Everyone knows that it’s better to have a tidy and organized home than a messy one, but just knowing that isn’t necessarily enough to actually help you get your home in order, much less keep it that way.
One thing leads to another, situations arise, and life gets in the way more often than not – and sometimes a consequence of that is that your home goes from being your personal slice of paradise to a pretty stressful and messy environment, all things considered.
Getting your home tidy and organized allows you to enjoy a greater degree of calm and psychological peace, not to mention the fact that it also frees up your energy and attention, so that you can then move on to more ambitious and engaging home projects, such as having new sliding or hinged patio doors fitted.
Here are a few tips to effectively tidy and organize a messy home.
Break the process down
If your home is very messy, it’s quite likely that there is a psychological block you have to overcome to even get started with the tidying and decluttering process, since the task itself may seem insurmountable upfront.
Instead of allowing yourself to feel overwhelmed by the task before you, though, work to break the process down into chunks, and then focus on either one room or one item type at a time.
Dealing with one room at a time is typically an intuitive and straightforward way of doing things for most people, as it allows you to enjoy a clear sense of progress as you notice the house becoming incrementally tidier, bit by bit.
That being said, the Japanese cleaning expert Marie Kondo isn’t a fan of tidying room by room, as she argues that, among other things, this approach to tidying makes it far too easy for mess to creep back in during the process, and doesn’t really address the “categories” of things that most people own.
Her approach, instead, is to focus on different item types at a time. At one point you pull out and sort through all the books in the house, and then organize them. At another point, you go through all the clothes in the house. And so on, and so on.
The benefit of her approach is that it can feel more systematic, although it is, of course, primarily focused on paring down the number of belongings you own, according to the idea of getting rid of everything that doesn’t cause you to feel a “spark of joy.”
Whichever particular method you use, you should definitely chunk down the process of tidying and organizing your home, so that you don’t feel too overwhelmed upfront.
Set a weekend aside
If you’re going to dedicate half an hour to cleaning and tidying your home every evening, there’s a good chance that you’ll never actually reach a point where you will feel like things are properly neat and organized.
That’s because just living your life in your home automatically means that you will acquire some clutter and that things will become a bit messy as time goes on. So, unless you really hit the ground running and make a major dent in the process of organizing your home in one go, you may end up spinning your wheels indefinitely.
One good approach is to set a weekend aside so that you can make serious headway, if not complete the process altogether in one fell swoop. From there, you can then put systems and routines in place to help you to maintain the standard of cleanliness and organization you’ve just achieved.
Take action and begin
One of the key reasons why people procrastinate when it comes to organizing their disorganized homes is because they simply think themselves into a state of more or less fatalistic despair, whenever they try to figure out how to get their home properly organized.
The most important thing, though, isn’t that you have a great master plan to execute, but rather that you just start taking action, even in small ways, so that you can then build the momentum that will carry you through the process.
Often, you’ll find that just taking that initial step can help you to uncover all sorts of additional insights along the way, that will help to give you a clear sense of just what you need to do next in order to get everything up to scratch.
If you sit around too much and try to figure out every detail of how you should potentially go about things, though, it’s a sure bet that you’re never going to find the motivation to actually get started at all.
Motivate yourself with a reward
It’s always easier to get some process done that you’re really not in the mood for if you give yourself some incentive or reward that can serve to motivate you to actually get through to the end.
It might seem silly, or even self-indulgent, to reward yourself for getting your home organized since “it’s just something that you should do.” All the same, you’ll likely make much better progress if you do in fact give yourself some treat when you reach the finish line.
Of course, the treat or award should be something appropriate to the size and scale of the task itself. You probably shouldn’t, for example, book yourself a luxury cruise as a reward for getting your bedroom tidied up.
How about agreeing with your partner that you will go out for a nice meal at a restaurant when the job is done, though? Or that you will go to the movies? Or maybe deciding that you will give yourself permission to buy an item of clothing that you’ve had your eye on for some time?
Not only do these kinds of incentives help to motivate you, but they also make life a bit more fun.