Your Organised Home
Module 2: Know the Enemy

Never-ending Story

The main reason that keeping an organised home is so darned hard for many of us is the fact that you’re never actually finished doing it. Unlike goals such as getting a promotion, winning a race or completing a presentation, there’s no point at which you can draw the line and say “there – job done.”

As Joan Rivers once famously said: “I hate housework. You make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.”

This is why those of us who struggle with clutter are often at heart perfectionists with very high standards in other areas, but who find that the daily grind of never-ending tidying is not a chore that appeals or offers any real glow of satisfaction.

Mind The Gap

Let’s imagine this – you’ve completed this course, and your home is now perfectly spotless, organised and tidy. You pour yourself a glass of something special and kick off your shoes to celebrate your tidy home… and ten minutes later the dirty glass and shoes are not only cluttering your room but also magnetically attracting other items to themselves!

What we’re aiming for here is a change of thinking in which you begin to stop clutter at source.

You can do this by making sure that the gap between using an item and putting it where it needs to be afterwards shrinks.

And so something is either in use, or back where it should be – but it’s not hanging about turning into clutter.

In my imaginary picture of a celebration above, this means that as soon as you’ve had a glass (or three) of something nice, you pick up your shoes, pop them in the cupboard or wardrobe, and rinse out your glass.

In fact, the “putting away” becomes a holistic part of the process of doing anything in life, from reading a newspaper (read paper > recycle bin) to cooking dinner (cook dinner > put pans in sink > eat dinner > wash up).

Sounds too simple? Consider this: right now, the clutter in your home is comprised of items frozen in time, caught in the gap between use and storage or disposal.

Remember that last week I described clutter as being “the wrong things, too many things, or things in the wrong place?

By definition everything has a place in which it belongs, be it a bin or your wardrobe, the kitchen cupboard or toybox – whatever is cluttering your home needs to make one or two small journeys to its destination and it then ceases to be clutter and becomes a valuable object once more.

It’s the small but significant issue of when it actually makes those journeys that separate the cluttered home from the tidy one.

Time Is Precious

So, decluttering is about time-consciousness as much as it is about brooms, bin-bags and coat hangers.

Bearing that in mind, I’d like you to take a moment with your notebook and estimate how much time in an average day you spend dealing with the consequences of your cluttered life.

Examples might include searching for things that have become mislaid or buried under mounds of stuff, or having to spend ten to fifteen minutes washing kitchen equipment before you can even begin to cook a new meal.

Please don’t succumb to any guilty feelings or negativity about yourself at this point – these feelings are counter-productive and they will sabotage your success by making the whole topic so painful that it’s easier to ignore it and go back to old ways.

I want you to be successful and to feel good about your home, and in order to make progress we need to do a quick audit on what the cost is in terms of time before we can move on and look at ways to use your time enjoying your home rather than struggling with it.

Remember, be gentle on yourself – you went off-track and now you’re working to get back on it, and stay on it – no need to feel bad about yourself because of it, no-one is perfect after all.

My point in asking you to assess the time you lose is this: ALL tidying up has to be done eventually, unless you plan to grow old and die surrounded by untouched mounds of clutter.

By tightening your timeframe and recognising clearly that cluttered living is not quicker or easier than being organised, you’ll begin to have the motivation and methods you need to create a harmonious orderly life.

To quote Shirley Conran, “I make no secret of the fact that I would rather lie on a sofa than sweep beneath it. But you have to be efficient if you’re going to be lazy.”

Knowledge Is Power

When you began the decluttering process last week, I asked you to take note of what kinds of item and which areas you have the most problems with.

It makes good common sense to put these at the very top of your list of things to do, because once you start to see real progress you’ll be ten times more motivated to complete the rest of your decluttering process.

If you find that one or two things stand out as regular pitfalls, then have an extra push on these this week.

My client Catherine was equally torn between her chaotic bedroom, strewn with toys, clothes and crockery and her kitchen which was full of dirty dishes, pans, cutlery – you name it, it was unwashed and lying around getting in the way.

When she got home in the evenings she was pre-occupied with washing pans so she could get dinner on for herself and her hungry son, and so she’d chuck her work clothes onto the floor or a chair instead of taking time to hang them up.

Getting herself and her small son ready in the mornings was a major ordeal because she needed to wash out bowls again before she could prepare breakfast, and she was normally juggling tasks such as having to iron her work clothes at the same time.

Even before she left home she was exhausted from the struggle! And she knew she’d be coming home to more chaos at the end of the day.

I showed her how making a commitment to tackling those areas first – organising her bedroom, hanging up clothes, doing a few mammoth washing-up sessions – allowed her to start to tighten the space between use and storage, because she had a clear sink and drainer so washing up after meals didn’t need to be a major chore.

Because her bedroom was clear of clutter, she could easily hang up her work clothes and change into something more comfortable, and knowing that her clothes would be fresh and unrumpled the next day made getting ready for work simpler and less time-consuming, leaving her more time to enjoy a healthy breakfast.

Virtuous Spiral

It’s a virtuous spiral – start to declutter, mind the gap between use and disposal of items, and you’ll have more time and less pressure which in turn will give you the freedom to continue manifesting your ideal home.

Last week I asked you to consider if you had any special needs for your home, such as space to work, exercise or meditate.

