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The Boundary Method of Organizing reminds you that you only have so much space in which to store possessions. While it may seem unfair that you don’t have larger or extra rooms in your home, boundaries help you to contain your possessions, so your home doesn’t become cluttered.
This method is simple to understand and provides a clear way to bring order to your home.
If you’ve decluttered in the past and wondered if you were holding onto too much stuff, Boundary Organizing can help you better see what you can keep without a space feeling cluttered within moments of decluttering it.
Boundary Organizing is all about practicality. You only have so much space in your home. If you try to store or display more stuff than you have space for, your home will look crowded.
Growing up, my mother told me that the reason our house was more cluttered than other people’s homes was because they lived in bigger houses. And, yes, we did have a small house.
But my parents never fully considered the other option for their reason. Because our house was small, if we had possessions in proportion to the size of our home, we would have lived organized and clutter-free.
It might not seem fair that you can’t own as much stuff as someone who lives in a house twice the size of your house or apartment, but why punish yourself by living surrounded by clutter that prevents you from enjoying your home?
Question: Does an area feel cluttered soon after you declutter it?
How to SEE Your Way Organized
Boundary organizing is a practical way to think about organizing because you can SEE why an area isn’t organized.
Space - You only have so much space in your home. You can try rearranging things, but that won’t give you more space. At best you’ll make better use of the space you have.
For example, storing bulky items in a deep drawer or on a wide shelf and small items in a shallow drawer or small area so they don’t become mixed together.
Enough - You identify what is enough for you. How many tee shirts do you wear? Can you fit them in one drawer as opposed to fitting them into multiple locations, mixed in with other types of clothing?
Eliminate - You see if you can store a group of items in a contained space like a drawer or cabinet. Does this give you enough items for your use? Together, this helps you see what you can eliminate - sell, give away, or donate.
Boundary organizing can help you eliminate the excess items that you hold onto “just in case” because you can see that they will have no space in your home.
Do you feel you need to rearrange items, so they are better organized, or do you believe you need to declutter first?
How a Boundary Benefits Your Decluttering Efforts
A Little Space can only contain so much stuff. Too much stuff and it becomes difficult to find items.
You can’t see all the items stored in the space.
It’s inconvenient to move things, which really means that it’s inconvenient to put them away and the item ends up someplace other than where it belongs.
This means that when you declutter a space, you are limiting the items you keep to what can fit in the space where the items get stored.
Take Action: Declutter one Little Space like a shelf in a kitchen cabinet or one drawer.
Using Time as Your Boundary
Most decluttering methods encourage you to focus on your use of an item. For example, the 90/90 Rule of Decluttering has you question if you’ve used an item within the past 90 days or plan to use it within the next 90 days.
Or there’s the slightly more expansive 6-month Rule which has you consider if you’ve used an item within the past six months.
In both cases, you’re using time to help you decide what to declutter. The idea here is that you only keep items that get used frequently. (You can also include items that you display as being used.)
A big problem with this method is that it doesn’t include items with seasonal use (from clothing, sports and recreational equipment, and holiday decorations).
Action: Get rid of something you haven’t used. Look for one item that you haven’t used in the past three-to-six months and don’t foresee yourself using in the next three-to-six months. Add this item to a box of things you’ll be donating.
Using Space as Your Boundary
Boundary Organizing is another name for Container Organizing and is a technique that can better help you understand how to organize your home.
No, Container Organizing doesn’t mean that you go out and buy lots of bins, baskets, and plastic storage drawers.
Instead, it refers to creating physical limits for categories of items based upon where they are stored.
Examples of boundaries include baskets, bins, shelves, drawers, cabinets, each shelf within a cabinet, closets, cubbies, and even the flat surface of a piece of furniture.
I often refer to these areas as Little Spaces and use them to define decluttering small tasks. These Little Spaces can also define where items are stored.
Action: Look around the room where you’re sitting and identify the Little Spaces in the room. Are there spaces you would describe as crowded or even overstuffed?
Identifying Categories of Items
One way to make it easy to locate items is to keep similar items together. So, if you knit, keeping all your yarn in one room, in one cabinet or container, helps you see what you own.
