I am not a very organised person. I hate being told what to do, so all these plan things like flylady etc just tend to get my back up. So just wondered if anybody has any tips on how to get organised, or what has worked for you.
I figure if I can get organised, then I will be able to achieve all the things I want to such as live in a house where I don’t have to step over things to get to something, and don’t feel as if at any given time my attention is needed in about 5 different places at once! Might also give me some guilt free time down the lottie
I am a Virgo. Apparently they are obsessed with organisation (yep!) but are naturally not organised. So yes, I am obsessed, I live in a small house, really tiny and so feel like I have to be. I also dislike being told what to do and the Fly Lady doesn’t work for me.
These are only the things that work for me generally. Try to have the house as minimal as possible (I know you are a hoarder so may be a bit difficult ) The cleaner and simpler the house is the easier the day is in my head if that makes sense.
Then in the morning I have a cup of tea and ponder the days jobs going from top to bottom in the house and see what is priority for that day and make a mental list. In the evening if I have a clear lounge and kitchen I am much calmer when I get up in the morning. I also give myself treats for doing a couple hours of work. A cup of tea or a bit of knitting .
This is something I’ve been working on for a while. Other peoples lists just don’t work for me.
Having been this disorganised all my life, I’ve decided it’s going to take a while to change, so I’ve stopped worrying about how long it takes. And then I’ve just tried to work out what is most important to me (I have a chilled out husband who gets that I will change, and change will be most effective if I make happen myself in my way) and what I want to organise first.
I’ve started with the kitchen. I cleared every surface and cleaned. And I’m trying really hard to keep on top of the washing up, recycling. I also started putting DH glass beer bottles back in the cupboard if he doesn’t put his own recycling in the crate outside. I’ll do all the other bits of glass, but he has to do his own bottles. That was about a month ago. And the kitchen is much better and easier to clean if I let it slip for a couple of days. Not sure what my next room is going to be. Study or our bedroom I think.
For me, it’s making sure I just do a little everyday and not make excuses when DH challenges me! Hope you find a way that works for you.
No, I don’t like other people’s lists either. At present - I’m feeling quite pleased with the front room, there is no back log of washing - all the school stuff is ready for tomorrow and there is no pressure on that score. Maybe the most helpful tip would be to focus on one room at a time (or one area). Also actually thinking about what you want from ‘being organised’ - for example - I’ve reorganised and tidied so that Babes can reach her own school things/martial arts kit and manage it herself which will hopefully take the pressure off me = as she will hopefully be manging things herself.
best
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I was lucky in that I started with a sparkling clean rental house, so it’s a case of keeping it clean rather than getting it clean. I do (normally) one room per day, and try and get that properly clean and tidy, then just do a general sweep of the house putting stuff away. That seems to work and means that if I’m poorly or mega busy no room gets left for more than a fortnight. If a busy or poorly day falls on a bathroom or kitchen cleaning day then I swap them out for one of the other rooms, so that they don’t have as long to wait before proper cleans. I make my own list of what needs doing, and cross off tasks on my whiteboard - and I split tasks up so I have more to cross off!
Like today’s issue. Trying to find the paperwork to renew the car tax. I have spent the best part of and hour and a half going through paperwork, some dating back to 2007 and still can’t find the mot certificate. But have just found another pile of paper . When facing things like this, everything else that I should be doing goes to pot, and I feel more disorganised than ever.
i find i have to have a tidy hall way, we have a under stairs cuboard which has shoes gloves bags extra on
if i can get out of the house i dont feel so trapped by the rest of the disorgainisation !!
as for paper work i do quite enjoy it !! so mine is sort of organised ! a floder with car tax, v5 documents insurance. ect hous hold bills and at the begiing of each year it is changed and up dated.
I have no solid answer for you as this is an on going challenge for me. Putting less pressure on myself over the whole thing usually helps. I tend to let mess build up then blitz it all but thenI get the inbetween where I look at my house in dismay and think ‘ugh!’ I think picking stuff up instead of walking past it and actually doing something with it there and then helps.
Paper work, gets looked at once in a blue mooon, it comes in, it goes in document drawers and when they are full to bursting or we can’t find something important they get sorted.
