How to Get and Stay Organized at Home

If you want to get and stay organized at home, you can rely on decluttering when you feel like it, or you can follow a path that guides you through the process of organizing your home efficiently and effectively. These are the lessons I learned to get more organized.

A problem with the decluttering process is that it teaches you to declutter but not how to stay organized. I can’t think of the number of times I cleaned the surface of my desk … only to face new papers piled there within days. Has something like this happened to you too? You’re not alone.

Because I was in a decluttering mindset, I looked at the papers and sighed, telling myself that I’d need to declutter yet another day.

I did this constantly. I’d mess up a drawer looking for what I wanted to wear. Day after day, the drawer got progressively disorganized until I hit my frustration threshold and emptied the entire drawer so I could put things back in a more organized way.

I was stuck in the all-or-nothing mindset where I was either tidying up or allowing things to get messy.

When I finally got organized (more on how I did that up ahead), I realized I wanted to become a professional organizer and help others clear their clutter and bring order to their homes. I took a bunch of for-professionals classes through the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals and learned a lot of techniques I’d wished I’d known when I was decluttering my stuff.

The Path to Getting and Staying Organized at Home

When I was trying to organize my stuff, I didn’t work with much of a plan beyond “clean my desk” or “sort through dresser.” In hindsight, this is probably why the process took me so long. It’s also the reason I spent more time trying to organize excess stuff instead of getting rid of it. I never actually took the time to figure out what I needed and used and what I didn’t.

After I emptied my parents’ house, which was so full of stuff that we only had narrow pathways to move around the rooms, I got serious about getting organized. I finally saw how stuff had gained priority over people in my parents’ house and how stressed that left us.

Step One: Clarify Your Purpose

Why do you want to declutter? I know you’ve likely seen that question before and you probably said something along the lines of, “I want my home to be neater.” That’s where I was stuck for years.

But I never stopped to figure out, why was that even important to me? What would I be able to do if my spaces were organized? How would that benefit me? Realizing that I didn’t want to end up like my parents, trapped by stuff, was like resetting my thoughts. I went from someone who thought she should hold onto everything for “someday” to someone who preferred to be organized today.

Part of this involved figuring out what I valued, and I don’t mean things but the values and choices that guided my life.

I realized that if I’d been clearer on my values and aspirations, I would have had an easier time making decisions as I decluttered.

Step Two: Make the Time

One thing that I’d wished I’d done was to intentionally make the time to declutter. Instead, I often used decluttering to procrastinate on other things I needed to do. Of course, I was making progress with getting organized, but at the expense of other things that should have been priorities.

I didn’t give myself a deadline or make a timeline and so, when I was emptying my parents’ house, each time I went into the house I’d work myself until I was exhausted and then I didn’t want to do anything but go home to shower, crochet, and eat peanut M&Ms.

When I finally turned my attention to my possessions, I worked in briefer blocks of time, but I still didn’t give myself deadlines. I retrospect, I dawdled. A lot. Something as simple as a timeline and a schedule would have moved me along.

Steps Three and Four: Clear the Clutter and Give Items a Home

My natural knack for organizing meant that I was good at grouping similar things together. My problem was that I kept everything and pressed beyond the spaces I had to fit my possessions. This was why I was always organizing … but never organized.

While clearing my clutter, I kept returning to what was important to me. Was it important to me to own every book I’d ever purchased (whether I’d read it or even liked it) or would I be happier holding onto the books that I read and reread all the time?

Did I need to engage in a dozen different art and craft hobbies, or could I delve deeper into fewer?

The clarity exercises I’d done made it easier to see what I wanted to keep, and what I could let go of.

And I based decisions on the space I had. If things didn’t fit in a drawer with similar items, I challenged myself to consider if I really needed all those things. (Which was a huge change from my standard operating procedure of going out and buying more bins for my stuff.)

Somewhere in this process, I started practicing habits of putting things away and opposed to allowing them to pile up until I got frustrated and decided I needed to declutter.

It was easier to keep less stuff organized, but I still needed to intentionally decide to do tasks that kept things tidy. While decluttering helped, it was the habits I formed along the way that kept me organized for good.

Step Five: Maintain Order

I started maintaining order even before I finished decluttering and organizing. And when I became a professional organizer and started working with clients, I realized that a lot of people thought that the act of decluttering or giving items a home would keep them organized.

Nope, it’s a little bit each day process. We live in our homes and so things get used. Even wearing a coat adds the step of hanging up the coat when I was done with it. It was easy to throw it over the back of a chair, but I realized that these tiny exceptions added up over time and “suddenly” my home was cluttered.

Staying organized is a ‘go with the flow’ process. Living with my parents was different from living on my own, which is different from living with my husband. Instead of staying stuck in a decluttering mindset, as I go about my day, I look for small ways to keep things organized.

It’s so much easier to file two or three documents than sort through a tower of paper. I’m better about cleaning up after an activity as opposed to waiting until some undefined “later” because I know how discouraging it is it walk into a space that was left in a mess. 

How You Can Use This Process to Get and Stay Organized

Your situation is different from mine and so the details of your process will look different from mine. However, the core steps are still there –

1. Clarify your purpose. What do you hope to gain by getting organized?

2. Make the time. Give yourself a realistic timeline with milestones along the way. You may need to make adjustments, but attaching dates to small goals can help you to eliminate distractions and figure your way around any barriers you encounter.

3. Clear the clutter and give items a place within your home. This will be the phase where you’ll spend most of your time. However, being clear on what you want to achieve (and by when) can save you from drifting around and not getting much done.

4. Maintain order. Each time you declutter a space (even a drawer or a tabletop), make a point to maintain order there even as you move ahead to declutter the next space. Develop routines and personal guidelines that make it easy for you to stay organized.

   
   

Do you wish that you had support during the process of organizing your home, maybe even others whom you felt accountable to? Want someone whom you could ask your decluttering questions? I’m here to help. Watch for Organize Your Home, Organize Your Life, open its door to registration in December 2024.