Ten Tips to Motivate You to Get (and Stay) Organized!
New year’s resolution: stay organized!
For this blog post in video form, please head to my YouTube channel or check the bottom of this post.
Are you on the right track to organizing freedom but want to make sure you keep it going? Read this post for my 10 simple tips to help motivate you to get and stay organized!
If you’re dreaming of making organizing an organic part of your life, keep reading. You will be the one that never has to say, “oh I wish I could be more organized”. I have shared these tips with friends and clients and in my book.
1. Closet
The closet sets the mood for your entire day. It’s also an ideal place to practice and hone organizing skills that can transfer over to the rest of your goals. I know that if you start your day choosing clothes from a laser-focused closet, you’re well on your way to a structured, system-driven office space. No one’s home or office needs to be perfect. But these spaces should reflect YOUR priorities—the life they want, and the things they want to accomplish. Link to my video on 3 simple steps on how to get started organizing your closet.
2. Time Management
Batch similar activities to help stay focused, improve your creativity, and avoid wasting time.
3. Planning
Make your calendar your best friend.
4. Weekly Check In
Make yourself as efficient as possible, and if something is not efficient, consider outsourcing it.
5. Make organizing a priority
Start with even 10 minutes at the end or beginning of the day and after 21 days it will be a habit.
6. Get travel prepared
Plan before you even know you’re going to travel.
7. Functional or pretty?
Always be ready and willing to assess your newly organized spaces, and decide if they’re truly functional, or if they’re too complicated; if they’re too complicated, re-evaluate and re-organize so that things make the most sense for your daily life.
8. Measure and celebrate
I always quote Peter Drucker, management guru, “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.”
And of course, I love an opportunity to pop a bottle of Veuve Cliquot Champagne to celebrate my organizing successes!
9. Adapt
I’m an expert in adapting, whether it’s adapting from the countryside to the city, from one city to the next, to different sizes of spaces, or to different countries. Whether you’re single or part of a large family, whether you live in an apartment or a mansion, you need to know how to store your shoes and fold your sheets, and we all need to embrace the wonders of labelling. But adapt your organizing system to YOUR lifestyle and update it as your lifestyle changes.
10. Organizing is FUN
Ultimately, I’m presenting these tips and all my ideas potential inspiration, rather than prescription. I want what I do to inspire you, not tell you how to live your life. And you need to find a way to make organizing fun.
So now you have my ten tips, my ultimate goal is to make organizing so routine that people actually forget about it. In my book, Organizing for Your Lifestyle, I promote “Organizing is a lifestyle, but it isn’t one-size-fits-all.” Incorporating organizing into your life shouldn’t, ultimately, involve changing who you are, but rather maximizing it. Remember: being organized doesn’t mean thinking about organizing all the time. Ideally, being organized means that you don’t have to think about organizing all the time—because you do it automatically, as an organic part of your everyday routine.”
