Have you completed your organizing project and established homes and routines for everything, but now your space is looking just like it did before you began? Do your once organized spaces now make you feel like saying Bah and Humbug? You don’t have to wait for the Ghost of Christmas Past to revisit your system and make changes to your routines. Don’t get Scrooged on all the progress you’ve made, take some time to revisit your system today!
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Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we have Part 5 of our five-part series on our general approach for organizing projects. And that is the acronym “order.” We’ve done “O” for Outline your plan, “R” for Review your items, “D” for Decide where things belong, “E” for establish homes and routines, and now we’re at the last “R,” which is Revisit your system.
I believe that when you create a system, there’s no such thing as a perfect system, particularly the first time you set it up. But things change. People change. Circumstances change. So you’re always going to need to tweak your system. Things aren’t going to work the way you think they will. There’s always a way to improve.
So, in my pantry, I may end up adding a turntable, or I might add some helper shelves. Here, I will tell you that when I built this pantry, I was coming in to check on the progress of the building and I noticed that they stopped the shelves at this level. When I saw that – and I’ll show you the picture here – there was a lot of vertical space that was going to be wasted, so luckily I caught them in time, and I was able to ask them to put one more shelf in the pantry. Many pantries can afford to have one more layer of shelving up at the top. Closets too. You might look at that. Also, I wanted to point out that when I was building, I had them put in an automatic switch. It’s down here, and it is turned off and on as the door opens and closes. So, this is something you can do when you’re remodeling or building.
I don’t know how easy it is to add after the fact, but it’s a pretty good idea, because when you’re cooking and you’re coming in and out of the pantry, you may not want to turn that light off and on all the time. Also you might want to do simple things like remove the lids from your containers. So, when you are trying to put things away, you might want to have open bins, rather than having everything enclosed with a lid, particularly if you have little kids. They don’t want to use two hands to open something and get in and put something back. They want to just toss things in, grab things out, and human nature is just kind of like that. Your categories might change. You might stop buying certain kinds of foods, your kids might grow up and you might want to adjust, you know, the height of where you put their snacks. All kinds of things require you to revisit your system. So, that’s what you want to keep doing. Make sure you re-do these projects once or twice a year to keep them fresh.
And if you need help keeping it fresh, we have a perspective for you from our expert team. If you want to get our help on a project like a pantry, a closet, or anything else, we can help you in our Member Message Board area. Seven days a week, we’re answering all of our Member questions. Find out more at clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
Other videos in this series:
“O”- Outline Your Plan
“R”- Review Your Items
“D”- Decide Where Things Belong
“E”- Establish Homes and Routines
You may have been searching for steps to a successful organizing project.
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