Is your home picture perfect? Neither is mine! Sometimes organizing projects just aren’t worth the time. Watch this video for some strategies I use in my own home that are anything but perfect. Form and function don’t have to be perfect strangers when decluttering your home.
(Click here to watch on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded player. Or watch the video at http://bit.ly/tcdperfect.)
Transcript:
Hi. I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re going to talk about not being perfect and getting away with it. You know, in my program we talk a lot about being effective, doing what works. And I have a few examples today to show you things that I’ve done for myself and for my clients that have not been the perfect, lined-up-on-a-shelf, rigid organization solution you might expect from someone in my profession.
So, here’s something I want to show you in this office closet here in my new house. This fixed shelf is not going anywhere. And I had these plastic drawers already, and I wanted to see if I could use them in this space. When I measured, it was just a fraction of an inch too tall. So, I looked at it, and I was able to remove the drawer and look under here and realize that if I were to remove the top on this set of drawers, it actually would fit just right underneath the shelf. And so I very elegantly got out a hack saw and hacked off the top of this thing. And now that I’ve shown it to you – I was saving it for this video – I’m just going to recycle this, because I don’t need it. I’m just going to have this tucked underneath the shelf permanently and there it works just fine. And you can do that too. Use what you have, make it work for you.
Another thing that people don’t expect from me is to say: “Maybe you don’t need a filing system.” You know, nowadays, people have gone paperless to such a degree that we actually have very little paper left in our lives to file away. And what if you just have a box for things at the end of the year or even a big folder and label it for the year, make an index of the pile of stuff. You can put that index in front of the folder, you can put it inside the box, if that’s what you’re doing, or you can even type up that index and put it in Evernote and that’s it. What if you didn’t make individual folders and have them all special and color-coded with all of your files in them? Usually, you rarely reference the things that you put in your filing cabinet anyway. So why bother? If you just need them for a “just-in-case scenario,” you might as well just put them in a pile together and bundle them up and be done with it. We’re always looking for the return on investment in an organizing project, so we’re not organizing for organizing sake, we’re organizing because we’re going to get more time back on the other side. So if the time invested is not going to pay off, why do it?
You know, another thing that we do for our clients, and I did for my own little kids growing up, was we did not keep their shoes all lined up in the closet ready to go in their bedrooms and worry about running upstairs to the bedroom when it’s time to go somewhere. We would get a big basket like this and put the kids’ most commonly worn shoes in the basket, have another basket for socks, and, you know, I have two boys so we would just do all white socks in that basket, and when it was time to go, everybody would line up by the back door, we’d put everybody’s shoes on and get out the door. We didn’t have to run back and forth up and down stairs to go to bedrooms and find the shoes. So just do what works.
Think about what you could do in your house if you didn’t have to have the perfect solution. If you need some help we have advice from our Team on-line available seven days a week in our Member Area. You can find out more at https://www.clutterdiet.com/learnmore. You can ask our experts your question, upload your photos, show us what’s going on, and maybe we will even let you off the hook of that organizing project you were thinking of doing.
Come and see us, come and talk to us, we’d love to help you. See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.
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