Personalized Organizing
Organizing is not one-size-fits-all – how to use personalized organizing to have better results.
When it comes to organizing – your life, your home, your paperwork, your finances – you have to find ways to make it work for you instead of trying to force yourself to fit some structured organizing process. Yes, there are tips and tricks that anyone can use to help declutter and organize, but the systems you pit in place to keep you organized need to work for you.
What Is Personalized Organizing?
Personalized organizing is organizing based on what helps you be the most efficient and stress free person you can be. It means that just because we all see pictures of organized homes that look fairly sterile and spotless doesn’t mean that’s the right way – or the only way – to be more organized. Personalized organization leans in to what works best for you, and that means taking into consideration the kind of time you have available, the other demands you have in your life, and even anything you might struggle with, like ADHD.
How Do I Personalize My Organizing Habits?
The first step in personalized organization is to stop measuring yourself against a manufactured standard of what it means to be organized. The next step is to stop seeking perfection in your life, your home, or your organizing systems. Life is messy. There will always be another pile of laundry, more dust, and another bed to make. The point of personalized organization it to keep your stuff – physical, digital, and mental – from causing you stress that takes away from you enjoying life.
Organizing and Decluttering, a Personalized Approach
Often when we’re working with a client, they will either be embarrassed about how they store stuff or worried that they won’t be able to maintain a newly organized space. But the whole idea behind organization is to develop a system to maintain it that actually works for you. Yes, everything having its place helps, because things don’t pile up, but that place doesn’t have to be conventional.
Examples of Personalized Organizing
Paperwork, mail, and paying the bills: if you struggle to manage paying bills, you may need to better organize your mail. For one person, the best way to do that might be to get the mail, stand over the trash can, and immediately throw out the junk and pay the bills immediately. For another person it might mean sorting the mail into different piles but leaving them visible, on a counter or table, to be reminded to deal with it. Yet another person might throw out junk but keep some kind of filing system organized by date for bills that are coming due. It doesn’t really matter how you do it; the end goals are paying bills on time and eliminating paper clutter where possible.
Clothes closet: There are countless ways to organize your clothes closet. For some people, having containers and baskets and color-coded hangers can make the entire closet easier to manage. For others, that might make it seem more chaotic. The trick is to discover what helps you be more organized and spend less time stressing. It may be as simple as putting your clothes away as soon as the laundry is done so that you can find an outfit more easily the next day. It might be spending ten minutes at night laying out everything you’ll need for the next morning. Clear containers to store shoes might be great for one person but add stress to someone else who would rather have the shoes out in the open, lined up on a shelf. At the end of the day, it’s about what makes life easier for you.
Decluttering Helps with Organizing
One of the best methods for improving your personalized organizing journey is to start by decluttering. We recommend choosing a space that causes you stress, removing everything from that space, and sorting and categorizing everything. You can sort the stuff into throw away, recycle, donate, and keep. Once you’ve identified what you are keeping, you can determine if it belongs in the space you’re organizing or if it actually has a home somewhere else in your house. Organizing what’s left can then be done to suit your personal style and needs.
Personalized organizing is about making your life easier, reducing your stress, and making it easier for you to stay organized. Forcing yourself to stick to organizing plans that just stress you out makes no sense. If you need help finding a way to stay organized that works for you, give us a call!