Organize 365 Podcast Episode 144 - Getting Organized Step 1: Decluttering

This episode is brought to you by my virtual organizing sessions. Would you like me to help you get your home and life organized? Listen at the end of this podcast to find out how to sign up for virtual organizing sessions, or go to organize365.com/virtual to learn more. Welcome to the Organize 365 Podcast. My name is Lisa Woodruff, and I'm a professional organizer and blogger in Cincinnati, Ohio. I want to help you get your home organized and help you organize life stages and unexpected events. So sit back, relax, and let's get organized. Oh my goodness, I am crazy excited about the next 4 podcasts. So this podcast today is about step 1 of getting organized, which is called decluttering, and I'm going to be taking you through the getting organized process. In the next 4 podcasts. Now, I have been thinking about recording these podcasts for over a month, and every time I sit down to record this podcast, I think, oh, I want to tell them that. Oh, maybe this story would explain that point better. How am I going to break down organizing into these steps so that people can really understand what the whole process of getting organized is? And 2 days ago, it hit me like a lightning bolt. So some of this is a brand new revelation for me, and I've been organizing for my entire life, so I'm hoping that you will get some new nuggets of information here as well. The term getting organized means different things to different people, and over the last 5 years of working with clients in their homes and online, I have distilled getting organized into 3 distinct phases or steps. I used to call these overwhelmed, Getting organized, and systems and maintenance. And I'm changing the names because while that was kind of what— how you felt, it wasn't what you did. And now that I figured out what you do in each of those stages, this is going to make so much more sense. So the steps are decluttering, organizing, and increasing productivity. Each of these steps has its own goals and strategies for success. And in this series, I will be describing each step from beginning to end and giving you actionable strategies to get organized. These steps are progressive and need to be done in order in each area that you want to tackle in your home and in your life. In the podcast, I'm going to be sharing with you what it looks like to do each of these steps in 4 areas of your home and life. Your master closet, your kitchen, your schedule, and your daily actionable papers. So by telling you how to implement decluttering, organizing, and increasing productivity in all 4 of those areas, I'm hoping that the light bulb goes off for you like it did for me. So let me first give you the high-level information about what step 1 decluttering is and looks like. So I used to think that decluttering and organizing was one step because I usually do them at the same time. However, each one has its own unique focus and objective, and decluttering always comes first. Once you decide what area you're going to organize, the first step is to declutter. So what does decluttering mean? Well, decluttering means to remove what you don't want or need in that space. Some things are obvious, like food, trash, or broken objects, but then it gets harder because one man's trash is another man's treasure, right? So how do you decide what should go and what should stay? The key here is to focus on what can go, not how to organize or what you want to keep. There are no right or wrong answers here. You cannot do this wrong. But these 3 things are going to impact how you declutter. Number 1, how overwhelmed are you? Number 2, how long have you felt unorganized? And number 3, how much time do you have? Each one of those is going to increase the amount of anxiety or stress that you have about getting decluttered and organized. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, it's been a long time since you felt organized, if ever, and you have zero time, You're just— you feel like you don't have any place to start, right? So if you're not overwhelmed and you used to be pretty organized, and it's only been about 6 months since you've been disorganized, and you have about an hour a day, you come into organizing in a much different place. So you just have to recognize— I can't change your circumstance. I could just bring it to your awareness so you can give yourselves grace. Understand where you are when you're coming into this quote unquote getting organized time of life, especially if decluttering is what you need to do first. All right, so the more overwhelmed you are and the longer you've felt unorganized, the more you need to declutter. We just have too much stuff. And at the same time, the idea of living with less stuff is kind of weird. It feels odd To have to give away perfectly good items that you paid for. But the freedom of living with less is just that— freedom. So how much less? In my experience, you can declutter anywhere from 20 to 50% at a time. We're not going for perfect here. We're going for progress over perfection. You're not going to be able to walk into your closet, get rid of 80%, and live on the 20% that you actually wear. It's just too big of a jump for you. So remember, you're going to have to declutter the same spaces multiple times, usually separated by 6 months or a year. You'll go back and be like, why did I save that the first time? Well, you got rid of a ton of other stuff the first time, and so this is a process. This is kind of like a shedding and a renewal. So to be most effective in this process, to have the best chance of actually decluttering more towards the 50% and less towards the 20%, is to take whatever it is you're making the decision about and take it out of