A cloud of mist rises from the floor as you creep underneath the canopy. Suddenly your sleeve catches upon a sharp edge causing the slightest of vibrations. You cringe, knowing that this could be your last moment before everything comes crashing down around you. Your heart pounds as you wait with bated breath, hoping that nothing is disturbed. This may sound like the beginning of a thrilling novel, but rather, it is your den/craft room/garage, the mist is actually dust, and the canopy is all the items that have somehow stacked higher than your head. It is time, you realize, to organize!
As thrilling as the tale above sounded, most of us don’t feel the same way when we are about to tackle these projects in our own homes. These spaces are supposed to be our sanctuary, our areas of creativity and activity, and yet they somehow have become a glorified storage unit. What’s worse, it is work and the kind that one often wonders when it is going to end.
While I cannot just make the work magically disappear, I can offer you some tips on how to progress through the project. How to organize and stay on task without getting overwhelmed midway through and give up. Below I have compiled 10 tips to help my readers tackle these spaces and how to see results without losing your mind in the process.
##1 I Spy with my little eye – Identifying what you have
So when most of us begin to organize, we imagine an end result of a clean and functional room that will actually serve a purpose. The stuff that is in the room may or may not have a life there, but it is the hidden items that will throw a wrench in the works. As time goes on, the truth of this matter only grows. Things are easily forgotten, and finding a new home can be a task unto itself. This only becomes more frustrating when you are already worn, and now your whole plan is in jeopardy of falling apart.
To help avoid this pitfall, take a general inventory of what you are seeing and then group them into categories. This will help provide you with a clearer image before you actually begin the cleanup. Once you have a general idea of the groups, pick through the items and look for oddities, those things that threaten to break your ideals. It is far better to discover them early on and then plan for them while you are still energetic. We will get into deep diving later, but for now, this should only provide you with a feeling of what to expect. That way, when you come across something, then, you will not be discouraged when you are exhausted.
##2 Choo Choo – Breaking up the job into manageable chunks
So you think you can, you know you can, you think you can. Just like a little train we have known since childhood, we have been taught to try until we succeed. I couldn’t agree more, but how you go about it is just as important. After all, the little train can think all he wants, but if he is trying to go up the hill without the tracks, then he isn’t going to get very far.
When I start an organization job, I immediately take the job in as a whole. I then start to subdivide the job into manageable chunks, so I can identify quick successes vs. long-term ones. This is critical because you want to have a positive attribute for yourself and your customer if you are doing this for someone else. Seeing quick and early results is a huge motivator and one that helps lay out the expectations for everyone else that may be involved. One of these quick successes is to identify categories and then sort the items into piles. What you are trying to accomplish here is to create a system, a process, that will maintain your focus and keep you from diving down rabbit holes which we will discuss further down in the blog. Putting things into piles first is quick, it is easy, and it makes the mess manageable later on down the road.
## 3: Seeing Clearly Now – Adding details to the action plan
This may seem like it is out of order, but not really. Once you divided up the work into manageable chunks, you can now see clearly what you have and what is really involved. Once a pile has sat long enough, it morphs into a single entity in our minds. We stop seeing the individual items that assemble the whole, in part because we cannot even see them. I lost count of the number of times a customer has told me, “Oh, I forgot I had that.” Regardless, lol, once you have opened up Pandora’s box, you now know what is really in store. That is the time to create a plan of action.
So let’s say you are working on an activity room. So far, you have identified what is actually in the room, in general, and maybe you realize you don’t have room for a particular category like you thought you did. From there, you can now decide to finish sorting, box up a particular category for storage, set up activities in the corners of the room, and finally clean once everything is in place. Whatever the case, you can now see clearly, and planning at this stage helps you maintain focus
##4: Down the Rabbit Hole – Avoid Wasting Time
So you have some high tasks, and you are seeing progress, but whoops, what is this, a hole, where does it lead to? This happens all too often when organizing or even on a project. If you focus too much on tasks that keep you tied to one particular compartment, the end result may be losing focus and getting discouraged. I have had customers see possessions that they haven’t seen in decades and want to examine prod, and make a decision right then and there (which is fine, honestly, when they want to throw it away), but it has the potential to be a waste of time and can bury you in details where little to nothing gets done during that time. For this particular instance, my solution has always been to sort the items first (a much easier task) and then show the customer the entire box filled with glasses. Often the customer will make a decision on the whole box rather than each individual pair. A huge time saver when this is repeated over and over again with different categories. So, stay away from rabbit holes until that is all there is left.
##5: Forests and Trees – Take a step back and self evaluate
At some point, you will start to feel a bit overwhelmed if the organization’s job or project is complex. This is normal. At this point, enough is happening that you are in the thick of it, and it can be very chaotic. That is when it is time to take a step back and tally your successes, failures, and where you are in the process. That revaluation is so crucial to helping you stay on point. You need to see the successes to remind yourself how far you have come and accomplished. The failures serve to help you make adjustments for future tasks. Finally, the tally helps you to see if the current process and list of tasks still make sense. Often I find when performing a project that what worked great in the beginning no longer applies to the current chaos I am surrounded by. It is OK to deviate from the plan, the plan is your guide, your roadmap, and it serves to help you see where you need to go, but sometimes you find that shortcut or a more creative solution, and it may be wise to change course a bit.
