The Secret to Jump Starting Your Organizing Efforts
You feel overwhelmed by the daunting task of decluttering your home. You don’t know where to start.
So you put it off. “Someday I’ll tackle the clutter, but right now, I’m going to check my Facebook feed, watch TV or make a snack.”
Can you relate? We’ve all been there – that place where we feel paralyzed by the magnitude of the job, so we do nothing.
When I teach my organizing workshops, a simple solution I suggest to participants who feel ‘stuck’ is to take some small action.
To get your decluttering efforts moving, I recommend tossing the ‘no brainers’ first.
No brainers are items that don’t require a lot of thought about whether you need to toss or keep them. The decision is obvious because these items are damaged, expired and carry little or no sentimental attachment. This gets the ball rolling and strengthens our purging muscles in preparation for the tougher decisions. Examples of no brainers include: warranties for items you no longer own, chipped dishware, frayed towels, and HBA’s.
What’s an HBA? I didn’t know either. I just learned it from one of my coaching clients. It’s short for Health and Beauty Aids. These are items we purchase (sometimes in bulk, often because they were on sale) with the expectation that they will de-frizz our hair, clear our acne, or erase our wrinkles. We hand over our hard earned money, but sometimes they don’t keep their promise. So we stop using them – yet put them back in the drawer. (After all, we spent good money on them.) Then we buy other brands, still clinging to the fantasy – if only we could find the right one, it would work wonders. We are left with the frustration of crammed drawers and long forgotten HBAs. It’s time to fight back!
Go through your cosmetics and toiletries and toss any items you no longer use. Be ruthless – many do not have an expiry date but if you notice a change in color, odor, texture or consistency, it’s time to get rid of them. You don’t want to risk an eye infection or cause your skin to break out.
What about the travel sized items you brought home from hotels or the sample sizes you accepted? It seemed like a good idea at the time. But if you’ve never used them, consider donating them to a local homeless shelter, fire station (for people who have been displaced by fires or other emergencies), or relief drives in your area. And think twice about bringing them home in the future.
While you’re at it, remove the outer packaging from items you’re storing in the bathroom. Unnecessary cardboard takes up valuable space.
If you don’t have a chunk of time to devote to this purging process, devote just 5 minutes towards it every night – just before you brush your teeth or before you shower in the morning. Set a timer. Everyone has 5 minutes to spare. By the end of the week, not only will you have more storage space in your bathroom, you’ll have easier access to your beauty products -eliminating the stress of digging through mounts of makeup in a drawer or searching inside a dark cupboard for a bar of soap.
Want to keep your bathroom drawers and cupboards organized and clutter free with little or no effort? Use the one-in one-out rule when purchasing toiletries and cosmetics. Use what you have first or, if you are not happy with the product, toss it before purchasing a replacement.
Using these tips will not only help you start and end your day with less frustration, it will also jump start your organizing efforts, moving you from feeling stuck to seeing success.
I often face that type of paralysis when I have too much on my to-do list. Instead of being more efficient, as is needed, when I don’t know where to start, I’ll do something that’s not even on my list. Would the same principle apply? i.e. get the quick and easy tasks out of the way in order to gain some momentum?
Janet, in my opinion, giving ourselves a small window of time, say 20 minutes, to get the easy stuff off our to-do list gives us instant gratification, which can boost our confidence to then tackle the harder stuff. But spending more than that on the easy tasks can be counter-productive if the priority items are never tended to. I call this ‘productive procrastination’ and I particularly hear writers doing this when they get writer’s block. I would be interested hearing in what other readers think about this great question.
When I get travel-sized shampoos, conditioners, and lotions, I pour all of them (yes, even hand and bath lotions) into my squirt container, mix them up, and use as shampoo daily (ensuring there is more shampoo than anything else, usually from the dollar store, so that it lathers well). I have a knitted closure bag that holds all little pieces of leftover soap to use in the shower, so I add hotel partially used soaps in there too. Nothing goes to waste and they don’t take up extra room for storage.
Haha that’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment – my kitchen looks like a bomb site so instead of starting I sat down to check my email… Thanks for the push to get going!
I return products that don’t do what they promise. The product might still end up in the garbage, but at least the company is made aware and I get my money back.
Love reading all the comments! Your thoughts, Hellen, are very helpful! (And I, too, miss Neat!)