You have just spent hours going through your home, cleaning, waxing, washing and dusting and now your home is clutter free and sparkling, now it looks like all of the pictures of beautiful homes like in the magazines, it is too bad it will not stay this way.
Soon there will be mounds of clutter on all of the tables, shoes on the floor and who knows what you will find tucked under the sofa.
Why is it that we spend all of this time cleaning, just to find the clutter reappearing? Only now, it seems as though the clutter makers have thrown a party and brought all of their friends, to add even more clutter to the room.
We have done everything that the Professional Organizers tell us to do and followed all of their advice. We have purchased all of the closet organizers, file organizing systems and all of the cute storage products and we still have clutter! Why isn't this working, the experts say it should!
All of the professional organizing products in the world will not help, if you are not organized yourself! Basically, if you don't have an organizing system in place for you to follow, all of the organizing products in your home won't help you to organize your life and won't be of value to you.
Six Steps to Clutter Free Living
- If you use an object, put it back in its proper home before you take out something else. Everything has a place where it belongs (remember all of the organizers you own) in an organized home. When you are finished with it, simply put it away.
- Keep your home, especially your living space, open and inviting. Having your home free of all of the knick-knacks, things lying on the tables, magazines and newspapers all over the floor, makes your home feel livable and relaxing. Not to mention the amount of cleaning that is eliminated by putting away the clutter as you go though your daily routine.
- Closets are our own worst enemy, we hate to get rid of things and clothes do accumulate right before our eyes. For every purchase you make, get rid of one thing for that piece to replace it. A good shortcut here is to purchase only so many hangers, if there are more clothes than hangers, something has to go. Then the extras get jammed in between other clothes, get stored in another closet, jammed in a dresser drawer or left on the chair next to the closet. Now you will have to organize your closets, with the pretty organizing system in it, all over again!
- Prioritize everything. By this I mean that if you do not have a home for something, find one. That piece that you have in your hand needs to find a home so that it will not become clutter that drifts from one place to the next and is constantly in the way. By making it a priority, you can now find a home and know where it will be the next time that you want to use it.
- Keep it handy. Most people would not store the remote control in the closet when it is used in the living room, so why would you store the scissors in the bedroom when you use it the most at your work center or desk. When storing items, think of what area of the house you use it the most and the least amount of steps that it can take in order to store it. Take things down to the simplest form for easy and fast organizing.
- Do it NOW. We tend to put off to tomorrow what we can do today, put off for later what we can do now and get things done when we have time. This type of thinking creates more work for us tomorrow, later and when we have time. That is why we care constantly picking up clutter and never having enough time to do the things that we would love to do.
The old adage is true, tomorrow never comes! By all estimations, later and when we have time, never seems to happen either! If everything has a home, we have the proper storage container for it and we do it NOW; clutter, is eliminated from our lives. Now isn't that a pleasant thought to carry with you the rest of the day?
Sometimes just organizing our lives isn't enough; we have to organize our minds in order for true organization to take place.
Easy Organizing and Cleaning tips, hints and shortcuts can be found at www.organizingandcleaning.com
Purchase Jan's books on Organizing, Filing Records, and Cleaning Shortcuts and get organized with her free pamphlets and checklists that will help you to take the stress out of life and give you time for the 'fun things'!
