Table of Contents

-Introduction
-Did you know?
-Monthly Mission – Laundry
-What’s New on Plan-and-Organize-Life.com – Recent site additions
-Clutter Is Distracting

Introduction

As I write this, we’re still fully in summer vacation mode, including a trip to visit family. At the same time, I can’t believe that the kids go back to school already at the end of the month. I’ve been buying school supplies as they come on sale and stocking up. I got some good freebies so far! For those with kids, are you prepared for the upcoming school year?

Clorox conducted a survey via telephone of 1200 adults in April 2011. Here are just a few things they found out:

Single women are more than twice as likely as married women to actually purchase new clothes in order to avoid doing laundry. In addition, more than one-third of unmarried women own more than 20 pairs of underwear – another potential laundry-avoidance tactic.

Nearly a quarter of men 18-29 only wash their sheets about once a month, while women are more likely to wash once a week or more.

One in eight men actually confessed to wearing their underwear two or three times between washes.

To read tips on how to catch up on your laundry, and stay caught up with it, check out the Monthly Mission for August, here.

Here are some of the more recently added pages to the website you may have missed.

Adding A Closet Shelf - See how adding a quick and simple shelf to a closet can add functional space.

Spice Rack - See before and after photos of my spice storage including my new spice rack.

Garage Makeover - before and after photos of my personal garage makeover. See how we tackled the problems and ended up with a functional garage.

Streamline Your Morning Routine - Ideas to help you get out the door in the morning and be on time for work or school.

Storage Shed Organization - Before and after photos of my storage shed reorganization project.

Toy Organizing Project - After Christmas I had to do some toy re-organizing. Here is a before and after of my little toy organizing project.

Bathroom Drawer Make Over - How to organize a bathroom drawer, an example with before and after photos.

Stop Clutter - Quick simple tips on how to stop the clutter from coming into your home in the first place.

Clutter is distracting and time consuming. This can pertain to physical clutter, as well as mental clutter. This is true for our homes as well as our work places and our schools.

Think about the piles of things in our homes that need to be cleaned up and put away. Think about the piles of papers and stuff on our desks or the work stations of our co-workers. It’s a wonder we’re productive at all. And have you been in a classroom of late? I understand wanting to display all the wonderful artwork, but there is a point where it becomes too much to keep focus on the tasks at hand.

So what is clutter? In my mind, clutter is anything that gets in the way of living a peaceful stress free life. It could be laundry that needs to be folded and put away, it could be dishes that need to be washed, or stacks of mail or magazines you’re going to get to when you have more time or toys scattered across the living room floor, too many knick knacks, or the piles of papers on our desks. It could also be something you love and use, but haven’t given a proper home, or haven’t put away.

My daughter’s room gets to me every time. I’m still working with her on putting things away into their proper place (she’s 5), but it hasn’t clicked yet. She likes me to come play with her in her bedroom, and I try, but I can’t help but sit there and start tidying up. The clutter in her room is very distracting! We are working on downsizing the amount of toys she owns, but it takes time, especially when new things keep coming in.

This clutter is not only distracting, but it can make you feel bad and waste your time. That pile of laundry over there is begging to be folded, but you go about doing something else. Then you pass by that laundry again, and it calls louder “don’t forget to fold me”, and now you’re feeling pressured. This could go on for hours, days, and goodness knows, weeks. Add up all the times you’ve glanced at that pile of laundry, or whatever it is, and thought “geez, I need to get to that” and think about how many times you felt bad or guilty for not actually getting to it. Think about how much time you wasted thinking about that clutter that needs to be taken care of. And the thing is, often times, taking care of that thing only takes a few minutes, and then it’s done. Often taking less time than the accumulated amount of time you wasted thinking about it in the first place.

So let this be a reminder that by taking the time to declutter and organize you’re home, you’re actually going to gain time and free your mind from a lot of time wasting stress. It might take a while to get there, but don’t give up. Keep working on getting your home or office organized, a little bit at a time. As we say, progress, not perfection.

Until next time, happy organizing!

Sincerely,

Tracy Greene
Plan-and-Organize-Life.com

P.S. Sometimes links to website pages get broken. If a link doesn't work, you may need to copy and paste the entire link into your browser.