I really, truly, love organizing, being organized, seeing other people’s organized spaces. It just makes me happy, and it’s one of my favorite ways to spend my extra time. Call me crazy, but I love it!
I’m always working to be more organized and efficient, because we only have so much capacity and so much time, that to waste it on trying to find socks and the homework and the baseball glove just seems silly. It’s 1st world problems, I know. I’m fully aware of the huge benefit of actually having socks and homework and baseball gloves to lose. But, life often hands us challenges, big and small. Whatever I can do to make the finite amount of resources I personally have stretch to fight those more meaningful, larger challenges, I’m all for.
Life seems a bit easier, and I feel like I have my life just a tad bit more under control and like I could possibly take on anything when I feel like my life is organized. Under the “Life” category, I am talking my home, my schedule, my car, my work. There is so much being thrown at us every. single. day. that we need to adjust to and take head on.
The more life I experience, and the older I get, I realize that I only have capacity for so much. My capacity has a limit, and then things start to suffer. I start to suffer. The people I love start to suffer. This capacity is usually way more than I would have ever expected to be able to handle, but eventually, there comes a stopping point.
So if you’re like me, and life seems a little easier to handle when we’ve got a bit of organization as our foundation, I wanted to share just a few ideas on what I do when I need to tighten up the ship. Remember we want our homes to be Life Giving, not life-sucking!
If you walk in the door and feel just overwhelm and UGGHHH, {you know what I mean, right?} then something needs to change. Sometimes we feel this way for a season, but even in very stressful seasons, we can make our home serve us and fill us up, rather than take from our reserve. I think the first question I ask myself when things feel a little out of control around our house, is “How does it feel to walk through the door of our home?”
Then I pay attention to what is causing stress in our day to day life that could be improved? Are we late getting out the door each morning? Are we constantly losing our sports gear to the garage black hole? Are we missing important documents, dates, deadlines, etc. because our paperwork is out of control?
It may be YES, YES, YES to all these! I have been there at different times and it can be super overwhelming. BUT, it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. And, it can change. You can try something for a few weeks and if it’s not working well, tweak it a bit and see if that helps.
Here are a few super easy, but impactful examples of how I have made this work in our house:
First up is my girls’ p.j. drawer. When we first moved into our house, their pjs were in the dresser drawer in their room, but they always bathe in the master bathroom. So to make it easier on all of us, we used a drawer in our master bedroom dresser to keep all their pjs.
Now their pjs are right there, and it’s not a huge ordeal to get them ready for bed.
Another simple thing I’ve done is add the kids’ socks to the mudroom drawers. Before we had drawers in our mudroom, I used baskets that held all the kid socks, and they lived right by the shoes.
I originally had the socks in the kids’ rooms. I would ask the kids to get on their socks and shoes to go somewhere, so then they would have to run upstairs to grab socks in the dresser drawer. They inevitably would not be able to find one shoe, so I would have to go upstairs to help, or they would get distracted and I’d lose them up in their rooms when we needed to leave! It was a HUGE time waster, so I moved them all by the door to the garage, where we also kept their shoes. When we remodeled our laundry room, I added a two drawers, and for now, that’s where socks live.
Before I cleaned it up a bit…
I emptied it and vacuumed it out.
After. I added some shorter drawer separators to make it a bit neater for the girls.
My boys are older now and like having their socks in their room now, but the girls still need help and encouragement getting their socks and shoes on and tied, so they live in the mudroom, right by their shoes!
All the everyday shoes are also kept in the mudroom, right by the garage door. The rest of their shoes stay in their closets. Again, anything to minimize a trip back upstairs where I would lose them to a distraction!
One last easy tip…I’m really not great at keeping up with paperwork, so I have been trying a new little system of an “In-Box” that I found at Target in the organization aisle. I’m not sure this is the cure-all, but it is keeping the paperwork contained, and I go through it every few days to see what needs attention.
These aren’t mind-blowing organization tips. They won’t magically make everything in life easy. BUT, I find a lot of what takes up so much of my energy is the little things. They are the things that can send me over the edge! But the little things also bring me such joy, and when it comes to organization, the little things add up to calm and peace. I’ll take a little calm and peace in the midst of a crazy world any day!
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