Maintaining Your Organized Space
Renee L. Brown
Restoration Organization
A delightfully organized closet or desk can soon become a disaster without a little bit of daily maintenance. You worked hard to get that space in prime shape, don’t give up on it! Maintenance is the backbone of organizing. It keeps the happiness in the house, allowing you to take pride in your spaces. Even just a little bit of maintenance a day will reap huge rewards and prevent you from slogging through several hours of catch-up each weekend.
- Clean Sweep: When you got organized, you should have set up a proper home for each of your items, so everything belonged to a specific location. At the end of each day, do a pick-up of the main areas of your home, returning items back to where they belong, i.e. gloves to the coat closet, hair brushes to the bathroom or bedroom, etc.
- Get Movin’: Many tasks can be done in less than two minutes. Get yourself in the habit of being wildly productive in a short time span and see how much you can accomplish. Challenge yourself the next time you are waiting for water to boil for tea or the oven to heat up and see how many items you can put back in place. Sift through your junk drawer and purge items no longer needed. Sort through the mail. Fire up the shredder. Take newspapers, magazines, bottles, etc to the recycle bin. Empty the dishwasher.
- Do It Now: It’s so easy to use a pair of scissors and set them on the counter instead of back in the drawer just as it’s tempting to set dirty dishes in the sink rather than open up the dishwasher. But these are the things that build up and make you crabby when you walk into a room full of disarray. Keep up with it; start telling yourself “do it now” when faced with procrastinating on small tasks.
- Watch What Comes In: It’s difficult to keep a handle on organization when new items show up from the mall, Target and Amazon.com. As you contemplate purchasing new items, give it some serious thought. Where will this new item be stored? Do you truly love it? Do you truly need it, or will something you already own do the job? Try the “one in, one out” rule, where you must get rid of an old item to make room for the new.
Think of organizational maintenance as similar to dental care. You don’t brush and floss your teeth one time and think, “Well, that’s all done!” No! You have to continue to care for your teeth every day, or the plaque builds up. Same thing with clutter. Keep at it a little bit each day and you’ll never spend a whole Saturday sorting papers. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, of course!
Restoration Organization
A delightfully organized closet or desk can soon become a disaster without a little bit of daily maintenance. You worked hard to get that space in prime shape, don’t give up on it! Maintenance is the backbone of organizing. It keeps the happiness in the house, allowing you to take pride in your spaces. Even just a little bit of maintenance a day will reap huge rewards and prevent you from slogging through several hours of catch-up each weekend.
- Clean Sweep: When you got organized, you should have set up a proper home for each of your items, so everything belonged to a specific location. At the end of each day, do a pick-up of the main areas of your home, returning items back to where they belong, i.e. gloves to the coat closet, hair brushes to the bathroom or bedroom, etc.
- Get Movin’: Many tasks can be done in less than two minutes. Get yourself in the habit of being wildly productive in a short time span and see how much you can accomplish. Challenge yourself the next time you are waiting for water to boil for tea or the oven to heat up and see how many items you can put back in place. Sift through your junk drawer and purge items no longer needed. Sort through the mail. Fire up the shredder. Take newspapers, magazines, bottles, etc to the recycle bin. Empty the dishwasher.
- Do It Now: It’s so easy to use a pair of scissors and set them on the counter instead of back in the drawer just as it’s tempting to set dirty dishes in the sink rather than open up the dishwasher. But these are the things that build up and make you crabby when you walk into a room full of disarray. Keep up with it; start telling yourself “do it now” when faced with procrastinating on small tasks.
- Watch What Comes In: It’s difficult to keep a handle on organization when new items show up from the mall, Target and Amazon.com. As you contemplate purchasing new items, give it some serious thought. Where will this new item be stored? Do you truly love it? Do you truly need it, or will something you already own do the job? Try the “one in, one out” rule, where you must get rid of an old item to make room for the new.
Think of organizational maintenance as similar to dental care. You don’t brush and floss your teeth one time and think, “Well, that’s all done!” No! You have to continue to care for your teeth every day, or the plaque builds up. Same thing with clutter. Keep at it a little bit each day and you’ll never spend a whole Saturday sorting papers. Unless you’re into that kind of thing, of course!
