Is time just not on your side when you want to get organized? Do you think organized homes belong to people who have all the time in the world? Watch this video for some quick maintenance habits you can adopt in less than no time. Maybe you’ll even wind up with time on your hands. 😉
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcd30secs.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and I’m so excited, this year I was named a contributing editor for Woman’s Day. And this is the April issue that just came out and I wanted to show it to you, because there was a really fun story in here that I did. They said, “Hey, Lorie, what do people do if they just have tiny little chunks of time? How can they still get organized?” I said, “Awesome, let’s just take each little chunk of time and give people little projects they can do.” And there’s a whole list of all of them in this issue, it’s Page 32, but I’m going to share a few of these tips with you right now.
So, if you have only 30 seconds, I want you to just go to that big scary mail pile you have and pull out all the reading material. Any newspapers, newsletters, magazines, catalogs, get all that bulky stuff out of your mail pile and put it where you’re going to read it, or recycle it, or whatever, and once that is out, your mail pile will feel much more manageable and approachable. You can attack that with your letter opener later on at another time, but that little 30 seconds is going to organize your reading material and make you feel a whole lot better.
If you have only one minute, you can take some donation items or some of your store returns or other errand items to your car and simply just get them one step closer to where they need to go.
If you have five minutes, you can move your laundry to the next stage. So if it’s dirty, wash it. If it’s wet, dry it. If it’s dry, fold it. And if it’s folded, put it away. And some of those tasks actually take less than five minutes. So then you can use that extra time to do some of those smaller things I already said. But put it to the next stage, you’ll feel so much better.
If you have 10 minutes, you can tidy up one drawer in your dresser or closet. And if you have extra time left, you can do two drawers. And if you just do that 10 minutes a day, for a few days, you will have all of your drawers organized in very little time with very little effort. So that is an easy project for you.
If you have only 15 minutes, you can do a quick speed cleaning of your car. So, go down there to the car, get all the gear and the toys and the gadgets out of there. Throw the trash away, shake out the mats, maybe you even have a little mini vacuum cleaner, you could give it a little touchup. Whatever you need to do to make it feel better in your car, go and do that. It really won’t take you that long.
If you have 30 minutes, you can do what I call a sit-and- shred, where you’ve got your big shred pile that you’ve had accumulating in your basket, maybe in your office, and you can sit in front of your favorite TV show for the half-hour with your shredder and just simply stick things in the shredder while you’re watching, and you’ll be done before you know it.
If you have 45 minutes, you can do your food storage containers, organize those by matching up all the lids to the containers, making sure that every container has a lid. If there are extra leftovers of the lids or containers take those orphans and put them together and save them aside to make sure they don’t go with anything later, and then eventually donate those. But get it all matched up and figured out and donate what you don’t need.
If you have an hour, you can organize all the cords and cables around your desk or your entertainment center and label those cords. You can pull them through the proper cord management holes in the desk or the entertainment center furniture, and you can group them with cable ties and make it all feel a lot better so that next time you have to get back there, you’ll know exactly what you’re unplugging and why and where it goes to put it back. So, that will feel better and be easier to manage.
There are so many more tips in this article. Again, the April of 2014 issue of Woman’s Day. And we are going to be continuing the Project De-Clutter series that we started last year. So, we already have one of those, I think it was in the February issue that we did as well. So, look for that the rest of the year (I’m so excited). And if you need help with any of these projects of course we can help you, seven days a week. We have a team of organizers ready to give you unlimited advice in our member area. So you can check that out free for two weeks, and go find out more about that at https://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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