7 rules for organising your stuff
Well look at you… you’re nearly half way there!
If you’re just starting the 7 Day Organising Challenge today, no problem. Keep scrolling to read the previous days’ posts in full below.
Day 1 – Choose one area to declutter & organise over the next 7 days
Day 2 – Create a vision for how you want that space to be
Day 3 – Declutter
For the rest of us, it’s time for…
Step 4.
Organise.
Top Tip: Hold off on any urge you may have to go out and buy storage solutions at this stage. In most cases, you’re much better to start the organising process using what you already have. Trust me! By the end of the process, you’ll be able to see exactly what you need, how many and in what colour. At the moment, it’s really just a guessing game.
Now, the organising process will be different for each of us depending on what we’re organising. But regardless of whether you’re working in your garage or in a wardrobe, a cupboard or your digital files, there are a few organising principles that will steer you in the right direction. Here are 7 of the best:
- Everything needs a home, or it will become clutter
- Store like items together rather than having them dotted around in various locations
- Keep things as close as possible to where they are used, wherever practical
- Put your most frequently used items front and centre, with lesser used items up higher, down lower or towards the harder-to-reach backs of cupboards
- It’s usually best to store items wherever your first instinct is to put them, because that’s inevitably the place you’ll look for it later
- Utilise vertical space wherever possible, be that walls, peg boards or simply a magazine box to reduce horizontal piles on a flat surface
- Set limits. It’s often when you’re putting the items you want to keep away, that you realise you’ve still got way more stuff that you need, want or can maintain. A lot of the people I work with find it helpful to look at the space available and decide how much of it is worth dedicating to a particular category of item. Because at the end of the day, the hard truth is, you can either have the stuff or the space, not both
Remember to refer back to the answers you came up with on Day 2 as you go about reorganising the space. There’s no point creating a system that you’ve tried before and you already know doesn’t work for you.
Likewise, you need to organise the space in a way that anyone who is likely to be using it is going to be able to both find what they need and put it away again without needing to bug you about it each time.
Once you finish organising the space, you’ve done the hard yards. The next few days will be much easier, I promise! Having said that, it’s often about this stage in the process when people realise they need help, so if that’s you, send me a message or your questions and let’s chat.
You can totally do this! See you tomorrow.
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