the home it lives in. So when we're talking about the closet, don't stand in your closet and make decisions. Take all of the pants out of the closet, put them on the bed, put them on your body, make the decision one pair of pants at a time. When you're in the kitchen making the decisions about the 80 million spatulas, tongs, and everything else you have in all those ridiculous utensil drawers, take everything out of the drawer, put it on the counter, put multiple drawers of stuff on the counter at the same time, separate by kind. Look at all the spatulas, look at all of the tongs at the same time. When you're doing the Sunday basket, collect all of the papers all the way around the house in laundry baskets Go in your family room or your office or your kitchen table, wherever you have enough space, go through the papers there. Don't go through every pile of papers in every room that you're in. So step 1 is, is to get whatever it is that we're going to organize and move it out of where it normally lives. You will just— you'll be surprised. Things in your closet, do this test. Go through your shirts, go in your closet and just do your shirts. Go through your shirts and pick out the ones that you don't want. And then the next day, I want you to take your shirts and put them on your bed and go through them, and I guarantee you'll get rid of more of them. You just look at them differently when they're not in their home. Here are the 5 steps I've come up with for decluttering. Number 1, you're going to start with one room, and in that room, you're going to start with one space. Okay? Number 2, you're going to eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. That's easy. That's what all of us can do when we go in a room in our house, in somebody else's house. We can easily see what is trash, what is food, or what is broken items. Step 3, you're going to sell or consign anything of value that you want to sell and donate the rest. So anything you're not keeping, get it out. Step 4, collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in that room. And then step 5, make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. Now let me go back to step 4 for one minute. When I say collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in this room, here's where I think I lose some of you, and I totally get it. I totally understand. If you're already living in what you feel is chaos, whether it is or it isn't, it's how you feel. If you feel like your whole house is disorganized, you're very overwhelmed, You need to declutter a lot of items. You feel like you go in one area and you declutter it and you move stuff that doesn't belong in that area to another room. Well, you're just making a bigger mess in the other room. Like, shouldn't we make a decision on everything? Shouldn't everything that leaves this room go somewhere else organized, not adding to the chaos in another room? And yes, intellectually, logically, that makes sense, but in reality, that's That's not how this works. How I like to teach people, or what I know has been successful for me, is you start in one room. I don't care what room you pick. In the 100-day challenge, we start in the kitchen, but after we're done with the kitchen, we go in the master bedroom closet and bath. And I find that those 2 areas are the areas that most people tend to gravitate to first. They either want to do their closet or they want to do the kitchen first, whichever one is bothering them the most. You're going to find things in your kitchen, you're going to find things in your master closet that need to go in the storage room, need to go in the garage, need to go in your Sunday basket, need to go in a gift-giving area, need to go to the food pantry, need to go a lot of other places. If you go to the garage and you want to make sure that the thing that you just took out of the kitchen is going to go in the garage, but there's no organizer yet in the garage, then you're just— now you're in the garage and frustrated there's no organizer. So what I say is to do all 3 of these steps, or at least the first 2, to completion in one area and then move to the next. So we're going through this podcast about decluttering, the next one is organizing. Do the decluttering and the organizing for the entire kitchen and then move to the master closet. Do the decluttering and organizing for the entire master closet and then move to the master bedroom. Do the decluttering and the organizing for the entire master bedroom. And then move to the kitchen. Now here's what happens. You're decluttering your master bedroom and you get to step 4 where you collect everything that goes in another room and locate it to that room. And boy, can you find a lot of things in a master bedroom. Let me just tell you, that's why it's not one of the examples. You find memorabilia, um, supplements, paper, office supplies. Mementos, gifts, like so much stuff. Whatever you find in the master bedroom that goes in your closet should already have a space because we already decluttered and organized the closet first. And whatever you find in your master bedroom that belongs in your kitchen should already have a space because we already did the kitchen. So when you are collecting everything that goes in another room and located in that room, if that room has already been decluttered and organized, Then put the things away. If you're taking these things to the basement storage room, to the guest room, to the garage, and we haven't organized that yet, leave it in a bag and dump it. We'll deal with it when we get there. Yes, I absolutely am making those areas worse. However, I'm making your living areas better. So if you get through the kitchen, master bedroom, master bath, and closet, which is the first 42 days of the 