How to Be Organized

If disorganization is congesting your life and as a result you're feeling scattered and frustrated, then it's time to get organized. To achieve organization outside, you have to do something on the inside, like clarifying your priorities, and deciding how you want your belongings to be arranged. Try to keep stuff where it belongs. Know what you need/want to do, when you are going to do it, and avoid the stressful situation of not knowing what needs to be done. Organization takes time, but when you get into the habit of it, life becomes so much easier. It only takes a week to start a habit.

Keeping Everything in Its Place

Organize Your Space

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Whether it's your home, bedroom, kitchen, home office, closet, or desk, you need to see what's in there, throw/give away anything you don't often use, and give everything else a convenient and clearly designated space.

Organized doesn't just mean tidy. The purpose of organization is to be able to find, exchange, and evaluate items quickly. However, organization can also help keep them tidy by providing a quick, logical space for adding and removing things.

If you know that you're not naturally inclined to be organized, you can change that by starting with one small area of your living space and focusing on keeping that small area organized. Keeping a small area organized over time is easier to do, and it will help you build a new habit. After about 2-3 months of keeping one corner organized, you will naturally tend to expand your new-found organizing instincts to other areas.

Example:

If you have a lot of books and fill a bookshelf with them in order of size, they'll look neat, but you'll have to skim over them one at a time whenever you don't remember where one is - maybe even move some if you've put one row of small paperbacks in front of another - and rearrange many whenever you need to add a few more.

If you give each category its own shelf area, and leave some extra space at the end or between book ended groups, you can find a book quickly by glancing at the category layout and skimming just the few books in the right category, and add or remove books here and there without disrupting the overall layout.

By organizing your items hierarchically, you'll just have to make a few decisions as you work your way down the hierarchy into increasingly narrower categories (e.g. rack, shelf, crate, bag), rather than browsing. For instance, you could put all your sports equipment in a crate for each sport and small items like golf tees in a baggie. A few big odd things like skis would go elsewhere. You could put cleaning supplies on another, sorted by the kind of area they clean.

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