When you’re stuck in a big organizing project, do you feel like you can’t see the forest for the trees? Watch this video to stop sweating the small stuff and keep the end in sight. When you are swamped by your project, following these tips will help you remember the big picture.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdmicro.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we are going to talk about macro versus micro organizing. What does that mean? It means don’t sweat the small stuff, at least not at first. So, when you’re first doing a project, especially a large one, you want to make sure that all of the big stuff is figured out first and you want to place everything where it goes. Sometimes we call this doing a “raw sort.” And then after that, once everything’s figured out, you can go back down on a micro level and detail out the space and create the systems that are going to work long-term.
So, here I am in my new kitchen, in my new house. I’m so excited to show you many cool things about the new house that I’ll be doing videos about in the weeks to come. But this is the spice cabinet where I have done a raw sort and I have placed all the spices in here simply to get them out of the way, get everything functional, and now I’m coming back today, and I’m going to do the spice cabinet the right way. I placed everything here with my SpaceScaping Kitchen Organizing System labels. So, I knew the spices would go here, because it’s next to the stove, and I need that to be very handy. Here’s the thing, builders, cabinet makers, they will always put in your shelves evenly spaced when they deliver the cabinets. So, these are adjustable and that looks great, but when I put the spices in here, that’s not really that functional for me. What I’m going to do is come back in here with a double turntable, so obviously I’m going to need to adjust the shelves, and I think it’s kind of interesting because over the years I’ve noticed that clients seem to have a block or a hesitation about the fact that they actually have adjustable shelves and they really don’t want to go through the trouble of actually moving them, or they haven’t even thought about actually moving them. So I want to encourage you to think about that; if you have an organizing problem to solve, that actually might be the solution for you.
So, let’s see what this looks like now after I have finished detailing on a micro level the spices. And here’s the after. I moved the shelves here and here to make room for this double turntable. I separated the spices into cooking and baking, or if you want to think about that as sweet versus savory. I do have another video, all about organizing spices if you want to watch that, but mainly I wanted to impress upon you the difference between macro and micro organizing. So, when you’re organizing your garage, don’t get stuck sorting out every little nail and screw before you’ve sorted and placed everything in a bigger way. And if you’re organizing a closet or bedroom, don’t get stuck with that box of photographs going through on a micro level looking at all of your memories from days gone by before you have organized the rest of the closet.
We really want to help you get unstuck. And if you do need help getting unstuck, we have helped thousands of people in 18 countries with our program, and you can learn more about that at clutterdiet.com/learnmore, where we give you professional expert advice for about the price of a pizza.
We’ll 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 structure an organizing project.
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