Lisa Woodruff breaks down why Americans struggle with storage spaces: 87% believe organization is learnable, but only 13% say their storage is actually organized. She recommends treating your basement, attic, or spare room like a retail store with labeled bins and shelving, and says the real barrier isn't time or money, it's emotional attachment to clutter.
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Happy Friday, everyone! Okay, this is gonna be the 4th installment in our organization research. We're talking about Swiss cheese organization, how we as Americans organize a little bit here and a little bit there, but we don't really have this overall feeling of, I am organized. One of the things we found in the research that we did is that 87% of Americans agree that organization is a learnable skill. I think we should just have a moment of silence For Americans agreeing about anything. Can I get an amen about that? So, but of those 87% of Americans who agree that organization is a learnable skill, those same exact people then told us if they feel organized in all of these areas that I have identified that we organize ourselves in. Our personal organization— how many said they were personally organized? 15%. What about our family spaces? How many are family organized? 15%. 14%. And this is the hardest area to get organized. We talked about this last week. Today we're going to talk about storage spaces. Is your storage space organized? 13% said yes. And ironically, the area in which we would think people have the least organization, which is paper organization, that one was actually the highest, a whopping 18%. So I think I'm really on to something. Not only do we feel like we have Swiss cheese organization We don't feel like we have any of these holes plugged at all. Like, no one has truly defined what does organization look like, what is done, what are the categories. And so these categories— I'm getting great feedback from these podcasts and from these videos. Each of these videos go into a whole podcast, so be sure to go over to the Organize 365 podcast in order to learn more. We've already talked about what personal organization looks like, what family and communal space organization looks like, Today we're going to talk about storage organization. Now, this is where the least amount of people, only 13%, said that they are storage space organized. So first, let's talk about what does— what is storage? What is a storage space? So everyone has a storage space, even the most minimal amongst us has a storage space. And then some of us have all of the storage spaces. So let's go through those. You can have a basement, an external storage unit like an off-site storage unit, You can have a shed, you can have an attic, you can have a spare bedroom, you can have a corner of a room, you can have a hallway. It doesn't matter. Where do you put things you're not sure if you still need them, but you don't really want to get rid of them yet? Or you might be giving them back to someone, or you might want to sell to someone. Where do you store these things? That is your storage area. So you could have, you know, a whole bunch of different storage spaces. The interesting thing about any storage space— and we're going to use a basement. I know not everyone has a basement, but you could picture a basement. We're going to use a basement as an example. Okay. Whatever your storage space is, this is how things end up in the storage space. Number one, there are things you do use but not very often, like any kind of decorating stuff, your luggage, um, sometimes furniture that you're not using right now but you're gonna use again. So that's things that would go in storage, and you actually go and you retrieve those on a regular basis and you put them out. And then we have everything else we put in storage, and everything else we put in storage are things that we paid good money for but we don't really need right now, but we're not sure what we're gonna do with it or if we're ever going to use it at all, so we put it in storage. And how we put it in storage is like this. It looks like a mess. Like, when you— when was the last time you walked into your storage space? I mean, you're already in a cold sweat right now even thinking about it. You're like, oh, don't send me wherever that is. It's hot, it's cold, it's dusty, it's unorganized, it's— I don't even know what's in there. And the minute you walk in there, you just feel like Oh, why do I still have any of this stuff? But you've kept it this long, so you might as well keep it longer, right? I mean, this is what I say too. This is totally what we say. So what if instead of just shoving things in an open space that we don't see, out of the way so that we don't have to rebuy things in the future, what if we thought of our storage space as a store? I mean, the word is even in there. Like, what if your storage space was actually a store. And if you think of your storage space as a store, what does a store have? Okay, a store has shelving. First of all, it has shelving and it has categories. So what if I sent you down— and this is what I would do when I was a professional organizer— you would come back to your storage room and it would look like a store. And there would be a section for your holiday decorating, and there would be a section for your luggage, and there would be a section for gift wrap supplies, and there'd be a section for decorating supplies that you weren't currently using, and there'd be a section for memorabilia and, uh, child-related things. And everywhere you looked when you walked into that space, whether it was a spare bedroom, a closet, a hallway, a storage area, an attic, it doesn't matter— every storage space I organized looked exactly the same way. It had plastic shelving units with clear bins, and everything was labeled. And you may say, That would be awesome. Oh my gosh, that would take so much time and it'd be so much money. There is a financial investment in using shelving, plastic shelving and clear totes. I always buy the ventilated shelving from Home Depot, the HDX brand. I love it, it's what I've used forever, but it's a one-time investment. And once you organize your storage room this way, you will never have to do it again. And if you ever move from one house to the next, It's already in totes. You literally just move it to the next house, set it up, your storage room will be all organized like a store, and you can literally go in and get your things. The hardest thing about organizing a storage room is not the time and money, because once you know it's going to stay, you'll invest the time and money. The hardest part about organizing a storage room is realizing you're storing a whole lot of stuff that you should have already sold, trashed, or donated, because we tend to put broken things in our storage. I don't know why we do it, but we do. I tell you more about this in the podcast. So this is the 3rd category of organizing. We now know about what it means to be personally organized, that we should just do good enough when it comes to family and communal spaces. Storage, storage organization— once you have started learning the skill of organizing, you've built your muscles here. You kind of need to hone your muscles a little bit in order to really tackle that storage room. But when you do This is pretty much a one-and-done activity. It could take you the entire summer, but you can then spend the next 10 years with an organized storage. It is such a huge burden to be lifted off of you. So these first 3 categories, we cover all of these in the Productive Home Solution, which just started this week. It's rolling enrollment. Anytime you're ready to start organizing, I am ready to be your teacher and guide you through organizing all these spaces. Next week we are going to start tackling what does it mean to be paper organized. Yes, you have paper, and yeah, we know what we can do about it. So head on over to organize365.com to sign up for the Productive Home Solution. Head on over to wherever you listen to podcasts and search Organize 365, and you can learn more about these weeks if you missed them. And if you're ready to go see about this research that we've done and the other research that we've published in the last year, Just go to organized365.com/research. I am really, really enjoying listening to all the survey responses that we have, listening to our Organized 365 community as they are getting through getting themselves organized and taking those learnings and then putting them all together in these podcasts to really open up this discussion of what is this invisible work women keep saying they're doing at home. How does it apply to all of us and how can we collectively work together to reduce the amount of housework we're doing, set up organizational systems that last so that all of us can enjoy our homes and have them be the peaceful haven that we are looking for?