You may then divide these items into subcategories based on your use. This could mean that you store your yarn by color or by the type of fibers the yarn is made of.
Are there items that you store in multiple locations in your home? Does this make it more difficult for you to locate what you’re looking for? Where would be the best space to store all the items together?
How Boundaries Benefit Your Organizing Efforts
A defining feature of being organized is that you can find the items you need when you need them. If you don’t know where something is stored, you’re really just guessing.
If you’re trying to locate an item, you may think, Oh, that’s in the garage. But where exactly? An entire room or storage space makes for a poor boundary because there are too many Little Space where to look.
Also, if categories of items are mixed together, it can be challenging to narrow in where to look within that room.
Look around the room where you’re sitting. Can you define the purpose of some of the storage spaces (drawers, shelves) in the room.
Name the Space
One way to keep in clear in your mind that a space has a defined use is to name that space. No, you don’t have to put a label on the space unless you want to, or you think it will help others in your home understand where to find items and where to put them away.
By “naming the space,” I mean that you refer to a location as your mug shelf, sock drawer, cookbook shelf, sweater drawer, skirts (in reference to keeping your skirts hanging next to one another in the closet. You may already do this to an extent in your home.
If you go to store one sweater in your tee shirt drawer because the sweater drawer is full, you’re going to forget about that sweater because it’s in your tee shirt drawer.
Look around the room you’re in. Can you see spaces defined by what is stored or displayed there? Are there rogue items that stand out as not matching the theme of the space.
Keeping Items Used Together, Together
One way to group items is by category, office supplies, or subcategory, pens and pencils. When you go looking for an item, you can see the options available to you.
Another way to group items and give them a set space is to think of items that get used together. So, keeping tape, pen, and scissors with your rolls of gift wrap means that you won’t need to hunt something down when you go to wrap a gift.
Are there items you use together that could share a space for added convenience?
Allow for Wiggle Room
For years (okay, decades), I’d cram as much stuff as would fit on a shelf or in a drawer. This would mean that to remove one item, other things were bound to shift and fill in the item’s space or other things would get pulled out along with the item I was removing.
Just because you can squeeze 23 books onto a shelf doesn’t mean that you should. Twenty-two books on that shelf would allow you to remove a book with ease and then return it to its place later on.
Action: Go to a shelf or drawer that is overpacked and eliminate just enough stuff to give you some wiggle room.
If It Works for Preschoolers …
Daycare centers, preschools, and kindergartens use boundary organizing to maintain order even when the littles outnumber the adults.
Teachers use shelves, cubbies, and bins to define where kids can find certain toys … and know where to put them away. This is the bin for blocks. Put the train set in the red bin and the puppets in the blue one. This is the unit for picture books.
Three- and four-year-olds can clean up the trucks they were using, because the trucks fit in the bin and the bin fits on the shelves.
But boundary organizing isn’t just for children. It helps adults save time because we can see what goes where. Before you can enjoy the ease of finding things and putting them away, you need to define boundaries for different items and limit yourself to what will fit there.
Action: Go to a defined space, a shelf, a drawer, a drawer organizer, a bin, a cabinet, etc. and remove any items that don’t “fit” either physically or because they have nothing in common with the majority of the items in that space.
As you remove items, does the space feel “clearer” and not just because there is less stuff there but it’s easier to see how this area gets used.
Boundaries Within Boundaries
You may already have drawer dividers or other organizing tools that help you to organize small subcategories of items.
For example, eating utensils may be sorted into a drawer divider so you can grab a fork without pawing through the other utensils. The utensil organizer also makes it easy to see that you don’t have any clean forks.
Office supply organizers keep paper clips separate from elastic bands and push pins and help you to grab a pen with black ink.
I keep a shoebox in one drawer to keep my no-show socks separate from other socks.
Drawer dividers or trays help create boundaries within boundaries and are really only necessary to make it easier to both locate and put away items.
Each of the small spaces within that drawer divider get their own purpose so things don’t get mixed together.
You’ll also have boundaries within boundaries in larger spaces as well. Each room may have multiple purposes and keeping the items associated with each use together can make it easier to use the items as well as to clean up afterwards.
Organizing isn’t about fussiness; it's about making things easier on you and the others in your home.
