Just in case you missed it, here’s what we were discussing a year or two ago the week of February 1:

2011

Overwhelmed by your to-do list? Six fabulous tips for getting it all done Rereading these tips has made me realize that I need to take Megan’s advice more often, especially about doing difficult tasks during my peak energy times, not low energy times.

So you want to hire a professional organizer to fix your spouse’s messy habits? Then don’t call me. Seriously. I can help couples who want to work together to fix the mess at home, but I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to taking sides and slinging ammo at the other spouse.

2010

Organize art supplies the preschool way: Part One The photos in this post are so inspiring to me that I’m feeling the urge to rearrange my entire closet this way. These photos have also become pretty popular on Pinterest, so check it out!

Organize art supplies the preschool way: Part Two More beautiful photos of a well-organized preschool classroom.

Display your child’s artwork; eliminate the stacks I took all of Nathan’s early car paintings and made a collage for my husband’s office, where he works as general manager of an autobody shop. It looks great in his office and cut down on the stack of artwork at home.

Sometimes our disorganization isn’t caused by a lack of motivation or organizing know-how — it’s caused by a lack of time. Some of us may be looking around at huge piles in our house and wondering when we are ever going to have free a afternoon to tackle them, especially if we have children underfoot. Other people might be reluctant to sacrifice a free Saturday morning to get their home organized, because it seems like such a (insert one) boring/difficult/overwhelming/tedious task.

Here are some ways to find time to tackle the clutter in your home. I’ve included tactics for those who have a large chunk of time and for those who have very little free time:

If you have less than 30 minutes:

1. Do a commercial break clean-up. During the commercials of your favorite TV show, you focus on cleaning up the room that you are sitting in. This means you grab empty laundry baskets and put all of the things that don’t belong in the room, but go upstairs into one and all of the things that go downstairs in the other. You quickly hang up clothes, throw toys back into the basket, recycle the old magazines, whatever the room needs. Be sure and get your spouse and kids to help if they are watching the TV show with you!

2. Combine cleaning up with other tasks that you already do. For example, fold laundry while quizzing your child on her spelling or her arithmetic. Sort through the mail after you pay the bills. Do the dishes while waiting for the meat to brown or the water to boil.

3. Institute a 30-minute clean-up time each night for the whole family after dinner. Write down a list of tasks that you know the family can complete in 30 minutes and have each family member pick a few from the list (it works much better if they get to CHOOSE which tasks to complete, rather than being COMMANDED to complete specific tasks). If you have younger children, try to include tasks that they can help with such as folding the towels, putting the silverware away or picking up their toys off the floor. (This is the method we use in our house. Works great; in fact it’s the only way we get housework done!)

4. Choose a room, set a timer for 10 minutes and have a beat-the-clock race with the family to see how much they can pick up and put away before the timer goes off. Create a reward to go with this (eg. If the whole family gets the whole living room cleaned up before the timer goes off, everyone gets dessert.)

If you need to find a large chunk of time:

1. Swap babysitting with a friend. They watch your kids for an afternoon so you can organize a room, then next weekend you watch their kids for an afternoon so they can organize a room in their home.

2. Plan to throw a party in 3 weeks’ time. Nothing like knowing you have 30 people coming over to inspire you to sort, purge and clean!

3. Get an accountability partner. Find a friend whom you trust and feel comfortable around, but who can also be firm with you. Have them stay at your house in the room with you while you organize. If you get off task or start to make excuses to quit, the friend’s job is to tell you to get back to work!

4. Use good stress to your advantage. Set a lunch date or movie date with a friend and tell them you cannot go unless you do 3 hours of organizing in your home office. If you think you might be dishonest with yourself (hey, I’m not here to judge!), ask the friend to come to your house after your three hours to check on your work.

Whatever method you use to clear the clutter in your home, it helps to know when your peak performance time of day is and only work then. For example, if you are a morning person, then don’t plan on doing all of your housework after work. If you know you have a tendency to sleep in on the weekend, don’t schedule an organizing project for Saturday morning. It’s always best to work with the habits we already have.

How do you keep your house under control when you have very little free time?

1. Frame the artwork and line it up on floating shelves. This is good for people who can’t nail things into the wall or for those who don’t want too permanent of a display.

2. Put the artwork inside of hinged frames from Li’l DaVinci Store and Display Art Cabinet. I love how easy it is to regularly change what is on display.

3. This display line kit comes from Ikea, but you could easily make your own using fishing line and eye hooks. Artwork always looks best when it is lined up, because the pattern helps unify the display.