100-day challenge, I am telling you, You feel like a million bucks. It doesn't matter that your garage and your storage room are a hot mess. They're even a hotter mess than they were before, because when you get up, you can get dressed, make your coffee, get you or your kids out the door, and not be in a sea of clutter, because every area you were just in is organized, and everything that's in there you love and want and need. And so you just feel like you then have the power and the ability Eventually to go tackle the garage, the basement, the memorabilia, the things that are always going to be harder to do. So I wanted to address that. Yes, I am telling you to collect everything that doesn't belong in the space you're in and dump it in the room where it does belong. And we will get to that when we get to that. This didn't happen overnight. We can't fix it overnight, but we can fix it. Now here's where I think this is gonna be the most beneficial. I'm going to take you through that 5-step process In 4 different areas in your life. Let's start with the Sunday basket because why not? I always start with the Sunday basket. However, a good friend of mine just started listening to the podcast and she said, I didn't know what the Sunday basket is. So for those of you that have listened to me for more than a hot minute, you know what the Sunday basket is. For those of you who are new in 2017, welcome. This is Organized 365. I'm obsessive about organization. I don't have a magazine-worthy house, But I really, really like solving your dilemmas by getting you more organized so you can get out and do what you love in life. And the step that I tell you to take first, which is the most universal for everyone, so it's the easiest for me to teach you, is to make a Sunday basket. So if you've not made a Sunday basket, go to podcast episode 101 because the Sunday basket is organization 101, and you'll find out all about the Sunday basket and how to learn more there. So for those of you that are familiar with the Sunday Basket, it's going to be real easy to see how this works with the step of decluttering. Number 1 is start with 1 room or 1 space. So how we start with 1 room and 1 space with the Sunday Basket is we grab a laundry basket and we go all around our house and we collect all of the paper everywhere that we find it, and we put all of that paper in 1 place. Step 2 is to eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. In the Sunday basket, that's when you go through that laundry basket and you get rid of everything that is trash in your papers and everything that can be shredded. So now you have a Sunday basket left with actionable items, and you have shredding, and you have trash. So trash is obviously trash. Step 3 is to sell, consign anything of value, or bag and donate any items that need to go to the donation center. Well, that doesn't make sense with the Sunday basket, right? Unless you think about that shredding. So for the shredding, either shred it or take it to any office supply store in the United States and they'll shred it for $1 a pound. A banker's box usually costs about $20. So if you filled up a banker's box, which is, you know, our printer paper box, that'll be about $20 to get that shredded. That's your step 3. Step 4 is collect everything That needs to go in another room and locate that in that room for the Sunday basket. That's when you separate the papers that are left into what is actionable and needs to be done, which is your Sunday basket, and what is papers to be filed in a filing cabinet somewhere. Those belong somewhere else. They belong wherever you have your filing cabinet. So you're going to take those papers, walk them downstairs, and put them right by the filing cabinet and walk away. We are not doing filing right now. We're going Leave that for another day. Then step 5 is to make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. Well, in your Sunday basket, do you have a basket? Maybe you need to go buy yourself a basket, and maybe you need to buy slash pockets so you can do the organization step. Now for the Sunday basket, just real quick, I have a really expensive Longaberger medium market basket, and it takes like 6 to 8 weeks to get these ordered. It's like over $100 with the protector. I am not even going to be selling Longaberger anymore. It is— I used it because I already owned it. I already had that basket when I came up with the Sunday basket idea. Here are a bunch of ideas of places where you can go get your Sunday basket. You can go to any store like Target, Walmart, any of those stores. Any cute little container you see that floats your boat, that can be your Sunday basket. It could be a little filing box. It could be a basket. It could be a bag. Anything in the decorative area. The easiest and best place to get an actual basket that is gonna be a good size, and I say, you know, the size of like a small watermelon is a great size for a Sunday basket. I love it if it can fit a binder. So even if you take a binder shopping with you, or if you can find a binder that they're selling at the store and carry it into the basket aisle, the best place to find a basket at a reasonable price is to go to Michaels Arts and Crafts Store. They have 2 whole aisles of baskets, and they usually have a 50% off sale. So you can get a really cute basket for $10 to $15. Okay, sorry. That's just something that keeps coming up in the Facebook group and I never address it, so I thought I'd address it here. All right, I started with the Sunday basket because a lot of you have already started a Sunday basket, so you can kind of see how decluttering goes through there. And I'm also giving you some examples of areas you wouldn't normally think to take this process through. So we're gonna do