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Organizing Crash Course or Sentimental Journey?

I hope you’ve taken our very short organizing test and determined whether you should engage your organizing projects like a title fight or a friendly display of your BJJ skills. Deciding if an organizing crash course, or not, is the correct approach for you, is critical. If not, then take a quick step back before you read this article. The quiz really is an important precursor to laying the foundation for effective organizing action.

Crash Course Planning

The organizing crash course starts with a simple straightforward plan. A plan, even a plan jotted down in crayon on an old utility bill is essential. Eventually you’re going to get tired. Fatigue saps your will and when your will is gone the project is doomed to fall prey to indecision. A plan, constructed when you’re rested and fresh, full of optimism and naivete, can keep you barreling forward. You know your daughter’s closet is next; not a glass of wine and an hour of Breaking Bad reruns.

List which rooms you’re going to tackle and what your rough idea of success is going to be. Here’s a portion of such a plan.

You’re not a slave to this plan. It is your plan after all. But it does serve as a useful guide. If you find that your daughter’s bedroom actually took you two days instead of five hours, you might want to seriously rethink the rest of your plan and make the time frames more realistic. Systematically work through each of the rooms.

Donate or Keep? That is the Question

The organizing crash course approach is to remove every item from the room. Throw away the obvious trash. Install any additional storage space such as bins, toy chests, or closet shelving. Then sort the clothes into donate and keep piles. The keep piles go back into the storage areas, the donate piles, obviously, are put back into circulation.

If the “keep piles” don’t fit then you must not commit them to the active storage spaces. “Keep items” that don’t fit into the active storage spaces must either be reassessed or consigned to dead storage.

The reassessment means to do a quick binary sort. Is there something in the closet less desirable than the item I’m holding in my hand? If yes, then quick swap. If no, then donate or dead storage is the answer.

The “keep items” that aren’t important enough for active storage must go into dead storage. I personally don’t like the idea of keeping “maybe’s” in active storage like a closet. If it’s not something you like enough to put a hanger in, then it shouldn’t be in a box above the hangers. That space is too valuable. It should be used for items that are accessed infrequently but with certainty, like your Winter boots.

Dead storage is the attic, the basement, or heaven forbid, the garage, where it can join the other boxes preventing the car from fitting. Sometimes people even acquire outside storage space to store possessions that aren’t important enough to wear or use, but are too valuable to donate or throw away. Those people need to hire a professional.

Time Investment

To be successful on the organizing crash course you’ll need to devote three or four hours every evening and a large part of your weekend to the effort. If you do less than this, it will take so long to see measurable improvement that you’ll give up halfway through. If the crash course fails, you can still succeed with the incremental approach.

Incremental Approach

If the crash course is like a marathon, where you’re bleeding from your toenails and everything wants to give up save the burning fire in the depth of your soul, then the incremental approach is more like a jog through the neighborhood park where you stop and buy overly sweet lemonade from those cute little girls across the street.

You’ll have three boxes at hand when you start the incremental approach. One for donate, one for keep and one for “I’ll think about it.” You still will want a plan, but don’t put in any time frames. Just commit to doing a very manageable time, say a half-hour a day—whether you feel like it or not.

It’s like gardening. You want to be in the garden every day, just to make sure everything’s okay. But some days you may pull weeds and some days you’ll admire the budding flowers. But, every day you’ll stop by 8:30 a.m. because the sun’s starting to heat things up and the lemonade is calling.

Incrementalism

If you’re a true incrementalist, you’ll never pull everything out of a closet at once and start sorting. You’ll pull out the obvious trash, but each item of clothing will be assessed and kept or donated, one-by-one in the closet.

You’ll develop a mental checklist. If something doesn’t fit, it’s gone. If an item is so out of fashion that it will never come back, it’s gone. If you hate it now as much as you loved it once, it’s gone. Don’t put yourself in the position where you have to move a mountain before you can take a bath or go to bed. Do one little area, section, or pile at a time without accumulating a bigger pile.

Time Commitment

This approach will take more elapsed time than the crash course. There is a slight penalty from starting and stopping more frequently, but you won’t increase the pressure on yourself and that preserves a lot of energy.  You may have to convince an angry partner that the pile of books will eventually be donated to the local library. Maybe your mother can put off her visit for a few weeks until the spare bedroom is complete.

Smell the Flowers

Yes, you’ll have to live with the mess longer but that is a choice you can make. Once made there is some solace in knowing that the journey you’re on is the right one for you. And, the destination is the same. You’ll get there. You’ll get the home you know you deserve. And you have the time to take a sip of lemonade and admire the flowers along the way.