The FREE Solution
There is an organizing solution that I use in every home I work in and it will work to keep any home organized. I also use it in my home.
The best news is that this solution is FREE.
Because it is “free”. Literally. The solution is to have free storage space in your home.
How does free space help to keep us organized? Consider our fictional but based on a real-life client:
Her kitchen cabinet is full of coffee mugs. She loves her coffee mugs and everyone knows that she loves mugs. Today is her birthday and she gets - you guessed it - a new coffee mug! But, where will this new mug go? Not in the kitchen cabinet because it's full. Instead, the new mug will get shoved in another cabinet or it will live by the sink, making this critical area of the home hard to clean and organize. Organizing experts recommend the 1-in-1-out rule to prevent such piles. For the 1-in- 1-out rule to work, however, we have to do it every time something new comes into the home. In this example, our client has a new mug so she must now identify a mug she can let go and get it out of the house. Today is our client's birthday, so she not’s going to do the 1-in-1-out rule today. Maybe tomorrow. Or, maybe a year from tomorrow when her birthday rolls around and she is gifted more mugs.
I picked a birthday in my example as a life event that brings stuff into our spaces. However, this is true with many of our major life events - from graduation parties to managing a parent's illness. When life is at its busiest, stuff will start to pile up because we simply won't have the time for the 1-in-1-out rule or other techniques we use to stay organized. When our lives are most full, the piles on counters and in corners start to build.
These piles are not exactly clutter, they are party decorations, clothing, medical documentation, or coffee mugs. We may need and want most of these things but because they didn't have any place to go to, they make our homes look cluttered. The actual clutter (things we no longer want or use) is hiding out in the drawers and in the back of closets, hogging up all our storage space so that anything that comes into the home has nowhere to go. So, we make piles of things, and put things in bags on the floor and those piles and bags frustrate us and make our homes harder to manage.
Organization really is as simple as having a home for everything and everything in its home. But modern life comes with a constant stream of possessions into the home. Sometimes, that stream is a flood which means that we simply won't have the time for organizing and removing clutter from our homes. If every closet and every cabinet is currently 100% FULL, we are only one life event or transition away from tipping into visible disorganization.
If you feel as though you have already hit that tipping point, my advice is not to churn through the new piles. They have nowhere to go so they are not going anywhere. Instead, dig into closets and cabinets to root out the clutter, making space for the useful things that currently have no home. This is one of my biggest tools in my organizing bag of tricks. Freeing up empty space in every storage area of our home will allow us to maintain organization and feel less overwhelmed when we are at our busiest. Ideally, if we maintain our storage spaces at around 80% percent full, we can maintain organization. It's not as hard as it sounds - studies show that we only really use about 20% of the objects we own.
Free space allows us to feel more organized before big events or during transitions like changing seasons or holidays when the house usually feels too full. It’s space to breathe when life is coming at us too fast to declutter. After I work with a client to declutter and free up storage space, I teach them to monitor their storage spaces so that when those spaces are creeping toward 90% full, they know to take action. Sometimes, that action is to call me! I just finished working with a long-term client who is hosting a major family event at her home. She scheduled time with me 6 months ago to reset and declutter her pantry, kitchen, mud room, and family room ahead of the event so she would have the breathing room to host. It also freed up her time and energy to devote on this special life event.