A project can feel overwhelming when things are scattered all over the place. I like using a staging area like a big dining table or a large open space to bring everything together. Gather things from around the house or the room and just pile them all together there to stage them for sorting.
We do this every year in January when we are putting away the holiday decorations, for example… we go around the house grabbing all Christmas things and putting them all at once into the dining room. This way the rest of the house is instantly back to normal, and all of the holiday debris is centralized to deal with it more easily.
Once things are centralized into a staging area, THEN you can divide and conquer. Sort it out from there. Doesn't that feel better?
Other examples of centralizing: Make your bed first when cleaning up your bedroom, then gather all clutter and pile it all on the bed. The rest of the room is clean now! Sort what's on the bed and deal with it from there. (You'll be very motivated to finish because you'll need to use that bed when it's time to go to sleep.) We also use this centralizing concept when we gather laundry from various hampers around the house and bring it to the utility room to sort and wash. And I also centralize when I am packing for a trip– I gather and pile it all in one place and pack it up. Centralizing helps you gain one of the biggest advantages of the organizing process- VISIBILITY. You can see everything you have and make better decisions about it.
You can also think of this concept as the known vs. the unknown. Put all unknowns into the central staging area, and the knowns can remain in their homes. So in a garage with a small-to-medium amount of clutter, for example, you can take the cars out and go around the periphery grabbing the unknown, unclassfied, "homeless" items and centralizing them into the middle of the garage floor. The known items with a home can stay on their shelves and in their cabinets… and then you focus on the center of the garage and sort from there.
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Great advice, but I’m not nearly that sophisticated. My idea of organizing is to every once in a while, go through the house and trash anything and everything I haven’t used in the past year. Simple yet effective.
Great suggestion and I love how it builds on a way that most people already work!
I use the pile-it-on-the bed technique all the time. The frightening thing is, I use it all. the. time. Our bedroom is the dumping ground for anything that doesn’t have a home, and that seems to be a lot. But this method does help. I do it with laundry that needs to be folded, as well.