4. Framing artwork en masse also makes for a neat display. Matching frames help the artwork blend in with the rest of the room. Probably not the cheapest or easiest way to display artwork, but it is definitely one of the most elegant ways.

Image courtesy of www.marthastewart.com

5. Martha Stewart wizards created a pattern of shapes on the wall, then filled in those shapes with magnetic paint. So very clever and so much fun for kids to hang up their artwork inside their shape of choice.

6. Why stop with painting magnetic paint inside of shapes? Why not paint the entire wall with magnetic paint? Imagine artwork in place of the photos. It would make for a dynamic display that is easily changed. No complicated framing required.

Custom quilt for $450 from www.bluebirdgardens.com.

7. I love this idea of transferring the images onto fabric, then turning the whole thing into a quilt.

8. Minimalists can simply take photos of their children’s artwork and load up a digital photo frame with the photos. The artwork is shown in a slideshow fashion on the wall within the frame. The actual artwork pieces themselves get tossed. This is a great option for those with very limited space. And for the very brave. Could you toss all of your children’s artwork?

Image courtesy of Less Than Perfect Life of Bliss.

9. Here, they have painted the frame and hung it on the wall without its glass or backing. A single binder clip mounted directly on the wall in the center of the frame holds a piece of artwork. Such a clever, inexpensive way to have an ever-changing, handsome display.

10. Those who have limited space will also like the idea of scanning or photographing the artwork and making it into a photo album. (This book is from www.kodak.com). The beauty of this option is that you can add captions or little stories to accompany each piece, making it something of a scrapbook of the child’s school year. Then the original pieces of artwork get tossed.

I want to invite all of you local readers to come to the Get Organized Conference this Saturday, January 28 to hear me speak about organizing children’s spaces. I will explain step-by-step how to organize a children’s space, and I will give you my recommendations for storage products that work well in these spaces. I will also cover tips on getting children to part with their outgrown toys, plus tips for getting children to clean up their playroom.

I will speak at 11:30, and at 1 p.m. I will sit at the Ask the Organizer table, where you can pepper me with your most pressing questions.

My presentation is part of a larger event featuring other organizers speaking on organizing topics. Organizing-related businesses will be on hand to showcase their products and services.

The conference runs from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. at Closets to Go in Tigard, Oregon. A $5 donation is requested at the door to offset costs. Get more information here. Hope to see you there!

Ikea jars ($4.99) and a label from a label-maker is all it takes to make your craft room “writing implements” go from tools to functional decor. I love this idea. I also love this other idea below. I’ve published it below on this blog, but I think it’s worth publishing again since we’re talking about organizing pens, markers, etc.

This set-up is actually from an art supply store, but you could do something on a smaller scale in your craft room with PVC pipe. Either method of organizing your art supplies will provide a visual punch to your room, which has the added benefit of inspiring you to keep it organized!

Top image courtesy of iheartorganizing.blogspot.com.

Just in case you missed it, here’s what we were discussing a year or two ago the week of January 19:

2011

Meal-planning and schedule-tracking for busy families I hate to cook. If you hate to cook too, then this meal-planning system will make you hate it a little bit less. This schedule-tracking system is pretty nifty too.

2010

An inexpensive light bulb organizer You must first drink 24 bottles of beer before you can make this.That’s not a problem, right?

What can you do with all of those old neckties? You could make them into a toddler leash. You could tie them together and escape out the window. Or you could make this.

Do you have magazine envy? Do you feel badly about your house after you flip through House Beautiful? Here’s how to cope with that.

Saving too much "just in case" means there's more space for your soup cans, less space for you.

For those of us who struggle with disorganization, overly doing a lot of normal, everyday actions leads to the suffocating piles of clutter and unmanageable stress we face in our homes.

For example, it’s completely normal to save some sentimental items like a few pieces of our children’s school work, a handful of greeting cards or some special items from our grandmother. When we struggle with disorganization, however, we may be overly sentimental, saving most or all of our children’s school work, every greeting card we receive and so many items from Grandma’s house that we have no room for our own family’s special items.

It’s quite sensible to have a few extra items around the house for convenience sake. For example, most people have a box of nails and screws in the garage, a few cans of soup in the cupboard and more than one pair of socks in their drawer. Those of us who struggle with disorganization, save as much as we can “just in case”: We have several boxes of nails and screws in the garage, so many cans of soup that some have expired, and too many socks to close the drawer, let alone find the mate to the one we are looking for.