Action: Identify the different ways you use a room. Are the materials and equipment for different activities kept together? (For example, the TV remote is kept near the television when not in use. Cozy blankets are stored together in the same basket near the couch.)
Blurred Boundaries
A boundary, or container, is any type of defined space. You could think of your bedroom as a space bound by activities related to rest and rejuvenation at the end of the day and preparing yourself for the new day.
If you do paperwork in bed and then have piles of papers on your nightstand and beside your bed, then you are blurring boundaries. Paperwork doesn’t suggest relaxation. Particularly if you end up bumping a pile of papers with your toe in the middle of the night when you get up to use the bathroom.
I often do craft projects at the dining table. However, glue sticks and dinner rolls don’t really belong together so I clear up my projects every evening even if I’m returning to the same spot the next day.
For blurred boundaries, I use tote bags or small bins to group items together. I create a small bound area for the items that I will carry between a couple of locations.
Would a “traveling” boundary work for you? Are there items that you could store in or on a movable cart, caddy, tote bag, or bin? This becomes the specific location where these items are stored, even if you take them to use in different areas.
Can You Stretch Boundaries?
Boundary organizing reminds you that you can only keep so much stuff in your home before things get cluttered looking. This might seem unfair, but remember, you can’t organize too much stuff.
My parents had a small living room that became even smaller over the years as stacks of boxes lined up along the walls. While keeping the things in boxes may have looked more organized than having them in loose piles on the floor or on any available flat surface, the house ceased to be pleasant or functional.
It’s easy to think, “Oh, this shelf holds twelve mugs, but I think I’ll hold onto fourteen in case two get broken. There’s a bit of space for one of the mugs with the serving dishes and there’s space for the other one with the food storage containers.”
However, if a mug does get broken, you might either decide you don’t need to replace it or you might buy another mug when one catches your eye.
Even though you can see those other two mugs, they aren’t where you go to look for mugs, so chances are that you don’t register those items.
Open three kitchen cabinet doors and look for out of place items that don’t match the theme or grouping on that shelf. Would you remember where the item is if you went looking for it.
Miscellaneous Stuff
When an assortment of items is piled together, I think that pile can feel more stressful than if you were looking at a pile of laundry to be folded or dishes to be washed.
First, all piles can feel somewhat stressful because the collection of items likely requires continued action. We started to do something and then stopped.
There’s something called the Zeigarnik Effect in which our mind keeps turning its attention to unfinished tasks. So, that pile is reminding you that you have something that needs finishing.
But a pile of miscellaneous things also needs to be sorted, so you may feel additional dread at going through these things and trying to decide where things belong.
Do you have piles of miscellaneous things? (Some piles may be contained by a drawer, box, laundry basket, or bin, perhaps when they were swept out of sight.
You don’t have to sort through anything today. But notice if your piles have themes like “papers” or tend toward the miscellaneous.
Consider Retrieving and Returning Items
When packing items into a space, consider if you can see the contents of that drawer, cabinet, or closet without moving a lot of other items out of the way.
The more often you have to shift things around, the greater the chance is that things will get messy. Or won’t get put away where they belong.
It should be easy to both retrieve the item you want to use and then to put it away when you are done with it. If you have too much stuff in a space or some things are piled on top of other things, you are making this difficult to do.
This might not be a big deal if you rarely use the items. My bins of Christmas decorations can live in tall piles because I touch them twice a year, once to pull out the items and put them on display and once to pack everything away.
Action: Check an area that you’ve decluttered and question if you could retrieve or return any of the items here with ease … even if you were in a rush.
Put Away Isn’t Organized
An important part of boundaries isn’t just that they are contained-spaces like drawers and cabinets, but that they contain a category or subcategory of items - socks, an accordion file of product manuals, a backpack filled with the items you need for weekend birding walks.
This means that if you struggle to find things that you’ve put away, you’ve tucked them into containers like drawers or cabinets where you found the empty space, but those items may not have been stored with similar items.
So, you may struggle to find the serving bowl that got tucked in the cabinet with the extra cups you rarely use.
Boundaries don’t just define spaces but how these spaces are used. Boundary organizing helps you to locate items when you need them and makes it easy to put things away because there is no question about where things belong.