##6: Babies and bathwater – Taking breaks to avoid mistakes
OK, so you are exhausted, you cannot do anymore, and there are still a few bags left to sort, or a few more holes to drill, or what have you. At this point, take a break. You will want to rush it because you are ALMOST there, but that is when things tend to go wrong. Throwing away that last bag to be sorted rather than fully looking through it may result in missing something important. At this point, I highly recommend taking a break. Take a walk, look at your phone, sit, and chat for a few minutes. Take your mind completely out of the picture. This calms you down and forces you to relax so when you begin again, you are no longer in the “Hurried” state.
##7: Counting Sheep – Sleeping on the problem
When you are at the point of complete exhaustion, where a break will not cut it, it is time to pack it up and continue tomorrow. Sometimes your brain is so engaged you no longer can see the forest for the trees. You are hyper-focused to the point that certain concepts no longer carry meaning.
Let’s try a little experiment. Say the word Navigation 20 times out loud quickly. It starts to lose meaning the faster and more often you repeat it. Your brain is so focused on saying the word that the word itself loses context.
The above experiment is what happens when you are in deep on a project. Certain things start to lose meaning, and you start to lose the ability to interpret. When your brain is at this point, you need to stop for the day. This is especially true if you are in a quandary. If you are stuck on figuring out how to sort something into categories, but all you see is a bag of trash. Your brain has gotten so tired that you no longer carry meaning on what you are doing. This is when sleeping, even for an hour or so, is very helpful. Your brain will start to process everything you have done and start presenting you with solutions. I woke up in the middle of the night after working on something complex and ran straight to my computer to put in the final puzzle piece I couldn’t figure out the previous day. It is amazing what your brain can do.
##8: TPS reports – Deadlines and how to handle them
Pressure, Pressure, Pressure. Trying to do a major project in only a few days is practically suicidal. I have had so many customers request a project at the last minute and want it done in 2 days. My team is exhausted, I am exhausted, and the customer is often frustrated. You just cannot expect perfection when you want to turn a mountain into a molehill overnight. For any project you do, you need to size up how long you think it might take and then double that number. There will be things you don’t think about that will invariably pop up. You may not have thought about the run to the hardware store 20 times taking up ½ the day. Or time to eat, time to rest, time it takes to actually go through the stuff. Time to address your life goals that may run parallel to the project. If you have to set deadlines for your project, then make sure you give yourself ample time so things are not falling apart at the last second
##9: TPS reports (second manager) – Revisiting Deadlines
Ok, so we already mentioned deadlines, but I wanted to parse this out just a bit to mention that deadlines are actually a good thing when used correctly. Putting a deadline on the whole project may cause undue stress, but putting deadlines on tasks can really help grease the tracks. Remember what I was saying earlier about going down the rabbit hole earlier. Setting a timetable to accomplish certain tasks can help you from diving too deep. If you, say, set a timetable to sort all your items into a category, then you set a standard to keep from looking at those items beyond what they represent. You look at the sports equipment as the sports category rather than trying to figure out where all the pieces are to that sports equipment. That part will come later in the process, but for now, you need to accomplish one thing, getting the project to a point where you can stop at some point. This is a partial goal, a partial deadline, but the point is by setting up these stop points, both time and physically, you can achieve far more than you realize. You may want the whole garage finished, but if you just could get things into labeled boxes, for instance, by the end of the weekend, then you can pick them up and continue at a later date.
##10: In the Rabbit Hole – Examples of time wasters
As I was typing, I thought of a really good example of rabbit holes that can sidetrack a project and why you would want to stay away from it.
Let’s begin this by thinking about an activity you enjoy. This activity has to have a particular item to it for this to work. For me, I am thinking about metal detecting. For you, maybe a model, or art supplies, or a bike. Now, Image you are digging through a pile at home of similar objects. We will use a bike as an example. You have a stack of bikes on the floor and on the shelf, several huge bins that are mismatched with pads, bike, and skateboard parts ( you are very active, evidently), and other accessories. It is dark out, so you need to add bike lights but don’t know which bin to sort through. You might get lucky and search for only a few minutes, or you might search for an hour only to realize the bike lights broke last year and you threw them away.
Now, how does this relate to the Rabbit hole? Well, when you are doing a large project, like organizing, you may find your bike and remember you want to find the lights on the bike for the next time you go riding. When you are organizing, this is a moot task. It is pointless to stop and look right now for it, but that is what so many of my customers have done. Something pops up, and they suddenly remember that this search was important to them. I have had so many occasions where I had to remind the customer that they were paying for my service by the hour. That usually helps bring them back on task. The point is, when you are done sorting, many of those missing items tend to turn up. Once they are categorized, they usually find their way right to where you need them.
##Final Thoughts
Thank you for reading my blog and visiting my website. I am very pleased to be serving the community and helping people in need. Have a wonderful day!
