These days, we’re asking a lot of our homes—we need them to support us in our work life, school life, and our regular, everyday life. They’ve become our gyms, our schools, our offices, and our places for rest and rejuvenation.
With so much activity and time spent at home, things can get messy. Whether you’ve been wanting to organize certain parts of your home for a while or need better systems now to support the increased demands on your home, now’s a good time to get organized.
I asked Darla DeMorrow, a certified professional organizer and founder of HeartWork Organizing for her advice. Here’s what she said.
It’s a new kind of insanity for working parents to have to keep track of multiple school schedules, so having a shared calendar and a daily check-in is crucial. Organized people may not realize that the obvious ways to stay organized may not be at all obvious to someone else, so go ahead and explain where things belong at home.
Most of all, make time to put things away at least once a day. Just like brushing your teeth, daily maintenance goes a long way in keeping everyone and everything mostly organized. Most of all, relax your expectations for just about everything, especially staying organized.
Step 1 is to start with a written goal that is five words or less. This helps you focus on your project and eliminates distractions.
Step 2 is to organize into groups. This gets results fast, helping you figure out what you have without adding emotional stress with an artificial keep-or-toss decision.
Step 3 is reduce, release, and reset. Once you see what and how much of each group you have, it’s much easier to part with things you no longer need or want. With your collections sorted and pared down, reset your cabinets, closets, and shelves, which will no longer be overstuffed.
Step 4 is tweak the space. This is when you can upgrade your storage containers and make sure that your most-used items are in easy-to-reach spots.
Step 5 is succeed by celebrating. A reward that you choose helps to train your brain to have fun organizing. Your reward can be a healthy walk or call to a friend. Once you’ve gotten through one small project like a closet, you can use the same system to get through any other project. You can use the same system to maintain your home in short 15-minute projects.
Once they are on a single drive, you can use software to de-duplicate, rename, and move photos around in batches to get them organized. You can then review your physical photos, toss the duds (we all have them), and send the best ones out to be digitally scanned so they can be added to your digital collection. Scanning at home often yields poor results that have to be re-done, so it’s worth paying once to get great results.
Learn how to use the photo maintenance software that you already have. Mac owners will usually use iCloud Photos. Android users have a few more options. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you can scroll through your family’s entire history on your cellphone, create a photo book, or share a fun project with important people in your life.
Why not create a photo book of all the strange and wonderful things that happened to you this year? Give a customized slideshow as a present for a birthday or anniversary this year. If this all seems overwhelming, contact a professional photo organizer who can coach you through the entire photo organizing process or do it for you.
High-impact projects are ones that you use every day, like your medicine cabinet, the floor of your closet, a single shelf on a bookcase, or a single kitchen drawer or cabinet. The refrigerator can be a great small project to start with because it’s self-contained.
Instead of trying to organize the whole house, set a timer on your phone for 15 minutes and just organize the shoes at the door. Instead of trying to organize the playroom, just spend 15 minutes putting toys away one day, and labeling for 15 minutes the next day. Better yet, get the family into the action for just a few minutes each day and teach them to “SORT and Succeed,” too.