Organizing 101

The dozens of organizing shows on television right now show professionals working with everything from extreme hoarding to just general messiness and sorting it all out in 30 minutes less commercials. A lot of people get the idea that “organizing” is all about throwing out stuff. But that is only part of it — in fact, sometimes organizing is not about throwing out anything at all. It is primarily about recognizing priorities and developing systems. And yeah OK, there is sometimes a bit (or a great deal) of throwing out of the stuff.

Organizing is about focusing on what is important to you, your family, and your lifestyle and about making the related things work for you when you need them. Whatever the things are that you keep around your house — everything from clothes to shoes to toys to athletic gear, cooking equipment, whatever — everything should have a place and when not in use, it should be in its place. This method will help you find what you need when you need it.

If you work with a professional organizer, they will most likely help you sort down everything. If you have extra batteries in the kitchen drawer and in the closet and in the bedroom, you need to collect all the batteries from everywhere and designate a logical, efficient battery storage place. Then you will know what batteries you have, what sizes you might need, and you will not go out and buy a 30-pack of “AAA” batteries when you already have some at home.

I recently wrote an article about a pantry re-org and the lesson applied there — the homeowner had 6 or so jars of dijon mustard but they were in various places all mixed in with other things and those little short mustard jars were in the back of the shelves. Once organized all together, the cook can see that she has all those jars and would not need to buy any more for quite some time.

If you apply this principle to all the things you have in your life, you can develop a logical place for everything and as trite as it sounds you can then have “everything in its place!”

This is a photo of a storage shelves in a ceramics studio where I take lessons:

Every student and artist is assigned a shelf, sometimes two. This particular student whose stuff occupies the middle shelf is a great example of a lot of things all in their place. This person has tons of supplies — brushes, sponges, various works-in-progress, and they have it all organized so that it is all logically arranged and easily accessible. I wanted to share this photo to highlight my point that sometimes you do have and do need a lot of “stuff”, but that in itself doesn’t make things disorganized. This is a great example of everything in its place.