Table of Contents

-Introduction
-Did you know?
-Monthly Mission – Kids Stuff
-Check Out These Pages! – Relevant pages and new site additions
-Indecision and Inaction = Clutter

Introduction

Ahhh… the sound of kids being back in school. It’s pretty quiet. I’m taking this time to catch up on running errands and getting chores done kid-free. And take a little quiet time to recoup from the summer break. The new school year though also inspires me to get back into a routine and reclaim the house and return it to a bit of order.

Halloween is next month already! We’ve been discussing costume possibilities. Costumes of interest this fall seem to be from the movie “Despicable Me 2” and the game “Minecraft”. We’ll see!

Click the logo above to learn more!

Did you know…

In a study conducted by California Closets, 83% of women wanted their homes to be more organized. This included respondents who already considered themselves organized.

Phew! This means that only 7% of women feel they are organized enough to be satisfied. That’s a really small percentage. Which means, most of us are “typical” and we shouldn’t feel bad or beat ourselves up for wanting to be better organized.

(Source: California Closets Study Results).

If you have kids, you have a lot more stuff because kids just seem to have a lot of stuff. To check out this month’s monthly mission to tackle your kids belongings, click here.

Here are some pertinent pages on the website you may have missed along with any new pages.

Laundry Room Ideas - Ideas to help you out in the laundry room

Kids Rooms - A little help with ideas to organize all the stuff kids come with... artwork, toys, clothing.

Living Room Storage Make-over - See how we re-organized our living room (play room) with a new Ikea wall unit that's great for storing lots of stuff.

Christmas Organizing - Tips on how to get the most out of your Christmas holidays, in an organized stress free manner.

Home Filing System - Keep all your paperwork in order so you can find what you need at a moments notice, and learn what to keep and what to toss.

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.

Organizing Children's Artwork - Here are some ideas about what to do with all that fabulous artwork your young kids bring home from school.

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

Do you have things lying around your house that you’re going to get to someday? A stack of papers, a pile of magazines, some items you’re going to donate when you get around to taking it to Goodwill? These items are clutter. And I have it too.

Looking around my home I see a few piles of things that I need to deal with, at a later time. But why are they there?

Indecision

Some of the items I’m not sure what I want to do with. I don’t know if I’m going to keep it, and if I do, where I’m going to put it, so for now it’s sitting there staring at me in a little pile in a corner and I’m doing my best to ignore it. I need to make some decisions!

Another big area of indecision is with sentimental items. According to a study by California Closets, 53% of the people who responded considered themselves “sentimentalists”. These are people who find it hard to throw anything away that has a memory attached to it, such as clothing, kids projects, souvenirs, etc. Not all sentimental items are clutter, but unless you love them and display them, or store them properly to admire or pass down, do you really need to keep everything? Will a photo of the item suffice? You’re really preserving the memory, not so much the item itself in many cases.

Inaction

These are items where I know what I’m going to do with them, but I just haven’t taken action. Either I’m going to drop them off to charity, toss them in the garbage, or simply put them away. I think the largest inaction problem in my home is things not being put away. I don’t know how many times to repeat this to my family (and myself), but that one action would make the house SO much better.

Another reason for inaction can be that we’re avoiding this giant task of tidying up and getting organized. Some of our clutter requires no decision making… trash is trash, or as I mentioned earlier, just putting things away . But sometimes we feel that decluttering is such a big job, we can’t even get started. That’s why so many people recommend the 15 minute rule. Set the timer, do 15 min. of cleaning and then quit. What you accomplish in that time will add up and you will see a difference, making a big job much easier in much smaller chunks.

So, which comes first actions or decisions? I think that it’s really a mix. We need to take that first step, the action of getting up and dealing with the pile of stuff. Say, if you have a spare room you need to clean out, you need to open the door and get in there and start making decisions. Once decisions start happening, you will need to follow-up with further action, to see the job through to completion. Get the garbage to the garbage can, the donations to charity, etc.

Decluttering your home may be difficult at times when you have tough decisions to make. Try to do it in small doses, a couple decisions at a time. Little steps forward are still going forward! And keep your eye on the prize, the home you envision in your mind, a cleaner more open space for you to live and relax in.

Until next time, happy organizing!

Tracy Greene
Plan-and-Organize-Life.com