Great Tips to Keep Your Life Organized
Do your messy house, overflowing desk, and chaotic schedule make you feel like your life is unorganized? Professional organizers, life coaches, and popular magazines like Good Housekeeping and Woman’s Day offer these five key tips for a better organization:
- Decide What You Need
- Examine Everything
- Create Organization Stations
- Use Technology
- Add Happy Touches
Get started organizing your life! Each one of these tips is excellent advice on ways to make an organization work for you.
1. Decide What You Need
Before you open a single closet or go through any piles of paperwork, stop and decide what you need in your life. Are you a busy, outgoing person who is rarely at home? Then you probably don’t need a cabinet full of board games or a dresser stuffed with extra clothes to wear around the house. Do you prefer to stay at home and enjoy quiet hobbies? Get rid of the camping equipment you never use and all the party shoes you don’t wear. A key tip for an organization is deciding what you need in your life right now and not hanging onto things from the past or an improbable future.
Consider your lifestyle and regular schedule to help you get organized. Do you love to stop for flavored coffee on your way to work? Take the coffee pot off your counter to make room for something more useful. If you park on the street, take down the key hook you once used by the back door and replace it with a key dish near your front entrance. Hanging on to old items and old habits keeps you from being organized.
2. Examine Everything
When you’re organizing your kitchen, it’s tempting to leave one drawer as a “catch-all” of miscellaneous things. It might be easy to sort through your books but having a pile of catalogs you haven’t touched creates clutter. Old makeup, unworn jewelry, and old sports equipment shouldn’t be left as disorganized messes.
The clutter in your home or workplace can make you unorganized throughout your life. Have you been late for work because you couldn’t find your keys? Ever miss an important meeting because your desk calendar was covered in papers? Organizing your things helps you stay on schedule.
3. Create Organization Stations
Keeping everything you need for a project in one place helps you organize your life. At home, having everything you need to wrap presents – paper, bags, bows, ribbon, scissors, and tape – in one spot saves you time. Keeping all the diner dishes near the table cuts down on setting up for meals because you won’t be looking through multiple cabinets for plates and bowls. Creating a mudroom space near the door keeps boots, mittens, and hats in one location. Organization stations free up your time to do other things.
At work, devote one desk drawer for pens, paperclips, and small notepads, or whatever you use most during the day. If you’re in the trades, sort your toolboxes into items used for similar jobs, so you can grab the one you need for each project. Your work life will feel more organized when you are better prepared for the tasks you do.
4. Use Technology
Technology can help you organize your life in many ways. Electronic calendars can be shared with your whole family’s smartphones, so everyone knows the schedule. You can request doctor’s appointments and car maintenance visits online instead of spending time on hold on the phone. A smart home hub can read you the weather and traffic reports in the mornings, so you know if you need a jacket or which route to avoid instead of being late for school or work.
5. Add Happy Touches
Once you’ve cleaned out your closets, created organization stations, and added technology to your life, reward your efforts by adding happy touches to the places you spend most of your time. Repaint your den your favorite color after you’ve cleaned out all the old books and papers. Add a flowering plant to your newly organized desk. Get a new wallet once you’ve cut up all your expired cards and thrown out old receipts you were carrying.
Rewarding yourself and creating comfortable places helps keep you organized. If you let clutter build back up, your efforts don’t seem worthwhile. Remind yourself that being organized is better by personalizing or decorating and area you’ve prepared. Organizing your things will give you more time, so use it to take a class, read a book, or participate in something that makes you happy.
