Some people (I’m talking to you, Martha Stewart!) go overboard when it comes to organizing. That is, they waste time organizing things that don’t have to be perfectly compartamentalized, sorted and arranged. Here are five organizing tasks you can ignore:
1. Putting all of the non-perishable food in the pantry into their own separate glass containers. It’s a lot of extra effort that does not increase the functionality of your pantry.
2. Sorting children’s toys into ever smaller and smaller categories (eg. separating out the race cars from the trucks from the buses). Children can’t — or rather they just won’t — take the time to put all of their toys back into multiple nitpicky categories. Think broader categories (eg. all of the cars in a bin) instead.
3. Putting each cooking utensil in its own container in a drawer. This just takes up a lot of drawer space. Furthermore, you won’t remember where each utensil goes once you have taken several out. Feel free to throw 6-9 utensils in a drawer and call it good.
4. Alphabetizing all of your CDs, DVDs and books. Your house does not have to look like the library. You will be able to find your books, music and movies just fine so long as they are on a shelf.
5. Putting all of your photos into albums. Who has time for that? Instead, sort them by year or range of years and put them in an acid-free photo box. Don’t forget to label the outside of the box!
Organizing is supposed to make your life easier, not more complicated. Aim for creating a functional, comfortable home instead of a pristine, high-maintenance one.
Image courtesy of www.stacksandstacks. Think of how many drawers you would have to allocate if you organized your utensils this way!