I don’t really have any systems, it’s a bit random sao I guess that doesn’t really help you.
To make yourself feel better about what you do get through though why not write a ta-da! list instead of a to do list. Only write the list after you’ve completed some tasks, I actually find this great motivation to do more boring chores.
I struggle with this all the time. I am such a perfectionist in that I have to do all or nothing. If I am going to do a job - I have to do it properly. Which means I won’t just “quickly” tidy the front room…I have to completely blitz it, clean, hoover, make it into a show home room! Which means I can’t whizz round for 10 mins - I have to spend an hour +++ on it!
I am really trying to get out of this - especially once the baby arrives. I won’t have a spare hour to do ONE room! So, what I have just planned (I also have to do a timetable - can’t just do things as and when! Obsessive that I am!) - a timetable indicating what needs doing and when. Every day I have to make sure the washing up for the day is done before DH is home from work and also that any washing that is in the machine has been hung up before he comes in. They are my daily URGENT tasks that I have told myself i HAVE to do (as I have lost count of the amount of times I have had to put the machine on again because the clothes have gone smelly from yesterday!). On top of that I have set myself ONE job each day. Monday Bathroom, Tuesday Baking (and cleaning kitchen after), Wednesday Front room, Thursday Bedrooms (only 2 at the moment - the spare room gets left to fester!), Friday used to be hoover the whole house and change the beds (as the bedrooms are tidy enough to get in there to change the beds!) - it’s now just change the beds as DH hoovers on a Saturday now as I get major braxton hicks when I use the hoover.
That way I’m not setting myself a mammoth task of doing the whole house all the time. My children are SO untidy so it’s really a struggle to get them to clear up after themselves but I am getting there slowly.
DH and I have just come to an agreement that his job when he gets in is to make sure (and help if need be) the children tidy their toys away and take them up to their room. Before I would have to spend hours tidying up their toys first before I even got to the cleaning! Doing that means I nag everyone much less.
This plan has only just started so I’m yet to see if its working.
Good luck! x
I hate cleaning my house, probably due to doing it as a job and having a cleaning freak streak of OCD when i had PND. Anyway, now I just start small like 10min tidy before dinner where the kids put their toys away and I do a quick hoover, or in the morning I empty the dishwasher and hang washing as my minimum to do. Once their done I feel like I’ve done everything!! then I try to do an afternoon of cleaning on a Monday but I always find a way of getting out of it!! We have a HE morning here every now and again so it is my only motivation for me to clean TBH!
I’m like that, totally disorganised and can take ages to try and find things. I am a not-so-closet hoarder but this year that is going to change as it has to, the house is bursting with stuff and we can’t really cope with it at the moment so we are just de-cluttering loads of things. For paperwork we have boxfiles where we should be keeping important papers in - and we will try to keep this up better this year and onwards, but it doesn’t always work.
I don’t do following a routine like the fly lady stuff, much as it would be nice to - I just can’t get into something that much - easily distracted by doing something much more interesting and leaving the clutter to mount up.
In the last couple of days we’ve gone through all our clothing and got rid of anything too small, not worn for ages, not likely to wear or fit into in the near future - loads has gone to the charity shops today. It feels good to achieve that and is focussing on the positive. I/We are hoping to continue that by hitting and area or room of concern at a time and being far more ruthless than we have have been.
Have thought to write a list of things to do in the major house de-stash and clean but I know that will probably just daunt me and I’ll put things off. I do find lists help with organising other things in my life but for the house it just doesn’t so no help there sorry!
I’m not much help but trying to change things here this year too, I guess I’m just here saying that you are not alone.
If you do find the answer please share! We have not long moved and I had all these plans of how I was going to do so much cleaning on each day and I always manage to find something better to do with my time.
I really hate clutter, it’s like it gets inside my head and makes that cluttered and impossible to think which makes me grumpy. This is not helped by all the boxes we still have left yet to be unpacked from the move. Our wardrobe didn’t surviv the move and we can’t afford a new one so a huge chunk of our clothes are still in boxes along with other ‘stuff’. I have to say though almost 3 months later and I haven’t actively missed anything so think I will have a major sort out once they come to be emptied. I’m a terrible horder though and end up keeping stuff just in case. I need a cure for hoarding I think that would make a great difference.
