You may hope Spring is eternal, but check your calendar… Winter is coming. Do you have clutter like that? No matter how often you clean your house, the pile always comes back, like some endless summer loop. Watch this video for four reasons this clutter keeps falling on your counters like leaves in Autumn. Declare open season on your clutter and get your home in order.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdhope.)
Transcript:
Hi I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and online program. Today we’re talking about those recurring problem areas in your home and how to fix them once and for all. I’m going to share with you four mistakes that I commonly see people making so that you can learn from their mistakes and not do them yourself.
First, I see people not approaching their organizing projects as a system. People love to jump in and just clean something up and shuffle things around, but it doesn’t solve the ultimate problem that caused the situation to happen in the first place. I’m putting some questions up here on the screen for you that you can ask yourself that will help you put that Sherlock Holmes hat on and get objectivity back into your situation. Look at the origins of the problem and go through the chain of custody of these items, and figure out how this is happening so that you can make a system that works for good.
The second mistake that we see people making has to do with not figuring maintenance tasks into the system that you create. I always tell people that we don’t brush our teeth 60 times in one day and then stop and do it again a month later. We have to brush our teeth twice a day, because that requires regular care. Areas in your home require that too, like your dishes and your mail. It doesn’t work if you do it on a haphazard, once-and- for-all kind of basis and then you stop and wait another few months and do it again. Think about that when you are creating that system, make sure that you know what those tasks are and, more importantly, who needs to do them.
The third mistake that I see people making is that they have unrealistic standards. Unfortunately, through the media, we have an unrealistic picture of what our homes are supposed to be like. We do not have teams of stylists and interior designers fixing up our living rooms every day. We live there, so we’re going to have some toys out, some glasses and dishes around, it’s part of our daily life. We need to reexamine how we feel, if we have a little bit of perfectionism in our minds, and make sure that we get more realistic about how things are supposed to be every day. I know having children did this for me. I accepted that there were going to be more toys lying around most of the time and that I would like to sacrifice some of that cleanliness and order for more quality time with my kids.
The last mistake I want to point out is that people are going around without having proper resources and information for a problem that may be chronic and challenging for them. There is an organization called The Institute for Challenging Disorganization the website is challengingdisorganization.org. They specialize in helping people who have ADHD, people who have struggled with disorganization their entire lives, people who have hoarding disorder in varying degrees, and even traumatic brain injuries. There are some situations that are very challenging. If you have recurring problem areas through most of your house, I encourage you to look at challengingdisorganization.org, check out their clutter hoarding scale, and even find an organizer, a consultant, to help you in person or on the phone. This can be very helpful, it might just give you that breakthrough tip that you need to make progress and feel better in your home.
If you need some breakthrough tips and a little bit of objectivity, most of the time, we can help you in our online program, and we have a team of organizers available seven days a week to answer every member question. You can check us out at https://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
You may have been searching for how to maintain organization or what to do when you can’t stay organized.
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