Organize 365 Podcast Episode 148 - Get Organized in 3 Easy Steps

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 Organized 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. Now it's time to Put all 3 stages of organization together. And I have an awesome printable for you, and I've put it back in the show notes for the other episodes as well. So if you're finding this in the future, you can get to the printable from any of the podcast episodes, 144, 145, 147, or this one is 148. So this is podcast 148. You can click on the artwork and get to the printable right there, or go to organize365.com/148. 4, 8. Okay, so I've gone through the 3 stages of organization, which are decluttering, organizing, and increasing productivity for your Sunday basket, for your time in your calendar, for your kitchen, and for your closet. Now I want to take you through these 3 steps, all— well, 5 steps in all 3 stages from start to finish in 2 new areas just to make sure that this sinks in and that you can really apply this in any situation. So you're gonna wanna get the printable, put it in your Sunday basket, and then whenever you go into a new area to organize, you'll have right there the 5 steps to declutter, the 5 steps to getting organized, and then the 5 steps to increasing productivity to help guide you through. In this podcast, we're gonna talk about organizing your car, which I have almost never talked about, and we're gonna hit on kids' bedrooms. So you could also consider your guest bedroom when you're thinking about this as well. Doesn't work for master bedroom, but kids' bedrooms or guest bedrooms. All right, first let's start with the car. So stage 1 is the 5 steps to decluttering. So in the car, number 1, we're gonna eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. Number 2, sell or consign anything of value that you wanna sell. You probably won't have anything in this area, but if you've bought some special car organizers that aren't working for you, then you might. You're going to bag up anything that's donatable and deliver them to the donation center. That's step 3. Then step 4, and this is a big one in the car, is to collect everything that goes in another room and locate it in that room. This is something in the car that you probably need to do every week, especially if you have other people in your car. But even if you're the only person in your car, it's amazing the things that get stuck in a car. So usually what I'll do on a Friday is go in the house and grab a laundry basket and come out and fill the laundry basket with anything that's in the car that shouldn't be in the car. Then number 5, the 5th step to decluttering in your car is to make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. For me, I go through a ridiculous amount of Kleenex. Like I have perpetual allergies, so I need to make sure that I have Kleenex. And now that I'm in an SUV and not a minivan, I use small lunch bags. Mm-hmm. as my trash bags whenever we have trash in the car. When we had a minivan when my kids were smaller, I had a whole trash can in there. So I'm always replacing those kind of trash bags. Also, if you need any chargers, you might need to replace chargers, things like that. Okay, so we've decluttered the car. Now we're gonna move on to the 5 steps of organizing a car. Number 1, get a big picture plan for your space. This is the mindset part. I don't want you to think about your car as your car. Your car is really an extension of your home, and if you're in Yeah. The survival phase of life where you're in your car a lot, I want you to really think about it like a portable office. I have told many people that are not home very often to go ahead and just put their Sunday basket in the trunk of their car, because usually you're sitting on a soccer field or you're in between appointments, and you could go through your Sunday basket in your car in the 15 or 20 minutes that you have, but you don't have that quantity of time at home. So when you're getting a big picture plan for your space, I want you to think about the trunk section or the hatchback section of your car as a car closet or an extension of your home. Do you need to have an additional cable for your computer in there? Do you need to have files because you're in a sales position and you're always out and about and it would be easier just to keep the files in the car than to take them into the house? Are your kids or you in various Boarding things and you could keep your uniform right in the trunk. It doesn't have to go in the car. Are there things that you could keep in the car that would make it easier for you? Right now with 2 teenagers, we have a whole case of water in the backseat because I've stopped buying fast food drinks. They cost way too much money. And I'll get thirsty when I'm out because I could be in the car sometimes for 5 hours. If I have water, I will drink it. If I don't, I will buy a Coke. I will not buy a water. So I literally, when Greg gets home from the The grocery store, I just put a new case of water in the back of the car all of the time. So we're getting a big picture plan for your space. What is working? What isn't working? Don't consider your vehicle just a mode of transportation. For so many of us, we are actually living out of our cars quite a bit. Number 2, combine like items. So when you think of your trunk as a closet area, then you're able to put more things back there. Like maybe you'll have a duffel bag of everything related to soccer equipment and A different duffel bag for workout gear, and you'll combine those like items in different bags. I love to use bags in the back of a car. Number 3 is match your items to your space. So let's say you're like, ooh, I like that idea of a Sunday basket and keeping it in my car. Well, if I keep my Longaberger Sunday basket in the car, it's going to fall over and things are going to fall out of it. If I wanna keep my Sunday basket in the car, I need to switch it to one of those cubes, like that you would put in an IKEA cube system, you know, those fabric cubes that are more like a box, because a box isn't gonna fall over in the trunk of my car. So match the items that you have to the space that you have. Number 4 would be buy organizers. That's when I would go ahead and buy a cube instead of a basket for my Sunday basket because it's going to be in the back of my car. Number five, clean and finish. So this is when you actually clean the car. If you want, run it through the car wash. It's so funny when I pick up