closet and kitchen next, which you've probably read and seen a million organizing ideas on those, but I wanted to make sure I hit paper, which is Sunday basket, and we're gonna end with your time and and your schedule, your mental clutter. So we're hitting all areas today. So let's go to the closet. I think whenever anybody says, I'm gonna get organized, the first thought is, oh, I gotta go do my closet. Like, it's very natural to wanna organize your closet. So step 1, we're gonna start in one room or one space. So we're gonna start in the master closet. But refine that even further. I want you to do tops only, and then I want you to do bottoms, and then I want you to do shoes, and then I want you to do accessories. Take each of them through this 5-step process. So let's do— let's do shoes. Let's start with shoes. So we're going to start with shoes. Now you know what I said. I said take them all out of the closet. So I want you to carry them all onto your bed. Yep, put a t-shirt on, you're going to get hot and sweaty. Move all of your shoes out onto your bed. Step 2, eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. So you're not going to have trash and food, but for shoes You might have broken items. I know I've had broken shoes. I don't know why I keep them, but sometimes I do. So get rid of any of those that are broken or they're just too worn that there's no way you could even donate them. Then step 3, consign or donate anything else. So figure out what you want to keep and what you don't want to keep, and with what you don't want to keep, decide if it's worthy to consign it or to donate it. Now when you're doing your clothing, you can do your consignment 2 ways. One, You can use swap.com and just mail the donations away, and they will consign it or donate it if it's not sellable, and they will just mail you a check. That is how I would highly recommend you do consignment. Or do a local consignment store, drive right there, have them look at your shoes. Whatever they don't want, add to the donation bags that are already in your car, stop by the donation center, and drop all that off. Now you may say Well, I want to do the whole closet. Well, great, do the whole closet. But if you just have 15 minutes a day, do the shoes, and the next day do the pants, and the next day do the tops. Doing it this way breaks it down into really manageable chunks, and you can get some more decluttering done. Decluttering can easily fit into 5, 10, 15-minute chunks of the day. Organizing takes some time and strategy, and for sure, you know, step 3, increasing productivity, that takes a little bit more time and strategy too. But decluttering You can walk in a room and scan it and know what you want to declutter. Get in the habit of constantly putting things in the donation bags and putting things in the trash. If you see it and you don't want it and you walk by it, pick it up and get rid of it. Step 4 is to collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in that room. So for example, are there somebody else's shoes in your closet that need to go somewhere else? Would you rather keep boots in the front hall closet because there isn't enough room in your closet? Or when you were with the shoes, did you also find, I don't know what, an ice scraper and paper? Who knows? We find all random stuff in our closet, right, that shouldn't belong there. Grab a laundry basket, get rid of all that stuff. And if you don't know what room it's going to go in, and, and the things in that basket don't go in the rooms you've already decluttered and organized, you need one dumping ground room. So let's say it's the guest room, or it's the basement, or whatever space you have that's going to be organized last. That's where everything gets dumped until we can get there. Step 5, make a list of anything that needs organizers and items that need to be replaced. Okay, so I just got rid of all my black shoes because they're all broken and I can't wear 'em 'cause they're broken, but I need black shoes for work, so I need to go buy a pair of black shoes. So you would write that down. Or, okay, I have 24 pairs of shoes. I'm gonna write that on a list because this is the time when I get to the step of organizing, I'm going to get that shoe organizer and I need to know how many pairs I have. Next, let's look at the kitchen. Again, we're going to start in one room, but we're going to go down to one space. So when I start you in the 100-Day Home Organization Challenge, you can actually get week 1 free. So if you go to organize365.com and you go to the program tab at the top, you'll see in the dropdown there, there'll be try one week of the 100-Day Challenge for free. You're going to get the first week, which is the first week of organizing the kitchen. We actually organize the kitchen for 3 weeks. In there, day 1 is plan out your kitchen, day 2 is clean off your counters, and day 3 is to organize your silverware drawer. Like, not only do I tell you to organize all your drawers, we go drawer by drawer by drawer. And in that silverware drawer post, I link to 5 steps to organizing a drawer. There's actually 5 steps to organizing a drawer. So let's just start with that one. Let's start with the silverware drawer. We're going to empty everything out and put it on the kitchen counter because remember, we can't organize it in the drawer. You look at things differently when they're not in their homes. Number 2, any trash, anything broken, anything that is food. If there's food in your silverware drawer— this is when I also, when I do this, why I also like taking everything out of the drawer or out of the closet. I'll vacuum the closet when it's empty because all my clothes are on the bed, or I will wipe out the drawers and vacuum them out when I'm cleaning