What’s Holding You Back From an Organized Home?
I love The Container Store as much as the next person. Probably more. A whole store dedicated to organizing your home AND making it look good?? Sign me up.
But… buying cute bins and boxes is not going to magically make your home organized. The same goes for hiring an interior designer or professional organizer.
Yes, we help you create systems that work with your lifestyle and making organization easier, but systems alone won’t keep your home tidy.
In my experience, the clutter will inevitably start to build up again, and the tension will creep back in. (Remember that drawer you organized that now looks like a mess again? That’s what I’m talking about, but on a bigger scale — your home.)
This is because physical possessions are not the source of someone’s stressful clutter. Delayed actions and decisions are.
Keeping your home and life well-organized requires daily maintenance and healthy habits. You have to maintain your systems every day to keep them from falling apart.
Here’s how:
STEP 1: Pay Attention to delayed actions.
The first step is awareness, because most of us don’t realize when we’re procrastinating actions that will spare us clutter. To open your eyes to them, take note of the seemingly small decisions you postpone each day.
For example:
Hanging up your coat when you walk in the door
Sorting the mail right away versus leaving it in a “later” pile
Adding an item to your grocery list right when it runs out
Deciding what to do with your child’s 1,000th piece of art
Hanging on to bulky or unsightly gifts from family members
Etc.
Step 2: Look for the common threads.
Next, ask yourself…
What do these procrastinated tasks have in common?
Are they tasks that require action, such as paying bills or responding to emails? (Yes, digital clutter is still clutter.)
Are they choices that require discomfort or moving past guilt? (Like gifts or inherited items that you really don’t love.)
Do they feel “difficult” because they require you to learn something new or do something you don’t feel you’re good at?
The feelings spurring the procrastination — these are your “inhibitors.”
Once you’ve discovered what’s inhibiting you from taking decisive action and becoming a more organized person, you can start to tackle them head on.
Step 3: Practice Challenging your inhibitors.
Now, you have to practice fighting against those inhibitors, such as making actionable tasks easier (like putting bills on auto-pay), tackling those feelings of guilt, or retraining your brain to realize that, yes, you HAVE learned and improved at so many new things in your life and you can again.
You have to retrain yourself to take action and make decisions right away and with confidence. A strategy I’ve found useful is to think about your personal values and let them guide you.
For example, should you keep this chair your mother just gave you, even though you find it ugly?
Well, what are your deepest values? If you value family above all else, what does this chair represent to you? Is it just a piece of furniture or does it hold a special memory of a loved one?
If it does feel special, how can you remove whatever is feeling negative about it (such as the style)? Could you reupholster it to add fresh style to your home and have a story you can tell your kids? Or would you rather keep family close in a way that feels more impactful to you than a chair?
As an organizing coach, I can guide you to the best answer for you (or some creative solutions), but at the end of the day, only YOU know what’s most meaningful to you.
REAL TALK…
Decision-making is essential to having an organized life — and 100% personal — which is why having storage solutions alone will never guarantee an organized, clutter-free home.
If you want to create and KEEP an ordered home and a well-organized life, you have to change the way you approach it, too.
As always, I’m here to help if you need me. Happy organizing!
Yours,
Kristi