the kids from school and I've been through the car wash, they're like, "Oh, you went through the car wash," because they can smell it. You know, it just smells clean. So now you're decluttered and you're organized. Let's go through the five steps of increasing productivity as it relates to your car. So number one, used. Use the organized system. So we just decided to put the Sunday basket in the trunk. Maybe you decided you also want to have little lunch bag trash bags in your car and see how that works. Think about that after a couple weeks. Is that working or no, not really? All the paper is still accumulating in the kitchen. The Sunday basket has to be in the kitchen. Or that was a great idea to have trash bags in the car, but a lunch bag doesn't hold anything. I need to have a bigger kind of trash bag in my car. Then number 2, plan. Like, the thing I have to plan with my car is when to get the oil changed because I'm always driving. So we needed to get new brakes in my car, which takes half of the day, so I planned to do that on Martin Luther King Day because I knew I wouldn't need to be driving. So plan when you need to do your maintenance, plan when you're going to do big organization of your car. Number 3, refine and reorder. This one I am doing all the time as it comes to my car. So for example, I needed to pick my son up from play practice and I got there half an hour early in case he was done, which he was, which kind of bummed me out because I was gonna clean out my car. So I started with the console and I was like halfway through when I got the text, he was already ready to go. But I'm always refining and reordering what I keep in my car, especially now that I'm in an SUV and not a minivan. When you're in a minivan, you could like bring the kitchen sink if you want. Like, it can all fit in there. But the smaller your car gets, especially if you were used to a bigger car, the more you have to refine and reorder what you actually keep in your car. Number 4 in being more productive is evaluating and maintaining. Kind of the same thing, only a little bit different. So when you're refining and reordering, it's like I just decided I don't need 12 pens, I only need 2 pens. It's more the fine details of what you're organizing. Evaluating and maintaining is just going through your car 5, 15 minutes on the weekend, wiping everything down, replacing things. And then execute. Use that plan and see how it works. So this was a little bit more difficult to apply to the car, but I wanted to show you how it kind of does work. Now let's move on to the kids' Rooms. So my kids are teenagers, and you've heard me say many times that I like to tell children that their bedroom is their mini apartment. I like them— actually, as I'm recording this, the kids are unexpectedly off school, and Abby is 100% redoing her room. Like, everything except the bed came out into the loft. She vacuumed it, she's rearranged it. It looks awesome, looks so fun. And she knows she's allowed to do that because it's her apartment. She can rearrange it. But she also Has to keep it clean and has to keep it maintained. The other reason I love that is other than a little bit of things that they have in our storage room, for the most part, whatever my kids own is in their bedrooms. It's not in our house. They have to keep everything in their mini apartments so that when they move to their real apartment, they won't have too much stuff and not be able to go. So let's look at how these 3 stages of organization apply to a child's bedroom. If you don't have children, You could think about your spare bedroom in the same way. So the 5 steps to decluttering. Number 1, eliminate all trash, food, and broken items. My kids do that every weekend. Number 2, sell or consign anything of value that you don't want. And number 3, box up any donatable items and deliver them to the donation center. My kids do that every single weekend. Then number 4, collect everything that's in that room that doesn't go in that room and move it to another room. That almost never happens. There's very rarely things in my kids' bedroom that need to go other places unless, ahem, they've taken some of my stuff like my nail polish or my nail polish remover or, you know, those things. Then those things have to come back to me. But they usually don't have very many things that have to come back to me. Then number 5, make a list of any spaces that need organizers or items that need to be replaced. Now, in a kid's bedroom, this is a hot one. Like, once you organize your kitchen, you aren't normally going to have to buy more organizers. Like, one and done when you buy organizers in your kitchen. This is not true when it comes to kids' bedrooms. Whenever I organize my kids' bedrooms or they organize their own bedrooms, I almost always need more and different organizers because kids are growing and changing so fast. The size of their clothing, their interests, the things that they've collected. Plus, remember, everything they own is in this room. So if they have a new passion, they need a different kind of organizer. Like Abby just totally rearranged her room and she said, that mirror needs to go over here and I now need an organizer for this. So she is often needing new organizers. This is when it's beneficial to have in your basement an area where you have extra organizers that have or haven't worked in other spaces. Once you don't have children at home anymore, you really don't need that area in your house because once you have the areas in your house organized, you're not going to go get more bins and baskets and drawer organizers. But when you have children living at home, you will have an area of organizers in your basement, and it is much less expensive than running to Target all of the time. All right, that was just decluttering. Now we're going to talk about kids' bedrooms, the 5 steps to organizing, Number 1, get a big picture plan for that space. That's what my daughter did today. Every single thing in that room got moved. The couch is where the bed was, the bed is over on a different wall, the bookshelves that were horizontal are now vertical. Like, it's, it's 100% different. She clearly had that picture in her head, and then she set it— set out to make that work in her bedroom. Then number 2, combine like items. So she has a lot of bins, things that now that she doesn't want to use. It's been about It's 8 months since she's reorganized her room to this extent. I guarantee you when I walk into that hallway, there will be a