out the drawers in my kitchen. So you're doing a little bit of cleaning here also. Some items that you might not think of that usually collect as trash in your kitchen are all those little takeout condiments that you're— We have to save the extra ketchup packets. Yeah, we're gonna put them in a lunch, and then all of a sudden you have 89 of them, and then you have 42 soy sauces and 39 honey mustards, and nobody in your family even eats honey mustard. I mean, save 3 ketchup packets and get rid of it all because it's going to come in the fast food package tomorrow, and, and just get rid of those. If you have those silverware that comes in the little plastic, you know, and it's a fork and a spoon and a knife, a plastic one, and it comes in a little plastic wrapper and you save those, we usually use those at home. I mean, we do pack lunches, but we don't need a whole fork, spoon, and knife. So I take all of that out of the plastic wrap and then I have little containers of forks, spoons, and knives, and I just add it in there. It works better for me. If you grab it that way and put it in your lunch, by all means keep it. But in every kitchen I've ever been in, there's been an over Yeah. Overabundance of that stuff. Expired things, going through spices. This is so funny. So I went through our pantry the other day, and we have a pretty organized kitchen. So Greg's in the kitchen and we're trying to figure out what we're gonna make this week for meals, or what I would like him to make for meals, let's be serious. So I got out all of the marinades that he has for meat, and he's like, I'm like, we're not gonna make this, we're not gonna make this. And this is hilarious, we had like 10 packages in there. 5 of them were brown gravy, which clearly I must have bought with a coupon who knows when, because Greg's never bought brown gravy. Haven't grocery shopped basically in 2 years. And furthermore, neither of us have ever made brown gravy from a packet, so I don't know where those came from. But of those 10 packages, 8 of them were expired, so we threw them away. That stuff actually does expire. But don't even think about that. Like, we were in the frozen— I, I went in the freezer and I was like, Greg, when are you gonna eat your shrimp étouffée? So he had Been shopping and he thought shrimp étouffée looked good in the freezer aisle and he bought it and brought it home and as soon as it was in our freezer, he didn't want it. Like, so for like one week I was like, can I make the shrimp étouffée? Can I make this? It's like a single serving. He's like, no, no, no. Finally he's like, just throw it away. I'm never gonna eat it. So it doesn't even have to be expired. You can get rid of it. We buy stuff on a whim. We think we're gonna use it. We have these grandiose plans in our mind that don't come to fruition. So what? Get rid of it. I, you know, I would rather have less in my freezer than be constantly looking at a shrimp étouffée that costs $4.99 that we're not eating, and I could use that $4. And just get rid of it. It's just yelling at you. Get rid of it. Get it out of there. Number 3 is to donate. So I always have like a little, uh, paper sack, and when we're going through the kitchen donating things, like if that I actually think I could have donated that to our food pantry, the frozen, but the timing didn't work for me. So anything that's not expired, I, I always do run to the food bank. So you can give away your expired— your non-expired food. Step 4 is to collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in that room. So that can be loaded in the kitchen. I mean, look around your kitchen. That's where everybody drops everything for whatever reason. I almost think you should do that Daily or weekly, get rid of everything out of the kitchen that doesn't belong in the kitchen. And step 5, make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. This is when I'll realize we actually need one more set of tongs because the kids are cooking on their own and they're always dirty. Or what I find a lot in houses that we physically go organize is they have drawers, but they don't have any drawer organizers. So also in that free 100-day week where you start on week 1, In that same post, I think it's the next day when I talk about drawer organizers, I link to these plastic ones that I like. They come folded flat and you expand them and they'll actually hold things like wooden spoons and spatulas. They're for bedroom organizing, bedroom drawer organizing, but they work really great in the kitchen. Just trust me. So those you might want to buy for your organizing day. Last area, we're going to talk about your schedule and I don't talk about organizing Um, your schedule as much on the blog or podcast, so I thought this was a good one to add into this series. So whenever I get really overwhelmed or I feel like there's just not enough time— You guys are like, that's every day, every day I feel that way, Lisa. Welcome to my life. When I just feel like there's no margin in my life, if you add one more thing, I am going to break. I rarely feel like that anymore, but I used to feel like that All the time. I constantly felt like I had no time for me, no time for anything. Emergencies would come up. I didn't even have time for the emergencies because I already had emergencies. Everything was an emergency. So whenever I get overwhelmed, I like to take a legal pad. You could take a spiral notebook, a piece of paper, whatever. Not an app, not a computer. Sit down and physically write everything that's in your mind, everything that you need to do, everything you need to buy, everything you wish you had time for. Every project you want to start, project you need to finish, everything. Just sit and write and write and write and write and