I made a new rule for myself. Nothing comes into this room without something going out. I figured if I could just concentrate on this one room, then it wouldn't be so overwhelming. I was right. I found myself using my bedroom organizational skills all around the house. I almost didn't realize it was happening. I just started throwing out things that didn't have a place to go. My house slowly became more organized without me even realizing it because when I made space in my bedroom for a new category, other junk piles around the house started to shrink.

This was the beginning of my obsession with organization. Not necessarily having the perfect home, but a home where things had a place to go. I had this vision of a home where once the dishes were done, the laundry was put away, and the mail was sorted through, that it would actually look clean. I would always know where everything was and would never have anything left.