Do you have the habit of putting things away where it’s most convenient or where you know you’ll go looking for the item when you need it.
Boundary Organizing Keeps You Honest
If you store clothing in multiple closets in your home, you’re making it more difficult to find what you’re looking for. You also make it easy to ignore just how much clothing you own because you can’t see it all in one place.
If you’re a bulk shopper, you may store groceries or cleaning supplies or paper goods in multiple locations in your home because you fit everything you buy in one space.
Only you can decide if you need to keep these quantities of items on hand. If you can’t store a category of items (say, canned goods) in one location, can you limit yourself to two locations? Beyond that, it becomes easy to forget where everything is stored.
I remember one time organizing my mother’s pantry cabinet, grouping items together. I pointed out that she had over 40 cans of tuna fish and should probably tell my father (who was doing the shopping) to stop buying tuna.
Instead, she told me to rearrange the cabinet and spread the cans of tuna to different shelves, so it didn’t look like they had so much!
Be honest with yourself, do you store supplies in multiple spots throughout your home so you don’t have to see how much you have?
Sorting DOOM Boxes and Piles of Stuff
A DOOM Box is that collection of stuff that gets swept into a box or back to make an area look neater quickly. DOOM stands for Didn’t Organize, Only Moved, which means the collection of stuff here can be really random.
Sorting through a DOOM Box or a junk drawer is an exercise in grouping items, which helps you see what similarities in use items have.
To start, dump the contents of a box or drawer onto a flat surface like the bed, dining room table, or even a folding table set up where it’s convenient to work. The first step in making sense of miscellaneous piles is to name what you are looking at. Say this list out loud so it isn’t just another thought rattling around in your head.
Next, look for groupings of items. Maybe as you name each item, you notice commonalities, “things I can write with.” Then consider where you would go to look for this type of item when you need it. This may mean taking a group of items to another room or putting them back in the drawer where you found them.
Sort through a DOOM Box or junk drawer to practice grouping items. Remember, although a drawer is a container or an area with a defined boundary, if it is too difficult to identify what is in this space then the boundary is blurred.
(A suitcase is a bound space that transports parts of your wardrobe when you are traveling.)
Make Organizing Habits Easier
A big part of staying organized is putting stuff away. This way, you can find the item where you keep it all the time as opposed to trying to remember the last time you used it and where you may have left the item as a result.
Boundary organizing makes it easier to put things away because it’s clear where things belong. Also, a container, or bound area, can only hold so much stuff, which encourages you to keep the items you use as opposed to cluttering that space with things you may use “someday.”
Action: Take 10 minutes to put things away. Do you notice a spot that is overcrowded, preventing you from putting things away? Would decluttering this spot immediately make your life easier.
Shopping Boundaries
Your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer only give you so much space to store food. When these spaces are overpacked, it is easy to lose track of perishable items as well as expiration dates on packaged items.
You stock up on items on sale but then make a point to include these items in your meal plans. When I buy fresh vegetables, I try to use them shortly after grocery shopping, so I don’t forget about them as the week goes on.
Do fresh fruits and vegetables go bad in the fridge? Does meat and poultry end up with freezer burn? Do you buy packaged products only to discover that you had the items … you just couldn’t see them.
Action: Take 10 minutes to declutter your refrigerator or freezer. Are there items you can add to your meal plans in the upcoming week?
Maintaining Boundaries
Let’s face it, even after you declutter a space, new items will come into your home. You’ll replace something that wears outs or gets used or you’ll buy a new top or book or, well, anything. You may have heard of the One-in/One-out Rule for maintaining a balance of items in your home so that you can avoid having stuff spill over boundaries.
With One-in/One-out, if you buy a new book, you look for one you can remove from your shelves and donate. A new pair of shoes enters your closet and another pair leaves.
If you’ve decluttered, you’ve decided what you need and what fits in an area of your home. Eliminating when you add something is a logical way to maintain the boundaries you’ve established.
Action: This week, if you buy something, look for something that you can eliminate. This means your closet, bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, etc. will never become cluttered by a slow infusion of new stuff.
Boundaries Can Encourage Creativity
The idea of using boundaries to stay organized can feel constraining. What, I can only have so many garments, craft supplies, food items? That’s so limiting!
