Lo Maintenance: Organizing Tips and Tricks
Tips and Tricks To Help You Stay Organized
A Time Sucker
You did it! You took the time and organized your home. Take that feeling in. It might feel cathartic, calming, or peaceful. You might be feeling a sense of accomplishment and you’re definitely proud of your new clean home.
Now fast forward a few months. Life starts to get back in action. You are not living that picture-perfect “after” shot you once showed off to all your friends. Your kids come home from school and throw their backpacks on the ground, flip their shoes across the room and scatter papers all across your countertops. Your packages are sitting unopened on the ground looking like a cardboard mountain. Your tennis racquet from a match last week is still on the chair and the dog leash is laying across your kitchen table from a walk earlier in the day. Your husband was doing some work around the house and brought up some tools from the basement and those are now sitting in the corner of your living room.
This is real life. This happens daily in my home. When left unattended, piles mound, mess starts to clutter and stress starts to build. That once clean, peaceful organized life seems to be slipping away. Initially, you might want to start “rage cleaning” as I call it. Running all around the house with each item in your hand putting it in the exact right spot. When you take the racquet and bring it to the garage, and then take the tools and run them down to the basement, you are wasting time and energy. However, that’s what we like to call a “time sucker.” Here’s our advice to avoid that “time sucker!”
Take a look around your house, BREATHE, and start to make piles. A pile for all the things that should be in the basement. A pile for things that should be upstairs. A pile for things that should be in the garage. Make piles of anything that seems “out of place.” Once the piles are set, scoop up each pile and go to that location. Get those items all in their correct spots and move on to the next. Surprisingly, your house will feel back to normal quicker than you expected. Try to do this strategy everyday or every other day. Soon enough it will become so routine that perhaps the rage cleaning will become a thing of the past!
