Five tips for getting your home organized

Have you ever wondered how much time you spend a day looking for something you forgot where you left? Or how many times in a week you think about postponing something to do at home, that can 'wait until tomorrow'? Well, it's time you got yourself down to it and organized your home once and for all. With some useful tips, you'll be done in no time. And being organized will even save you precious time in the future, a time that can be used to do more productive, or enjoyable things by yourself or with your loved ones.

Step 1: Create a list

If you want to be organized and tide up your place, the first thing you'll need is to create an organized list of the things you want to do. After all, without a list you could start on the wrong foot, being disorganized about your organization objectives. After you finish your list, be sure to rank the items that need to be organized in order of importance and set up a realistic timeframe to achieve each goal. This will not only make things easier when you're actually working on the tasks, but also keep you excited about the tasks and the completion of each of them.

Step 2: Think about how to do it

Now that you know what you want to organize, think about how you are going to do it before you actually start moving the first box. This might be unnecessary to some, but it's quite easy to lose your focus while doing the task and abandon it for minutes or hours while getting distracted by an old picture, shirt or other object that you had 'lost' and had no idea where it was. By knowing what you have to do you can concentrate on the task at hand and finish it sooner. Also, if you have a detailed plan you have a better idea of what you're going to get yourself into beforehand. If you don't make a plan, you may be surprised by the amount of work that might be involved once you start, and be more inclined to abandon the task before getting a chance to finish it.

Step 3: Sort and separate items

Once you have started the process itself, sort out the things you want to organize, and try to separate them by groups, depending on their function, origin, colour, value, ... Whatever works for you. Just make sure you're consistent throught the process, or else you're never going to remember which criteria you chose in the sorting process in the first place! Also, while you're sorting, make sure to check if the item should indeed be in the room. Just like you shouldn't keep pans in your bedroom, take the picture books out of the kitchen. Unless you're extremely short on storage space, each room should store only things that are going to be used in that room.

Step 4: Find a destination for each thing

As you're going through each room, this step should come right after the sorting process. Once you know everything you have in a room, you should stop and think of what you're going to do with it. If it's still relevant to you and useful in the room you're at, separate and store the similar items into separate boxes, drawers or other containers that make it easy to retrieve items later. If you have trouble remembering what each box or drawer is for, draw a scheme separately or put stickers on the boxes themselves. If something hasn't been used in a long time, perhaps it's time to think if you really need it, and donate what you won't use. Clutter doesn't get rid of itself without your help, and now is the time to get rid of it!

Step 5: Keep it up

After you have finished organizing all your rooms, you'll notice your life will become a lot easier, and better. You'll waste no time finding things and will be quite happy with yourself in knowing exactly where everything is. You may even feel better for having donated stuff that was no longer useful to you but which will probably serve someone just fine. However, after you finish, you must police yourself to keep it up. Unless you want to see all your work lost in a couple of weeks of months, you must continue to reevaluate your tasks consistently, putting new objects where they belong, along their older and similar counterparts, and getting rid of things you stop using. By doing this, you'll keep your home organized and be able to enjoy all the benefits that such organization brings to your life.