But is it? I find it difficult to be creative when there are endless options. It’s overwhelming until I narrow in on an idea.
What else could I do with that box of pasta besides dump tomato sauce over it? What can I make with all those different color green yarns I have left over from that project last year? Fewer items in your closet may encourage you to create different outfit combinations, adding a variety to your wardrobe that didn’t exist when you owned more items.
Focus on one category of items, define a boundary (aka, storage space) and then work at eliminating items that don’t fit here. See if you get better use out of what remains.
Action: How can you use up hobby supplies or groceries? Can you pull together a new outfit? Find something new to read that’s already on your bookshelves?
Craft and Hobby Supplies
While you may be able to control the impulse to buy four big bottles of shampoo, you may feel less restraint at the craft store. I get it. I crochet and make handmade cards.
One boundary I set is to avoid going to the craft store too often. (For a while, I was going every week. I wasn’t making big purchases, but even the little ones add up.) I also avoid casually browsing Etsy and other crafting sites because it’s a bit too convenient to shop.
I don’t know any crafter who only owns the supplies they are using for their current project. But the desire to collect stuff for “inspiration” is tempting.
Using boundaries is a sensible way to define how much of your home will store craft supplies. Set the space you’ll devote to, say, yarn, and when the space is full, put a halt on buying more (no matter how great the deal) until you work through some of what you own.
Without really thinking about it, I’ve used boundaries for years to contain my craft supplies. With the holidays coming up, I’m actually looking at some of the supplies I’d like to use up to inspire the projects that I’ll choose to do.
Look for your next project in the supplies you already own!
When Organizing Boundaries Change
The boundaries you give the items you own won’t always stay the same. You may move. You and your new partner may be combining households. Your adult children or your grandchildren will be moving in with you. A family member’s health issues may mean converting a living room into a bedroom.
It’s a challenge to reorganize in these situations, which are already stressful situations.
But thinking of boundaries can simplify the “What do I keep?” decisions. You may end up with fewer cabinets or a smaller dresser. But you’ll know that only so much stuff can fit in these spaces.
Organizing does not allow you to defy the laws of physics. A drawer is as big as it is. Squeezing more stuff in the drawer doesn’t stretch it.
Do you have boxes or bags filled with items from a previous change in your life that you’ve been holding onto, hoping to figure out how to fit things in?
How can you use what you know about boundary organizing to make decisions about the items that fit in your home.
Use Boundaries for Your Time
One. Journal about why you need boundaries surrounding your time. Do you feel exhausted? Anxious about trying to keep up? Lost because you don’t know what you want for yourself.
What can boundaries give you? In an ideal world, what boundaries would you establish? How can you reframe those boundaries, so they fit your life as it is now? Journal for five minutes a day if you need to mull over this.
Two. If you restlessly bounce from one activity to another … and don’t really finish anything. Try setting boundaries around your time (or is it your attention … or both?).
Choose one task to work on. Set a time limit … 5 minutes to 30 minutes. And here’s the important part - you don’t have to finish the task in that time period, just work on it without allowing any distractions.
Three. You can also create boundaries on your time. For example, put things like exercise or other self-care activities on your calendar if you often agree to requests from others. This doesn't mean that you have to say, “no.” However, seeing something on your calendar can be a reminder of what you won’t be able to do if you agree to meet someone else’s needs.
Four. Take a break - it could be for an hour or a day. What do you need a break from? Social media? People? Working alone? Inactivity? Being on the go?
What do you need? Can you think of small ways to bring this into your life on a more regular basis?
Five. Be clear. Whether you are setting boundaries for your home or your time, be clear about what you want and be consistent. You are the only one who can set and protect the boundaries you seek.
The Benefits of Boundary Organizing
Boundary Organizing can also be called Container Organizing and it refers to the idea that a space (be it a room, drawer, closet, or even an hour on your calendar) can only hold so much stuff. This honesty may mean that you are limited in what you can own. However, it makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and streamlines returning items to their place so they don’t get left in a random spot where they can become cluttered.
The basics of this form of organizing are easy to follow. You can look at a space and clearly see whether things fit comfortably or are crammed into place. The method works with any decluttering practice.
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