Organizing Incentives

Tip: Incentives work!  Give yourself an incentive for each scheduled organizing session you put on your calendar and keep.  Give yourself an incentive for each target area you tackle and make progress on.  Give yourself an incentive for each flat surface you organize.

Organizing Takes Practice

Tip: Practice organizing.  The trick to getting better and mastering the skill of organizing is to practice.  Think for a minute of what advice you’d give yourself (or your son or daughter) if you wanted to improve your golf swing.  You’d tell yourself to practice. The same applies to organizing.  I’d recommend practicing organizing for at least 15-20 minutes every day.

Combating Clutter

Tip:  According the American Heritage Dictionary on my shelf, the word clutter as a noun is defined as “a confused or disordered state or collection; a jumble”.  As a verb the word clutter is defined as “to litter or pile in a disordered manner”.  I often here my clients refer to it as their random things, mounds of stuff, or piles of junk.

The three best ways to combat clutter are:
1. Have a designated place where your items, things, and stuff belong, and return them there.
2. Schedule daily and weekly purging in your most lived-in areas of your home.
3. Allow less to come into your home. For example: less paper, mail, trinkets, and purchases

Organizing Kick Space

Tip:  Kick space is space in your closet that you can easily kick into, without your foot coming into contact with anything.  This often indicates that the space isn’t being used efficiently or to it’s maximum capacity.  If you have room to kick without hitting anything, you have room in your closet that could be used more efficiently.

Here are some organizing products can you use to reduce the kick space in your closet: low dressers, low shoe racks, hanger extensions, additional shelves, stack-able shoe boxes, stack-able bins or another hanging rod.

Organizing Air Space

Tip:  Air space is space in your cupboards and closets that is occupied with air only.  To make the most of the precious real estate in your cupboards and closets use organizing products that minimize air space.

To minimize air space in your cupboards:

adjust shelves, if you can

add raisers and platforms

use stack-able containers

mount stemware units to the underside of a shelf

used step raisers, lazy Susan’s, long baskets and pull out drawer units

To minimize air space in your closets:

adjust hanging bars

use hooks

add additional shelves or hanging bars

use tiered hangers