write until you cannot think of anything anymore. I did this once and it was like 9 pages of stuff. It was crazy. It was about 3 years ago. Now when I do this, I can't fill a legal page because I've decluttered my life so much. This is decluttering your brain. Get it all down there on paper. Doesn't mean we're gonna do it all, just means it has to get out. You have to get it out. And I like to keep this list around when I'm in these really overwhelmed times. So that I could be like, it's okay, it's on this list. Okay, and if you need to put that in the Sunday basket so you can read it on Sunday and pick a couple of things out of there that you wanna do. But you need to get it out of your head. The other thing, that's to-dos. We're also gonna talk, and I'm gonna go back and forth, on your calendar. So for some of you, it might not be that you have so many things to do, but your schedule literally, like when you open up your Google Calendar, it's like somebody threw up in there. There are just so many appointments on top of appointments that you physically can't get from one to the other one. You're constantly late, you're forgetting things, you feel like you don't have it together, but it's because you're doing so much and you've been doing it for so long that you've lost the ability to see which of these things on this calendar are urgent and important and which ones have just been on here for 5 years and really should be taken off. So in that case, I want you to print out your calendar or write it out like Make a list of every obligation that you have this week or this month. Like, I'm on the PTA and I volunteer at my kids' school and I go to Bible study and I go to church and I go on a date night with my husband and I work 9 to 5 and I have to go see this doctor and I have to get my hair cut. And every, everything that is on that list, don't print it out in calendar form. Take every single thing that is an activity within a 30-day period and write it on a piece of paper. Like linearly, not like work is 60 hours, just work is one little line item on the page and a haircut is a line item right under that, even though the haircut's 2 hours and the work is, you know, in a month is, I don't know, 800 million hours. It's all one little line. So that's our brain dump. That's step 1. That's getting everything in one place. Step 2, eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. In both of these lists, you are just gonna have to say to yourself, there is no way. Like, either I'm gonna end up in a mental institution or with a heart attack, or something's getting knocked off of this list. And you may need to do this a different day, but after you've made the brain dump— and this happens every time for me— sometimes I have to write all of those things on little index cards or Post-it notes so I could see them all and actually physically move them around. Like, I'm keeping these, I'm getting rid of these. This can take me, you know, I set aside a good 2, 3, 4 hours when I get really overwhelmed to do this. It's beneficial for you to do this. Get up early on a Sunday morning, stay up late on a Friday night and do this. You wouldn't believe the clarity that you'll have. So as you're eliminating tasks, if it's on the paper, cross it out. If it's on a little index card, move it over to the side. What is gonna happen is you are going to languish and anguish and just, oh my gosh, I couldn't possibly give up the PTA. I've been on the PTA for 12 years and I was there for Susie and Bobby and Joey, and now I'm not going to be there for Anna? I have to be there for Anna. I was there for all the other kids. Or, I couldn't possibly stop teaching the Bible study. I've been teaching the Bible study for 10 years, and I'm the one that knows the curriculum, and I'm the one that told them to do this curriculum. Or, I couldn't possibly stop meeting for lunch every single week with this person because we've done it for 10 years. I want you to not think about What is the PTA going to do? What is the Bible study going to do without you? What is your friend not going to do without you at lunch? I want you to be super, super selfish. You— it's just you anyway, right? You and this piece of paper. And I want you to— sometimes I actually cross it out and then see how you feel. Like, go, okay, I've been meeting with this person for lunch every week for 3 years. Do you want to totally eliminate it? Do you want to go down to every other week? Do you want to go down to once a month? So you'll have this intellectual discussion with yourself, and you'll feel obligated to keep doing the thing that you've always done. But I want you to really sit with: Well, what if you did? What if you totally stopped going to lunch with this person? Now take your pen and cross that name off of your list, and almost always, all of a sudden, this wave of relief will come over you like physically. You will. Feel hot or cold, and you will just all of a sudden, all of this stress will just fall off of you. Um, one of the things that I eliminated from mine was I was on TV, I think it was 52 times in 18 months, and I'd worked really, really hard to make connections with the network producers and be on TV. And I still enjoy being on TV, but just, you know, rarely, not every week. It was taking a lot of time. I was not earning anything from this. I was giving up work to go on TV, and But I kind of had worked my way into being the person that people called in this area on TV for organizing. I didn't know what to do about it. I felt like I'd be letting the TV down. I thought I would be giving up on this dream and my business, 'cause what if the Today Show calls? 