How organized are you? Do you believe you know all
there is to know about how to get organized? If so, can you spot the following organizing mistakes?
1. Buying organizing tools too early. It is common, when a person
becomes excited about getting organized, that they will go out and buy an assortment of bins, racks, and other organizational tools.
Though their intentions are good, when they get home
they will find they bought the wrong kind, too many, or that they do not fit in the space they intended it to fit into.
If you prematurely purchase products before determining specifically
what you want them to contain and how they will improve functionality, you will probably waste your money.
Sort, organize, take measurements, and think/plan before shopping for products.
Otherwise, those organizing products can become clutter as well.
2. Shopping in stores before shopping at home. Sometimes organizing will involve the purchase of extra bookcases or other types of furnishings to solve a storage problem. However, that may not always be the case. You may
not be aware that you already have storage space in your home that you are not using.
Behind doors, on walls, between shelves, under beds, and under the staircase are a few areas that can
be used for extra storage.
Look specifically for any potential space you have in your home that can be used for storage. As an example, add another shelf or adjust the shelves already there
to store more items in closets.
3. Allowing a small project to morph into a big project. Do you wash your dishes on a regular basis or do you let them pile up until it is a big job and has become overwhelming?
How about your filing? Do you file every day, or place papers that need to be filed in a tray that piles up for months?
Do you do light cleaning on a daily basis, or wait so long to clean that you have to waste all day, and every last bit of energy, catching up?
4. Making your mission "fitting it all in." Stuffed files and cramming all your cooking utensils into one drawer may be considered by some to be a solution for maximizing space. Filling an area too full is actually detrimental to good organizing.
When your storage is packed too tightly, it is hard to find anything because you cannot see it and get to it easily. You need room to grow.
Give your things breathing room. If an area becomes too full, it is time to weed it out.
5.
Rearranging without planning. Planning "what's going to go where" is the most important step when organizing a room. Asking questions and assigning a purpose will help you get the contents of the room organized.
If you do not plan out a room, you will most likely end up wasting a whole lot of time moving furniture and other items to and fro, and not actually organizing them.
Organizing is all about devoting your space to those objects you use most, displaying and storing them well, and clearing out the clutter.
6. Not giving what you own a designated home. It is easy to stash things wherever you can fit them and consider yourself
organized. However, you will have a hard time finding the item because it is not going to be in a logical place.
Assigning a designated place for everything is important to being organized.
Store all-like items in one area and store them in the vicinity of where you will be using them.
For example, hair products are going to be stored in the vanity in the bathroom. Cooking
utensils will be stored near the stove.
7. Thinking that bigger is always better. Sometimes a storage space is so big that it becomes impractical. Simply dumping all of your stuff into a huge closet or cabinet may contain it, but it then doesn't make it easy to find or
access.
The same is true with a large purse. The bigger it is, the more you can dump into it. The more you dump into it, the harder it is to find stuff within it.
Break up large spaces into smaller workable sections by using shelves, containers, or dividers. If you do not divide and conquer the large space, you will find that the contents will start spreading and
mixing together and you will have a big mess on your hands.
8. Storing items in areas that don't make sense. Less accessible and out-of-the-way places are normally used to store items that are used infrequently. If you have difficulty retrieving an item you use on a regular basis, it is
not in the right spot.
High-use items need to be stored in accessible, easy-to-reach storage areas. Keep those items that you use infrequently in the back of a drawer or closet, or on
a high shelf.
9. Thinking that "neat" equates to "organized." Neat piles of paper stacked up on your desk or countertop is not being organized. It may not look messy, but it's very challenging to find a sheet of paper when it's somewhere in the pile.
You might have all of your cans in the pantry stacked beautifully, but if your canned corn is mixed in with canned peaches, canned beans, and canned evaporated milk, rather than being sorted like-with-like, it may look good,
but it's going to be a bear finding what you need when you need it.
