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Welcome to the Plan-and-Organize-Life.com Newsletter. I hope you enjoy getting the newsletter and that it helps to keep you on track with your organizing goals. Remember, you can get a lot done in only 10 minutes of decluttering and organizing! Table of Contents -Introduction
Introduction Welcome! If you’ve been following along, last month I talked about how to learn a new habit and to help ensure it’s going to stick. I have been trying to add the habit of hand washing any dishes after I unload the dishwasher in the morning. Hand washing dishes is something I tend to avoid, yet they only take a couple minutes to do if I do them every day. So far, it’s going pretty good. My other desire was to continue to work on implementing the One-Minute Rule. Since that is done all day long and not prompted by any specific current habit, it’s a little harder to make it a regular habit, but we’re still working on it! How are you doing with new habits to help your household be more organized? Did you know… 50% of homeowners rate the garage as the most disorganized place in the house. NAPO media stats The Monthly Mission – Garage Your garage is a functional part of your home and it should be treated with the same respect. It deserves a good cleaning and decluttering so it can be used to its fullest potential. As the weather begins to get nicer, it’s a good time to open up the garage and clean it out. Even though we did a big garage reorganizing a couple summers ago, it always needs to be cleared out come spring. It’s real easy in the winter months to just toss things in the garage for another day. Well, that day is here! To read more about the monthly mission for May,
click here. Recent Site Additions Here are some of the more recently added pages to the website you may have missed.
Procrastination and Clutter Let’s start with the definition of “procrastinate”: Procrastinate – to put off or defer an action until a later time, to postpone or delay needlessly. Since putting off various chores and tasks, to do “later” (and “later” is the best friend to clutter), you can easily see how procrastination leads to clutter. When we procrastinate (and we all do it), we basically put off making decisions and taking action. And when things don’t get done for whatever reason, our chores, projects and stuff pile up becoming a visual eyesore called clutter. That clutter then weighs on us in negative ways, perhaps feeling bad about ourselves, or feeling overwhelmed by the stuff in our homes. Of course, not all things can or must be done immediately in our busy daily lives. But, there are certainly a LOT of things that can and should be done right away if we want to snuff out clutter and keep it away. This brings us right back to that darned “One Minute Rule” I mentioned a couple months ago! (If you can do it in less than a minute, just do it.) The “I’ll do it later” mentality is clutter’s best friend! Once there is a couple things sitting around to be done or picked up later, you can be sure more will be attracted to it until it turns into a much more daunting pile of clutter to be dealt with. Instead, we need to do things as we come across them. Not major endeavors, but the simple things like opening our mail, putting our dishes in the dishwasher, putting our clothes in the hamper, putting our coats, bags and keys in a designated spot when we walk in the door, etc. These quick, simple things that take only a few seconds will make a huge impact in our homes. Not only will our living spaces look more clean and organized, it will help us to find things and function more efficiently. Now, if this is so simple, why don’t we just do it? It could be because we’re feeling lazy or we’re super busy. Or perhaps, we’re waiting until another time when it makes more of an impact. You know how the house is a mess and you have a lot to tidy up before guests come? And you clean and organize and the house looks fantastic and you wish it could always be that way? Well, you don’t get that kind of impact, that kind of satisfaction, if you clean up after yourself right away, every day. Your house is just always reasonably clean. What’s the excitement in that? However, remember all the time and energy and stress it took to clean the whole house in one day? Especially if you were trying to get kids to help you out? It can pretty much be torture. Now, is the satisfaction of the big reveal worth all the stress to clean the house in one day? Also, is the final result worth living amongst clutter and chaos for many days prior to the big cleaning day? And one more thought, are you ready to go back to living amongst chaos again until the next big cleaning day? Cleaning a little bit at a time is a lot easier than trying to find a huge chunk of time, or a day to clean it all at once. If you wait until there is enough mess to clean to give a bigger impact, you need to live amongst the clutter until that magical day comes when you can clean everything to perfection. It’s not likely to happen. Although cleaning up after ourselves when we’re done doesn’t make for dramatic before and afters, it does allow us to live comfortably and efficiently every day. And truthfully, isn’t that what we’re ultimately striving for? Isn’t that the whole reason we decided “I’m going to get my house cleaned and organized!” Don’t we really want to have the comfortable tidy home so we can relax and do other things we enjoy instead of the messy house with chaos so we can clean it every so often to make it look wonderful and have it last for a day or two? Instead of giant waves of clutter, clutter, clean, clutter, clutter, clean, can we live happily with the small steady river of tidying up a little bit every day? I’m sure we can find our excitement elsewhere. So, whether we’re procrastinating because we’re lazy, busy, or thrill seeking via chaos, we need to remember our ultimate goal, our reasons for getting organized in the first place and keep them in the forefront of our minds. We want our homes to look and feel comfortable and be able to function easily in them. For that, can we find a way to let go of our procrastination? Join me next month when we’ll look at indecision and clutter.
Tracy Greene
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