Now that you’re on track with storing and organizing your time, the next step is to get prepared to really start organizing your surroundings. The first steps in this process are purging and grouping your items. This is, honestly, the hardest part of the process. It requires you to go through all of the areas that you hope to organize and get rid of anything that’s holding you back. So, before you begin purging, I’d recommend these preparation steps:
1. Clean up a bit. It’ll be easier to really look through what you have if all of your sweaters are in the closet, all of your books are at least near the shelf, and all of your dishes are in the kitchen. Otherwise you risk having to repeat the process ad nauseum as you find more objects that should have already been organized.
via Martha Stewart (who, by the way, has an awesome "Homekeeping Handbook" that has excellent cleaning instructions for everything!)
2. Mentally prepare yourself. Try to get yourself into a mindset where you can get rid of things. If you start the process thinking that you’re only going to be able to get rid of 1% of your items, then you’ll end up getting nothing accomplished. You should also prepare yourself for the fact that you won’t be able to get everything done in one day (unless you live in a very small apartment, and even then it’ll be a stretch). Even if you could fit it in timewise, purging can be emotionally exhausting, so don’t push yourself too hard. Just get ready to tackle one or two rooms/areas. Set aside a couple hours per room or large area, or just one hour for smaller areas (like bookshelves or linen closets).
via Beach Float Abroad
3. Get your tools together. You’ll need several boxes or bags (I prefer bags for clothes and soft items and boxes for heavy or unwieldy items), the exact number will be dependent on how much you have to donate, throw away, repair, or keep.
Now you’re ready to begin purging! Purging is a fairly simple process, and you can adapt it to fit your needs. But there’s one hard and fast rule of purging that I like to follow: don’t start a room or area if you can’t finish it before you go to sleep. Purging is NOT something you want to sleep on; it’s an instinctive, intuitive, spontaneous process, and stretching it out over more than one day will give you too much opportunity to think up excuses to keep something. If you have to think up an excuse to keep it, get rid of it.
To start purging, get your clearly marked boxes and bags ready, and pull absolutely everything out of the area that you’re trying to clean. If it’s a closet, make sure that closet is completely empty. This makes sure that nothing goes back in the closet with you thinking about it first. If you’re doing a whole room, like an attic, do it in sections.
For each item, look at it and decide whether to donate it (to a friend, to Goodwill, to a sister, to a traveling circus, to a community theater, to whomever), pitch it (or compost or recycle), repair it (only do this if either of the following is true: a – you can repair the item yourself in a reasonable amount of time, or b – the cost of the repair is less than the value of the item), or keep it (whether to be used daily or to be stored more permanently, such as in a small memory box). Then, once you’re done purging, look at your piles. If your keep pile seems too big, keep in mind that the purpose of this process is to get rid of the things that are holding you back, go through the keep pile again. Repeat the process as often as you need to until the keep pile is small enough to comfortably fit in the area where it’s supposed to be.
via kinowear
Once everything has been separated, go ahead and make an immediate trip to Goodwill, the recycling center, the trash can, the shredder, or the repair shop. Follow your instinct on purging (unless of course your instinct tells you that a teal bridesmaid dress with a giant bow will ever be worn again), and you’ll be on the right track.
Now, the hard part is to resist the urge to automatically start organizing everything. Instead, group the keep pile into a couple large groups: (1) going into permanent storage, (2) going into seasonal storage, or (3) going into day-to-day use. Clean up the day to day use items a bit (i.e. get candy out of coat pockets). Then leave the piles alone until you’ve repeated this process for every area that you intend to purge and organize. If you’re going through a large area, such as an entire house, it might be helpful to put all the permanent storage items in one room, all the seasonal storage items in another, and put the day-to-day use items in the room where they’ll be used on a daily basis.
And that’s it for today! Check back tomorrow for advice and strategies for the next step: large scale organization!
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