'Cause I'd like to be on that show. And I felt like just all these things. And I talked to my husband about it and he's like, yeah, no, you got— you're done with that. We're done with that. We've done that. And when I crossed the TV off, this overwhelming— I was like, oh my gosh, like I just gave myself back. I think it was like, I don't know, 40 hours a month. Like the amount of time I was going to get back and the mental bandwidth I was going to get back from not being on TV totally outweighed being on TV. You, you every— I do this every— I do it 3 times a year. Every time I plan my year, I look at my calendar. What can I eliminate? I'm gonna also— I'm gonna hit them all today. If you're in a Bible study, if you volunteer at church, if you volunteer at your kids' school— like, I did all that. I wrote the church curriculum and then it was published by Tommy Nelson. Like, I was all in. I was probably at our church more than 40 hours a week before my kids were born. We were definitely there more than 40 hours a week once they were babies. We were there. And then once Abby came along, I started slowly stepping away. You know, I can't volunteer. And then I stopped writing the curriculum, and amazingly, somebody else did it. I mean, it's not like the whole church fell apart or anything because I couldn't write curriculum, and I slowly stepped away from volunteering. I have not volunteered at our church in 10 years, and you know what? I don't feel guilty about it. I don't. I— you have to look at what is best for you and the season of life that you're in. I am sure when these kids get older, Greg and I will go back and we'll be the greeters at church, and we'll have everybody sit down because we love our church and we love volunteering. But at this stage in my life This particular stage, just for me, for our family, for my business, for our kids, for my home, for my responsibilities. I, I, I'm not in Bible studies and I'm not volunteering at church, and I don't feel guilty saying that. And there were times in my life where I did more with church than I did with work, and now I do more with work than I did with church. So there is no right or wrong here. And when you're by yourself looking at your list of all these massive to-dos that you want to do, or Looking at your schedule of what's on the calendar that you've already committed to, you can cancel anything anytime for any reason. I love—I cannot remember where I first heard this. I have a super—I'm people pleaser. I like everybody to like me. It's a big problem. And someone said, "You know, no is a complete sentence." And I used to say, "Well, no, I don't volunteer because the kids are babies or because this or because that." Now it's like, "No, no." Is a complete sentence. It does not have to be followed up with why you've made that decision. You've made that decision. So we're eliminating tasks or we're eliminating appointments. Let's go to step 3. So step 3 is to bag up any donatable items and deliver them to the donation center or sell anything of value. This is something you can be like, yeah, how am I gonna sell my tasks? Well, here are 2 things that you can do. Number 1, the physical act of canceling the appointment, canceling the group, and returning any items that go with that. So if you say to the PTA, I need to take a break, but you keep all of the PTA binders and all of the stuff, then you're constantly looking around seeing this obligation that you've— and you still have this pull of like, oh well, I said I was just taking a break, and how long is the break going to be? And I still have all the items here. No, box them up. Take them back. If you're not going to be the Cub Scout leader anymore, box it up, take it back. I remember we were organizing someone's house and they had a bunch of Cub Scout materials, and I was like, oh, they'll still take them back. And we boxed them up, I put them in the car, I said, take them back. Whatever it is that you've decided is not going to be a project, is not going to be on your calendar, you know, let the other person know. Obviously, you may need to finish out the commitment of a week, a month, a semester, whatever you've committed to. But in your mind, you're not doing it at the next quarter or the next whatever. You're going to finish out this term and be done. And when you're done, I mean, you're done. Like, everything that goes with that leaves. It's not a permanently— you're never going to be in a Bible study or PTA president or the head of the junior league anymore. It's just right now, in this season, for this little part of my life I'm planning, this doesn't fit my goals. Other people can run all of these organizations. Nobody else can be a wife and mother for your family or take care of your personal home. You are the only person that can do that. You and your spouse are the only ones that can provide the income that your family needs. You guys are the only ones that can be in charge of, you know, caring for your parents and your siblings and the holiday memories. Other people can do these other things. And part of that is also figuring out where you get your self-worth from, which this is already way too long of a podcast. But you know, okay, so this is part of my little revelation. Sorry, you like the podcast. You're in here on minute whatever this is. I don't know, almost minute 40. I can keep rambling because you're still listening. What I realized that I do when I was going through this is there are decluttering experts out there like Marie Kondo and Flylady and A Slob Comes Clean. They talk about decluttering all the time. Like, if you want an expert in decluttering, they are experts in decluttering. The experts in organizing are pretty much products like The Container Store, IKEA. These people are experts in organizing and organizing products. And then there's a whole different population of people who are