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Can you guess where people fail at most when it comes to organizing their homes? It isn’t in the act of organizing, anyone can rearrange items and have a system in place, the true challenge is actually staying organized.
But don’t worry, I going to show you how to stay organized at home and keep it that way…for good!
Now with anything, there are no magic bullets, it really comes down to ongoing maintenance to continuously manage your clutter.
Because while I hate to admit it’s true, clutter is never ending. We are constantly accumulating more stuff, personal tastes change, children grow out of clothes and toys and junk mail keeps coming (no matter how many times we try to get off that dang list).
The key to truly managing your clutter is coming to the realization it is an ongoing process, with no end.
And while this may sound scary or anxiety inducing, it’s a lot better to come to this conclusion than constantly driving yourself crazy trying to have a completely clutter free home.
There’s a happy medium between having a messy, unorganized home and being obsessed with having everything perfectly organized all the time. Only you know where your happy organizing place is.
How To Stay Organized
So enough of this “no one is perfect” talk, let’s get down to some easy organization tricks that will help you stay organized and banish clutter!
1. Organization maintenance is key to keep your home clutter free.
As mentioned earlier, setting up an organization system is the somewhat easy part, the maintenance part is where people usually fall short. This is true for me, can you relate as well?
If you fail to maintain your organizing system, your home will sadly always be unorganized. Now this doesn’t have to be as time consuming (or boring lol) as it sounds.
- Set a daily or weekly time aside to declutter and organize every day. This may just be a couple of minutes before you go to bed or twenty minutes weekly. Whatever works for you and your lifestyle.
- Put every item back in its “home” you assigned it to when you set your organization system up.
- Set a timer and force yourself to organize as much as you can in the allotted time…even if it is just five minutes.
- Do this while listening to music or your favorite podcast. Make it fun…or at least tolerable! Doing a little bit of maintenance each day can really add up!
2. Stop making piles to deal with later.
Oh my how I am guilty of this! Recently when I went through decluttering, I found some piles I had made from a year ago! When I made the junk mail pile, it was innocent enough, I would just deal with it another day. Only, I shoved it in a drawer, out of sight out of mind, right?
Umm, not so much.
Piles upon piles can really start causing some clutter issues!
So the moral of the story is if you have say a piece of junk mail that doesn’t need to be shredded, throw it away at the time or at the very least put a time limit on your pile. Maybe you throw junk mail out every week, but that pile won’t sit there any longer than that!
The same can be said for donated items or clean laundry piles. Make a point to put away your clothes out of the dryer. For donations, once you have a full bag to donate, put it in the trunk of your car. That way when you’re out and about you can just drop it off and no more piles around your home.
3. Don’t just purge and organize your items once a year.
You don’t have to wait for spring cleaning to go through your closet and purge unused items. Aim to do this seasonally, it will really help you from getting overwhelmed. The same can be said for organizing.
4. Enlist help from other people.
If you aren’t the only one that lives in your home, then you shouldn’t be the only one responsible for keeping everything organized. If age appropriate, you can even get the kiddos involved and teach them that everything should have a place. Assign people different areas of the house for daily maintenance if that’s easier.
5. Don’t store items in the very back of cupboards or cabinets unless they are labeled in boxes or containers.
While this may be a tip for getting organized, it will help you out so much. Have you noticed items you forget about the most are in the very back of your cabinet?
Pretty soon you’ll find you just have a bunch or crap in the back of your cabinet you never use that is just sitting there taking up valuable space.
Get some cheap containers or boxes and label the contents to guarantee your cabinets stay organized.
6. Choose your organizing “battles” wisely.
This sort of piggy backs on the idea mentioned earlier of not striving for organizing perfection. Since it’s probably not realistic to have every little thing organized in your home, pick the areas that are most important to you.
For example, I work from home and find if my desk is messy it affects my productivity and ability to create new posts for this site. At the end of the day, I straighten up my desk. Now with that time, I could instead organize old pictures from high school.
This just wouldn’t be worth my time and having old high school pictures unorganized in a box really doesn’t affect me as much as having a clutter filled desk.
7. Establish a home “base” to keep yourself organized.
Setting up a home organization hub is different for everyone. Here are a couple of ideas:
- Create a home binder to help you keep organized. You can use your binder for things like organizing and cleaning schedules, passwords, meal and goal planning, etc. Abby from Just a Girl and Her Blog has a FREE downloadable home binder with some easy directions for setting it up. You could add additional sections to really customize it.
- A home command center can serve many purposes. My command center has a calendar, place to sort my mail, store list, etc. It is in my kitchen in a highly visible spot. This command center set up from Aileen Cooks is one of my personal favorites because it is very simplistic and easy to maintain.
8. Constantly challenge yourself to organize.
What better way to motivate yourself to declutter your home than taking an organizing challenge! Take my 30 day home and life organization challenge!
You can grab your FREE downloadable Organizing Challenge Printable here to help get you started!
Do this at your own pace, it doesn’t have to be in 30 days. For full challenge details and tips, check out my organizing challenge post.
Hope this post helps you stay organized! Let me know your favorite organizing tips below!
You may also like these organizing posts:
- How To Fix Common Organizing Mistakes To Declutter Your Home
- 10 Tips For Organizing Paperwork That’ll Eliminate Paper Clutter
- Bathroom Organization : Ten Things To Throw Away