Sunday, December 9, 2018
This article is about decluttering and organizing your space for the best work flows.
Updated 9:48 PM 1/27/2019
Everyone has a breaking point. A point where when your mind, body and spirit is racked beyond belief and you just can’t take it any more.
A few years ago I was working many hours and stuck in a rut and also getting disorganized. I had tons of papers all over my office at work and also a lot of papers at home. Most of it was training papers. I would go away on training sessions for accounting and work seminars and come back with another bundle or binder full of training materials or papers or notepads written full of information. I figured I went through this brief two week crunch session and would possibly need the information again and so I just held onto several binders.
Days became weeks became months became years and the interesting thing was that I did need the information, but I learned so much at my job and did it so often that I never needed to look back or refer to my binders or all the training material.
So all these papers just became several binders, books and papers scatter through my bedroom. And I never took time to clean it out or vacuum or when I did it was a tremendous feat trying to move all this stuff around.
It is a big misconception for a lot of people and hoarders, which I feel I can say because I’m a self-admitted hoarder too sometimes but not to the extreme, that items will likely be used again in the near future. And so they end up holding onto so many things.
What my breaking point was, was that my allergies made me think that I was being bitten and also there was just dust and stuff piling up and getting the realization that I was not exactly in the best place in my life. I was halfway through life and not exactly where I wanted in life and so one of the things that decluttering and organizing does is force you to focus on what’s important.
You may have seen a lot of decluttering, organization and fixing up hoarder’s homes. From TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive to NetFlix’s Tidying up with Marie Kondo everyone is always trying to be more organized, efficient and less cluttered. Even Steve Jobs often emphasized the beauty of minimalism.
A lot of people also feel that cleaning up can be obsessive-compulsive if done too strictly and that’s why it’s more about balance.
Some people, homemakers also find it extremely relaxing to see things where it’s orderly and everything having a place in the world.
My main tips when organizing was gathering all the items and a bag and sifting things I wanted to keep that either had real sentimental value, things I wanted to keep, and things that needed additional work that had to be done to it like shredding or backing up.
But there are also things you can do in the kitchen to make your life easier such as shelving for the food pantry, getting rid of old spices, adding shelves for shoes, or getting tupperware to store items.
We will add more info in this article as we go.
The other day my friend told me of the KonMari method which I had not heard about which is to gather several things toget and only keep the ones that give you a spark of joy and then storing them in a special place. This method was created by Marie Kondo but I have often used some of these methods without knowing the name of it when I was organizing my place.
In my methods though everything can essentially be classified as being needed, donatable, trash or shredded, or digitized.
We will update this as we go.
