Have a New Year’s Resolution to Get Organized? 5 Tips to Make it Really Happen This Time!
I love fresh starts—the start of each season, each school year, and of course, the new year.
The new year brings an exciting sparkle to new goals and dreams and an exciting energy to make big things happen.
While I’m a fan of fresh starts, the new year, and goals, I squirm when “finally getting organized” is someone’s big goal.
A few reasons for my unsavory knee-jerk reaction are that new year’s resolutions place pressure, a sense of urgency, rigidness, and, if you have perfectionist tendencies a likelihood of disappointment. There is a crash and burn associated with resolutions around getting organized, and while I don’t want you to stop before you start, I do want to set you up for success.
Here are five tips to increase the odds of organizing your home, new year resolution or not.
- Get clear on your end goal.
You can’t build a house without a blueprint; you need to see the end goal as you work on the project. You need to know where you’re headed.
You can journal, sketch, or meditate on it. Decide on what you want out of your home, what you value doing in your home, and how your home should serve you. What does it look like when it’s tidy? Get clear on those wants before you start the decluttering and organizing process.
- Embrace that learning how to get organized is a practice. Not a one-and-done. Like all other new skills and projects, you get to make mistakes. Let it take time. Lean into it.
Here is where I insert the “riding a bike” comparison. No one is born with an organizing gene. While this teachable skill may come a bit easier to some, it is a learned skill like driving a car, tying your shoes, roller skating, or riding a bike.
Let yourself be a flawed human that is failing forward. We teach our clients that progress over perfection is everything because there is no such thing as perfection.
- Social media is a lie. Don’t compare, and lower your standards.
I have worked in hundreds of homes, and only a couple looked as pulled together as a Pinterest post most times. Those homes NEVER had children or pets, and the homeowners could afford a lot of outsourcing when it came to cleaning, decluttering, and organizing. In all honesty, those museum-quality homes never felt comfortable to me. It was easy to fear you would ruin something at any moment by simply breathing.
Everyday life isn’t always tidy. And in my opinion, a fun life isn’t always orderly. So leave behind those deceitful images you see on the internet and allow yourself to enjoy a realistic standard of care in your home.
Decide on the lowest level of tidiness you can stand in your home. Try to maintain that for a while. When your time and energy resources increase, do more. We suggest the opposite of perfectionism. We want to challenge you to rebel and lower your standards from social media delusions to your real-life version!
- Schedule your time investments.
Goals are delicious little rays of hope. Giving us a chance to work towards something we know will make life much more delightful, but a goal without time investments is just some hopeful words scrawled out in your goal journal.
Book decluttering and organizing time blocks with yourself. Put them on the calendar. Whether it‘s 15-minute daily spurts or three-hour blocks, put it on the calendar!
Make it a reality by treating this time as important as any other appointment in your schedule.
- Declutter first.
Almost everyone I work with accumulates something I call the “container graveyard.”
It is a natural desire to buy something that will fix your problems. So you purchase some bins and baskets with reckless abandon and run home, stuff your chaos in said baskets and containers, and wallah! Your concerns are all done, the stars have aligned, life is sparkly and shiny, and you are basically Oprah now.
The problem that happens is that you didn’t declutter first. You didn’t reduce or take inventory of what you have throughout the house. You bought a bin to hold three boxes of light bulbs on a shelf in your laundry room, but you just found a lifetime supply of light bulbs that you purchased from Costco during the pandemic in the garage (behind the backup toilet paper). Now you must rethink and re-buy where the light bulbs live and what kind of container will hold that lifetime supply.
When I help my clients reduce, we tend to remove the excess and not need as much containment as they initially thought. So they end up with that container graveyard.
If you complete the decluttering phase, you will likely save money and time and could avoid making an even bigger mess!
In summary:
- Get a crisp vision of that end goal!
- Embrace that decluttering and organizing are skills you get to be “bad” at when you start!
- Don’t fall into the social media comparison game. You deserve a realistic standard within your home.
- If you don’t schedule it, it probably won’t happen.
- Declutter first. For the love of dog, always declutter first.
Rock Star Residential Services is here for you if you would like virtual or onsite support cutting through the overwhelm. Call us for a zero-pressure and complimentary consultation to discuss your decluttering and organizing goals at 541-610-7810.