I’ve just decided I’ve had enough of clutter. I’ve started being ruthless with it - I keep everything, literally everything, but I can’t find the things I want and for years I’ve found that tasks like making photo albums or making the children’s baby scrapbooks are just too overwhelming to contemplate because of the huge volume of stuff. So I realised that something has to give and I’ve made myself start the scrapbooks because I really wanted them to be done. I sat down on New Year’s Day and picked about six (well, ok, ten…) of the children’s birth and naming day cards each, the ones with special messages in them, and stuck them in. Then I threw away the rest - I made dh run out in the rain and put them in the recycling bin before I changed my mind! So now I have a small space where I was storing the hundred or so that we had before. And a nice page in the book. I figure if I work through it really gradually, I’ll end up with some lovely books and albums that are actually usable, as well as a cupboard that isn’t so full of old papers/photos etc that you can’t open the door…
I think I’ve just reached a point where the clutter is so much that we’ll never see any benefit from any of it if I don’t sort it out. We have so many things that are so important to me and I love looking at photos and cards etc, and I want the children to have them - but with as many as we currently have stored in the garage, we can’t get to them or enjoy them so it makes sense to prioritise and reduce!
With organisation generally, I find our new house masses easier than our old one. I was determined when we moved in that I’d have a place for everything and it seems to be working out ok so far. There are days when it seems a bomb has hit, but when the current projects are finished, it all goes back to where it came from and it feels ok again. I’m rewarding myself by making things feel nice - the lounge is in order most of the time so we now have gorgeous curtains (cheap but exactly what I wanted) that make me smile every day
For paperwork, I honestly belive everyone should have their own librarian (and I am one). I’m fairly organised, as losing things really really upsets me, but the tidiness thing has happened gradually as I’ve aged. The best book I ever found on the subject was quite a spiritual book (sorry, totally forgotten author / title) which really went on about how we are connected to all our stuff with energy - if you have lots of stuff cluttered up, shoved away, never seen, then this is stagnant energy that doesn’t allow anything new and wonderful into your life; equally, broken stuff - you know in the very back of your mind that it is broken and then your energy is brought down each time you pass that object.
So, to get the enrgy shifting then you need to de-clutter, but don’t try and do everything at once, start with one drawer or small space, clear that out and your energy will lift. Then try again with another wee area and just keep going - little by little, most days, even if it’s just a wee shelf. Basically, if you really love it or have used it in the last year and it’s not broken, then fine, keep it. If you’re just okay with it and it’s not been used for more than a year or it’s broken and you aren’t going to fix it right now, then bin / charity shop it - and get it out of the house as quickly as possible as the bags of stuff waiting to go the charity shop are areas of stagnant energy.
Okay, I can feel the need to de-clutter coming on me when I read this back - I have an expensive sunlight alarm clock light which has no light (it was dropped) and I’ve been meaning to get it fixed for about a year - oops. I have about 4 bags of stuff to go to the charity shop by the front door and I’m nowhere near as ruthless as I’d like to be (and oh, don’t get me started on dh’s HUGE pile of albums in the loft, these are the ones that don’[t get listened to, unlike the big pile in the living room which get listened to occassionally). However, when your house is decluttered, then it is MUCH easier to tidy and find stuff and it does feel much clearer energetically.
Well, I’ve sorted through the biggest pile of paperwork ever today (took from about 8.30 til midday), and it is all sorted in categories into cardboard boxes. Also have taken out all the dvd’s we no longer need and will have to decide what to do with those. All a step in the right direction I suppose. I do the initial clear out, but then it will sit for another few months before it actually leaves the house as it seems an awful lot of effort to take things to the charity shops as they are all in pedestrianised shopping centre. Might have to get aquatinted with eBay, never used it before, and it all looks a bit daunting!
) The cleaner and simpler the house is the easier the day is in my head if that makes sense.
and still can’t find the mot certificate. But have just found another pile of paper 