Finally, frugality is a virtue when we wear an older dress instead of buying a new one for every occasion, save a few pieces of tissue paper at Christmas to wrap old ornaments in, and hang on to an old shoebox or two for our children’s spontaneous art projects. But those of us who are disorganized take frugality too far and save too much out of fear of being unprepared: We save every dress we have ever worn, because we “might” wear it again. We save every crumpled piece of tissue paper, because we may want to wrap future gifts with it. We save an unsightly amount of trash and recycling “just in case” it might be useful for the kids’ art projects.

Those who are disorganized overdo things to the point of creating a toxic environment for themselves. As Sandra Felton said in her book Messie No More, “… on the whole, [disorganized people] are not naturally moderates. They overdo in what they keep and they overdo in their activities. ”

Knowing that you have a tendency to overdo things is one thing; learning how to change those ingrained habits is another. I will write more about what we can do to overcome these tendencies in future posts. For now, I think it’s enough to look around our houses and ask ourselves, is this stress I experience at home because I am overdoing something?

What do you think? What are you overdoing in your home? What works for you to maintain moderation in your life?

Image courtesy of TLC.

This homeowner has created a pulley system to suspend her child’s toys in baskets off the floor. Each pulley has its own label on the wall. It’s visually very interesting (the toys look like they are floating off into the sky in hot air balloons), but is it functional? Is it easy to use? What do you think of this unorthodox organizational system? Too much?

Image courtesy of Pinterest.

Just in case you missed it, here’s what we were discussing a year or two ago the week of January 11:

2011

Planning an organizing project? Don’t make this big mistake! This mistake will cost you your hard-earned cash and your sweet disposition.

Ask the Organizer: What do I store in wooden toy boxes? Yes, I suppose you COULD store toys in there, but that actually isn’t a great use for toy boxes. Here are some much better uses for this classic piece of children’s furniture.

2010

Conquering the paper mountain in your home office If you’re dreaming about lighting a match and dropping it in your home office, you might want to read this post for a less illegal way to cope with your paper clutter.

Where do you fall on the clutter scale? Where does your spouse fall? No two people have the same idea of what constitutes “organized” and “clutter.” Here’s a way to talk about that without clawing each other’s eyes out.

How often have you hit the January sales at places like the Container Store and bought a bunch of products, determined that THIS time you would get and stay organized? How many times have you promised yourself you would get your home organized once and for all, only to find the clutter has creeped back in seemingly overnight?

First of all, please know that you are not alone. It is very common to try many times to get organized without success. Similar to how it may take many times to quit smoking or to lose weight, getting organized is often achieved only after many attempts.

Getting organized is difficult, because so often we focus on making changes to our space (eg. buying more containers, rearranging the living room) when what we really need to do is make changes to our thoughts and behaviors. If we can change our thoughts, then we can change our behaviors. If we can change our behaviors, then we can change our outcomes.

Here are some examples of thoughts, behaviors and the outcomes they create that keep us disorganized:

1. Thought: “I should save this old margarine container, because it might be useful to store something some day.”

Behavior: You save all of your old margarine containers.

Outcome: You end up with no room to store useful things in your cupboards, because they are too full of things you are afraid to throw out. You might end up leaving the useful things out on the counter because there is no room in the cupboards. Now you have no counter space either.

2. Thought: “I will leave this sweater out on the table to remind me to return it to the store.”

Behavior: You leave the sweater out on the table, along with other visual reminders of errands you need to run.

Outcome: Your table looks cluttered because of the reminders you have left there. This makes it difficult for everyone to eat at the table at the same time. Furthermore, the visual reminders don’t work, so you reap the consequences of neglecting to do important things.

3. Thought: “I’m too tired to put my clothes away after I get dressed for bed, so I’m just going to leave them in a pile on the floor.”

Behavior: You heap your clothes in a pile on the floor every night before bed.

Outcome: Your bedroom looks messy. You don’t feel relaxed in a messy bedroom; you feel stressed and frustrated instead. Sometimes you even feel embarrassed. And you don’t always have certain clothes clean and ready to wear when you need them.

If we become scientists of ourselves, we can ask ourselves, what is the current condition that is bothering me? Then we can analyze what pattern of thoughts and behaviors got us there. Sometimes we can figure this out on our own. Other times we need a trusted friend, a professional organizer or a counselor to help us figure it out.

The key is to Know Our Thoughts and Behaviors. Only then can we start down the path of getting organized once and for all.