Organization

Organizing things is hard. It takes time and it takes discipline. You need to form habits to stay organized. The hardest part of organization is starting. It’s always going to be faster and easier in the now, if you have a huge mess on your hands, to just ignore it and keep piling on. I’m betting these kinds of thoughts go through your mind:

I don’t have the time!

The ENTIRE house is a dump, what good will it do to make this tiny corner neat?

Et cetera. Et cetera. I used to think that way too. And then, one day, I got sick and tired of not being able to find things easily, of having to move twelve things out of the way to get to what I wanted. (Moving helped too). I went through an organizational binge. And since then, I’ve forced myself to get into the habit of, at least once a week, looking around at everything and tidying up at least my desk.

Speaking of my desk, do you have something similar in your house? My desk is the place I dump everything because I don’t want to throw off the organization of everything else which is still neat. For me, it is far less tragic to keep my cupboards organized and have a dumping ground rather than to make everything just slightly messy and keep outside surfaces clean. Even at my worst, my shelves and drawers stay neat and tidy while my desk (and, in my darkest hours) parts of the floor, look like a train smash.

I am still not perfectly organized. But, I am developing a habit to minimize the mess. Once I have that habit down pat, I move on to the next habit. One day, I hope to have developed enough habits that I never have to do more than spot-clean – because I haven’t left anything else to be messy long enough for more than that to be necessary.

How do you attempt organization?