I hear it all the time, “Carrie, I have to get organized! My place is a mess. I’ve tried to clean it up so many times but it seems that as soon as I’ve cleaned up it’s a mess again. How do I keep my office, my home, my car looking nice and neat?”
Does this sound familiar to you? Well here’s the deal.
1. Cleaning up and organizing are two different things.
Cleaning up is about how it looks. Cleaning up means that you put things away or at least get them out of sight. Cleaning up is what you do before your mother-in-law visits.
When you clean up, you straighten the piles or maybe put them into bags or boxes and hide them out of the way. When you clean up you gather all of the magazines and articles that you’ve been meaning to read and put them into a nice neat pile and decide that you really are going to read them. When you clean up you gather your clothes up from the floor, from over the chairs and exercise machine and hide stuff them into your closet or drawer.
Organizing is about how it works. Organizing has nothing to do with how it looks. Organizing is something you do for yourself, not your mother-in-law.
The other day one of my clients said, “We tend to keep things because they give us a warm and fuzzy feeling but in actuality they leave us feeling cluttered and foggy.”
Organizing is about clearing the fog. When you organize you go through the piles and make decisions about what you really need to keep as opposed to what you think you’re supposed to keep. Then you put away the things that matter and let go of the rest. When you organize it means that you go through the magazines and decide which ones you’ll really read. You read them and let go of the rest. When you organize, you go through your clothing and keep the ones that you actually wear AND enjoy wearing.
When you organize you only keep the things that serve a real purpose in your life…the things that make your life easier.
2. When things are organized you will still have to clean up.
First the bad news…
Since organizing and cleaning up are not the same you’ll still have to clean up when you’re organized. I am pretty organized but I still clean up before my mother-in-law comes to visit! When you clean up you put away things that you use but may have been left out. You do the things that you’ve been meaning to do or at least decide when you are going to do them.
It is much quicker and easier to clean up when you’re just putting away the things that really matter to you and not putting away everything you have just because you have it.
You can do this when you bring organizing into your day-to-day life and you actively decide whether or not to let things that will leave you feeling clutter and foggy into your home or office in the first place.
3. When things are organized they do tend to look better.
Now, the good news…
I had a client…a 13 year old kid, who was frustrated because his mom and dad were constantly nagging him about his room. He told me that he didn’t care what it looked like as long as he could get what he needed. It was about function over form. He’s a smart kid, he was right. So we spent a few minutes organizing the books he had on a bench in his room. We eliminated the books that he wasn’t going to read and re-shelved the ones that he had already read. It was now organized and it worked much better for him…function over form. But now here’s the thing, much to his despair and his parent’s joy, it looked better too!
Bottom line…
Getting organized is not about putting everything you have away. It’s about putting away the things that will allow you to live the life you want to lead.
In order to get organized you need to make decisions about what things belong in your life and what it might be time to let go of. On the surface it seems that it shouldn’t be so hard but you may be fighting against long held beliefs and habits. Take it slowly and get support. You may be able to enlist a friend or family member or you can hire a coach or professional organizer to help.
One thing I can promise you, as you let go of the clutter and only organize the things that matter to you, you will literally open up space for the life you want to live.
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