whole bunch of things she no longer wants anymore that are either going to be donated or put in the basement for when she needs those kind of organizers again. And she's going to combine like items differently. She'll put them in different bins. She'll put them in different places. Number 3, she's gonna match the items to the space. So she has 2 IKEA bookshelves that each have 5 cubbies in them. She has a small desk and, well, she also has this IKEA glass 5-shelf thing that's supposed to be vertical, but currently the shelves are out of it and it is horizontal and it is holding her gerbil. So she doesn't have that organizer right now. So she has to match all of the things that came out of that room into that same space to go back in. So she's gonna do that matching. And then number 4, buy organizers. In our case, we have almost all the organizers she would need downstairs. But on occasion, we go out and buy specific organizers that are needed. Number 5, clean and finish. And whenever I talk to kids organizing their room, I say that means vacuuming. And as I'm doing this podcast, I've heard the vacuum click on a couple of times, so I know she is vacuuming because she takes such ownership of this. This is her bedroom, this is her space. She loves it, and she's empowered by being able to make these decisions. She's 15, by the way. Okay, 5 steps to increasing productivity. Number 1, use the organized system. So she did, she used her organized system of her bedroom and she realized it wasn't working for her. She wanted a change. So number 2 is plan. She planned reorganizing her bedroom. Number 3 is refine and reorder. So she is refining, she's getting rid of what she doesn't want, she's reordering the whole bedroom. Number 4 is evaluate and maintain. So once this is done, once she's done today, she will continue to evaluate the new way she has her room and maintain that. And number 5 is execute. So what you notice in ordering a kid's bedroom, or when I go through these examples, is the steps of decluttering and organizing happen right together. You declutter and then you organize closely thereafter. There's not a lot of space between those 2. The 5 steps to Improving your productivity, those happen later or can be totally independent of the decluttering and organizing. Now, as my daughter redid her whole room today, she went through the 5 steps of decluttering and the 5 steps of organizing, but in her brain, she only went through the 5 steps of increased productivity because she knows how to declutter. She knows how to organize. She does that every single weekend, and now we do it twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays. She cleans and organizes her room. She declutters and organizes twice a week. So today when she decided to rip the whole thing apart and put it back together, she didn't have to think, eliminate all trash and food and broken items, consign any items you want to, make a bag of donatable items. Like, all of that is now a habit for her, happens on a regular basis. And often we can get to this point where we declutter and we organize and it becomes second nature. The place that we want to get to and where a lot of us don't make it is this increased productivity, being able to see a space that you have decluttered and organized, but you wanna make it 100% different. You wanna totally break it down and start over again. That's where you use the system, it's not working, you plan a new one, you refine, you reorder, you execute, you maintain. That's taking it to the next level. All right, I would love for you to go find this printable and download it. You can find it at organize365.com/148. Awesome. And I would love for you to learn how to use these 3 stages of organization in the 100-Day Challenge. So I've made a change. I've been mentioning that this was going to be coming. You can join the 100-Day Challenge anytime. And the way I've made this work is you're just gonna jump in where we are. So we just finished, at the time of this recording, we are just finishing the master closet. So if you join today, you'll get the tail end of the master closet. And then on Monday, we'll be starting to organize the master bedroom. Here's what I find: it doesn't matter where you start; it just matters that you do start. And for many of us, we want to work on something together. So the Facebook group—everyone's in the Facebook group, and they're posting before and after pictures, encouraging ideas. And I—I have learned so much. There are so many people in the group now that are sharing that as we went through the kitchen organizing, I learned so many things. Like I've seen all these different refrigerators. I have different ideas of what kind of refrigerator I would like. Somebody cleaned out all these jars and put. Them in a drawer for spices and they used their label maker to put the expiration dates on the bottom of the spice jars because they transferred the spices. Brilliant! I never thought of that. Many of the people in the challenge already had these in-drawer knife organizers, which I guess I'd never even really seen them before, but a lot of them had them or got them and I was like, wow, that's a really great idea. Maybe I should move my knives. So I'm learning in this group as well. It's not like I have all the answers and You know, we need to learn from each other. Now, if you're not on Facebook and you're not in a Facebook group, I've made it so that the challenge is emailed to you every single day based on where we are. So you can always log in and get the whole entire challenge online once you sign up, but an email will come to you every single day telling you what area of the house we're in. Why this is so awesome is because you can get this email in the morning and then be thinking about, oh, that's right, I need to organize the silverware drawer. It's just another reminder to keep you on task and Doing the next thing. The number one reason why people listen to the podcast but don't actually get organized is because they don't know where to start and they feel all alone. So if you're in the group, you don't feel alone. And if I'm sending you an email, you know right where to start. The assignment, the video, any related tasks that you need are right there in the email. Like, you don't even have to go anywhere. Just push play and then do it. and take action and get organized. You guys can do this! 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 organizeyourhome.com. 365.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.