Taking Baby Steps To Getting Organized

Creating room to breathe is a crucial step to living a more organized life. De-cluttering and getting organized is also usually one of the top three New Year's resolutions each year. It's too bad that so many people give up before they've really made much progress on this front. Maybe this statistic from the National Association of Professional Organizers might help: simply getting rid of clutter eliminates 40% of housework in the average home. Imagine that. Getting rid of clutter can cut your housework by nearly half! Dealing with clutter can also help you reign in unnecessary spending. When your space is disorganized and overflowing with items you don't need or use, it's harder to find items you need but already have, so you waste money "replacing" them or buying organizational tools or even professional assistance to help you wrangle the stuff. Let's make 2010 the year you get one step ahead of the clutter. The key: baby steps.

Sarah on "Ditch the Guilt" "Clutter is a major stressor. Whenever we interview people about clutter, they use words like "overwhelmed," "nightmare," and "guilty" to describe how they felt about the issue. Words like overwhelmed, nightmare, and guilty are highly charged; they are capable of sapping anyone of a substantial amount of energy and joie de vivre. We're hugely in favor of ditching the guilt. Clutter simply accumulates. If you don't have systems in place to deal with it on a regular basis, then it's going to be a problem. So rather than lose sleep or precious energy and goodwill over it, we say, learn why it accumulates and ways to stay on top of it, using shortcuts wherever you can."

Alicia on "Right-Size the Problem" "One major reason people let clutter accumulate is because they think it will take a lot longer to deal with than it actually does. As a matter of fact, Sarah actually procrastinated for months on cleaning up her desk, but when she finally tackled it, it only took her twenty minutes to deal with. You can see a video of how she did took her desk from disaster to desirable at: http://www.youtube.com/buttonedupinc#p/a/u/2/Wg0CpI3S8Uw. Don't let your fear of how long it will take to deal with clutter get in your way of doing something about it now."

Here are a few more ways to take baby steps towards getting organized in the coming year.

1. Establish a Daily Clutter-Busting Routine. Once established, simple routines take next to zero extra effort and are incredibly effective at keeping clutter at bay. For a lot of people, a simple five-minute clutter-scan and clean up routine right before you head to bed works wonders. For others, a routine fifteen-minute cutter-busting session on Saturday mornings does the trick. Just decide on one routine that you can fit into your daily or weekly life and start implementing it this week.

2. Establish Some Rules About Clutter. Rules for dealing with clutter enable dealing with the inevitable onslaught to become a mere reflex. There are two kinds of rules you can put in place: (1) rules about how much clutter you will tolerate before having to deal with it, or (2) rules about preventing clutter to accumulate. An example of the first type: on Sunday night before I go to bed, my desk must be clean (or the mail pile must be dealt with). An example of the second type might be: no junk mail can enter the house (or stay on a counter for more than 24 hours). Before the week is out, make one of each type of rule and put them into effect.

3. Create a Temporary Holding Bin. There are things that you just don't know whether or not you should hold on to or throw away. This is a baby step in removing clutter that you're so attached to, you can't bring yourself to get rid of in the moment. During a review, you place items you think are no longer useful or needed in a temporary holding bin. If you find that after a specified amount of time goes by, you have not looked at or used any of the items in the temporary holding bin, you take the next step and get rid of the items - either donating them or tossing them.