experts in productivity, and they talk all about living a productive life, and they almost never talk about physically decluttering and organizing. They'll talk about mentally but not physically. Where I am unique in how I approach organizing is that I see the whole entirety of it. I see getting organized from decluttering to organizing to productivity, and I can speak to you at any of those levels and move you to the next one. And I don't see getting organized as an endgame. This is a marathon, and we're picking up the pace and slowing down and stopping for water and getting injured and getting back in the marathon. We're never going to be done. There is no perfect. We're just getting more organized and more productive as we go through life. And then these unexpected events happen, and all of a sudden we're back to overwhelm, and we need to declutter again, organize again, and get productive. And once we declutter and organize and get productive in our home, then we need to do it in our paper, then we need to do it in our schedule, then we need to help other people in our families do it. And it's this whole ecosystem. So I used to think I was an organizer. Then I realized decluttering went with organization. But what I love to do is make people productive, and all of it goes together. And the overarching thing to all of it is the mindset, is the thought process, is the why. Why would you declutter? How does it feel to declutter? It's really, really weird to have empty cabinets and empty spaces. And how do you live with that and not just go back to filling it up and getting stuck in the decluttering cycle and never making it to organizing? Or for most people, never making it to productivity. You declutter, you organize, you declutter, you organize, but when do you get productive? When do you live the life that has the extra time in it that you want? Okay, so number 4, step 4 is to collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in that room. I kind of already told you that when you're gonna give away the binders, you know, return everything that goes with these organizations. And number 5, make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. So again, when you free up this time on your calendar, or when you look at this ridiculously massive to-do list you just brain dumped, you don't even have to— on that list that you brain dumped, I would definitely eliminate as much as you can. But then what's left, you're not going to be able to do in the next 90 to 100 days. What can you do in this time of life? So I have a podcast. If you scroll back a little bit, I can't remember what number it is, about how I plan my year 3 times a year. So September to December is a year, January to May, and June to August, and why I do it that way. So when you look at your list, whatever month you're listening to this in, what can you get done in one of those mini years? Mini, not many. Mini years. And then put the list in the back of your Sunday basket, and when you get ready to plan for the next mini year, pull that list out again. Oh yeah, I forgot we wanna repaint all the baseboards in the house, and it's summer now. That'd be great. I'm gonna put that on my list now. So the ideas aren't gone, the projects aren't gone, you're just not prioritizing them right now. So I think you see in here how no organizing actually happened. I didn't tell you how to organize your to-do list. I didn't tell you how to organize your calendar. I didn't tell you how to organize your closet or how to do the Sunday basket system or how to organize your kitchen. I only told you how to declutter. Decluttering feels good, but it's not— Finished. And I used to get— I'd get declutter and declutter, and I keep taking more and more stuff, and I would get rid of more, and I'd be like, why don't I feel better? I mean, at least when I look around, I'm not as frustrated, but I don't, I don't feel settled. I don't feel good. And step 2 of organizing needs to follow quickly to bring order to your newly emptied space. So that's what I'm going to cover next Friday, is the step of organizing. Now, I made a change You may not have heard it. The 100-Day Home Organization Challenge is not closing. So people are in there, they've already started it. You can join at any time now and you can download that week for free. So just go to organize365.com/14— oh, I'm gonna get this wrong— 144, and you'll get all the show notes. And I'll put a link specifically in that post to how to get to that free kitchen week. So you can see how the 100-Day Challenge flows. I'll also give you all of that decluttering and organizing advice for organizing that kitchen drawer like I told you about. All right, I'm gonna give you a little bit more information about my virtual organizing services, and I will see you next Friday. I am so excited to be offering virtual organization services in 2017. I have been professionally organizing clients for over 5 years, and in podcast number 143, I really explain how the coaching and strategy part of professional organizing can be done through phone calls. Virtual organizing is perfect for you if you cannot find a professional organizer in your area or you do not want someone else in your home. You might really want my input on your situation and you want to make quicker, focused progress in your home. I know you get stuck and I would love to help you come up with ideas and troubleshoot Exactly solutions that will work for you in your home. To learn more, listen to episode 143 or go to organize365.com/virtual to find out your next steps and to sign up. I'd love to work with you and help you get your home organized in 2017. You can find the links for my virtual organizing services and everything else mentioned in this episode at organize365.com.