As you continue your decluttering process this week I’d like you to give special attention to that area, or to planning where you can dedicate to that purpose if you don’t already have a space set aside.

If you do have this area already but it’s fallen into disuse or is so cluttered that you can’t enjoy using it, make it the target of at least one ten-minute tidy per day.

This space represents you caring about and honouring yourself, and if it’s shared by other people in your home, making it a pleasant and hamonious place will illustrate to them the joys of living in an organised home.

Other People

Other people who share your home have a major part to play – while you’re fighting in the front lines against clutter and towards an organised home, you don’t want to discover that “the enemy within” is undoing all your good work.

While it can be very hard to pursuade other people to change their ways if they’re not motivated to do so, it is worth taking time to think how you can influence the people around you in a positive way.

Techniques that have worked for me and my clients tended to be the ones that involved positive reinforcement, so that for example children learn that a tidy bedroom results in some small treat – praise or perhaps an outing at the weekend.

Partners and older relatives require more subtle encouragement and it would be a good use of your time to plan a few positive ways to encourage them to play the game and help you, or at least not undo your efforts.

When one person in a household starts to change the way things are done, others may use this as a means to exercise any grudges or bad feelings, by deliberately sabotaging your work.

While it’s not within the remit of this course to show you how to deal with such negative behaviour I do recommend that you don’t let it affect your goals, but rather, use your own personal experience of that person to find a way to motivate them to support your decluttering.

Sometimes the old saying “if you want a job done properly, do it yourself” comes into play and it might at times be simpler to tidy up after someone else than insist they do it, get into conflicts, and allow them to use this against you to undermine your dreams.

Right now you need to concentrate more on building up a good momentum for yourself, by getting deeply into the groove of becoming more organised, and ”cutting off your nose to spite your face” by refusing to cope with anyone else’s mess won’t help you at all.

Use your common sense and knowledge of the people involved and concentrate on getting your home straight, because in my experience that grinds down resistance far more effectively than scenes, drama and martyrdom.

This Week’s Target

Most homes have one key area – it’s often the kitchen or main living area – where decluttering will make the greatest impact because it greases the mechanism of your entire home.

Areas like kitchens have a constant flow in and out of shopping, waste, and things in transit to other areas, and they’re in use daily even if it’s just to boil a kettle or use a microwave.

Living rooms are shared and used by everyone in your home and when it comes to relaxing they’re the place where you tend to spend the most time.

Post, magazines and newspapers, kicked-off shoes – again, the high amount of traffic makes the main living area a prime place for clutter to accumulate.

Have a good hard look at how you live right now and ask which area or room you want to focus on this week, choosing the one that will make the biggest difference to the daily running of your life.

If you’re not sure how to begin, ask yourself the following:

• Which room do you most often find yourself hunting for lost items in?
• Which area do you spend the most time having to tidy before you can use it?

Once you’ve decided where to focus most of your energies this week, please make an appointment with yourself to do one hour of decluttering in that area within the next 24 hours.

Also start to really Mind The Gap in that area – when you’ve finished using something, deal with it immediately and without delay, because that way it doesn’t get stuck in time and become clutter.

Actions of the Week

1. Stay committed

Commit to the tasks above and answer all the questions, because you need to know your enemy before you can defeat it.

Having an organised life will pay off in so many other areas – family, work life, social life and self-esteem – that it is a very good use of time to think carefully about what works, what doesn’t and generally plan your strategies based on what you learned last week.

2. Ten minute mission

Begin to tackle “right thing, wrong place” clutter for ten minutes asap – when you have finished reading this course or the minute you get home.

Make any special areas in your home the subject of further ten minute tidies because this will give both you and anyone you live with motivation to keep up the good work, and it is a way of honouring yourself.

3. Watch out for sabotage

Choose the most effective strategy if someone else is sabotaging your work – this may be finding the right way to motivate them, or it may be just picking up after them.

No-one wants to be the unpaid servant of another person but picture this – if your house was running smoothly and efficiently, even picking up after someone else would probably take less time and be less problematic than going back to coping with clutter.

You’re probably doing it anyway but when you were cluttering yourself you didn’t notice so much, and remember this: eventually you will have to tidy up, so don’t let stubborness sabotage your dream.

The same goes for guilt and perfectionism – stop them in their tracks and concentrate your energies on productive thoughts that will move you forwards.

4. Keep on keeping on

Commit to that one hour decluttering session within the next 24 hours, and make appointments you can keep for as many as possible this coming week.

If you get stuck on where to start, look at the notes you made last week telling you which kind of clutter was causing the greatest problem and make that the focus of a few one-hour sessions.

Don’t burn yourself out but don’t use any improvements you might have seen – or not seen – as an excuse to ease up because you are aiming for the ideal home you described for yourself in Week 1.

Keep up the ten-minute pre-bed tidy, and make sure that you’re moving forwards every day by a small but noticeable amount.

5. Give yourself a treat!

You have now started the second week of your journey to an organised home and you are doubtless realising the scale of creating and maintaining order in your life.

It isn’t easy for some of us to live in an organised manner and for you to have actually got this far in addressing your clutter, investing in this course and making it to week two is pretty incredible, so give yourself a pat on the back and treat yourself in some small way this week, because you do deserve it!

I’ll see you next week, when we’ll be looking at how to deal with the things we hoard or collect, and how to turn them from clutter to allies.