I had a real estate professor in college who had never owned a piece of property. To me (and others in the class), she didn’t really seem qualified to teach the course. In the same way, it would be hypocritical of me to write a book about time management and getting organized if I didn’t actually follow my own advice. So, after completing the draft of this book, my wife and I got busy applying these ideas to our own lives. Here’s what we did:
I would encourage most readers to start with a mental data dump to get thoughts out of their head and into an external hard drive, and in a sense that’s what I’ve been doing that for weeks in writing the rough draft of this book.
DAY ONE
As for the physical stuff, my first step was to create an “island of misfit toys.” I walked around the house picking up every item that was either out of place or homeless and put it in the middle of our front bedroom, which doubles as an office. I also removed papers that had been stuffed in kitchen drawers or piled on the kitchen counter and put those on the island. I was on such a roll that I took an initial stab at our kitchen junk drawer, removing the papers and sorting like things together.
While I was at it, I sort of straightened the other kitchen drawers. I found that we had a ton of plasticware spread across two kitchen drawers. I filled up an entire plastic grocery bag with those and tossed them in the pantry until I decide whether to throw them away or donate them to a homeless shelter.
This was not the purge, but it was an immediate improvement. By removing the out-of-place papers, I was able to create a drawer dedicated to batteries, candles, firestarters, and flashlights. It occurred to me at that time that there are a lot of items that most people have a bunch of, and each of those categories of items needs a dedicated space. What types of items? The ones I just mentioned – batteries, flashlights, candles – but also light bulbs, extension cords, pens, tape, bug spray, and more.
It’s funny, we sometimes have trouble finding a pen when we need it, and when we do, it usually doesn’t work. So I gathered all the pens and markers I could find – from our home office, from our junk drawer, and from a container in our bedroom. While watching TV, I checked the pens to see if they worked and ended up throwing away 26 of them. With what was left (the functioning pens), I left a few in our kitchen, put a couple in the console in our couch, put 10 or so in the pen container on my office desk, put three in each of our vehicles, and put a rubber band around the rest. One problem solved.
It sounds ridiculous, but I actually had a sense of calm from putting all of the out-of-place stuff in one location. The rest of the house was more orderly than it’s been in a while.
DAY TWO
A new day, and I continued the momentum. I had a medium-sized island of misfit toys, but I started emptying out more areas of the house and adding more items to the island. By removing some items – from cabinets, from closets – space appeared and I could see new uses for it. This allowed me to walk around the house with my wife and share my vision with her, and I sought her input as well. None of this will work unless we’re on the same page.
She showed me some “junk drawers” in our dresser in the room that she’s known forever need to be cleaned out, but that seems like such a mammoth undertaking that she can’t make herself start. She said that I have to make her do it.
We also talked about getting new furniture for the bedroom. When you start freeing up space, you also make space for those types of conversations. We talked about how having more drawers available for clothes would free up some space in the closet that would be perfect for her shoes. And putting all of her shoes in our closet will free up space in her exercise room – plus, our closet is a much more logical place for her shoes to be located.
We also talked about the closet in our front room, which doubles as my office. Right now, it’s not being used to its full potential, so I pulled some stuff out of it and added it to the island. That freed up some space for me to move some of my formal clothes (suits and jackets) into that closet. I used to wear those a lot more, but with COVID I’ve been working from home and haven’t needed them. But I actually added to the collection early in the pandemic when I was able to purchase some clearance suits online for 80% off – nobody was buying formal clothes, so they were practically giving them away. I can’t get rid of them because I may need them again one of these days, but for now they don’t need to be occupying prime real estate in our bedroom closet.
Long story short, without yet even getting rid of anything, just moving stuff around and putting items in a more logical location is already having an impact.
That said, there is stuff we’re going to get rid of, and we’ve started to create a pile. Most people have some items they know they need to get rid of – either by selling them, giving them away, or donating them. You don’t have to decide at this point how you’ll dispose of them, but you can go ahead and start separating them so they don’t accidentally end up back with everything else. As you go through the island, you’ll no doubt add some more items to the “no longer my stuff” pile.
Something funny has happened as I’ve started to add items to the island. I’ve gained some momentum, and today I couldn’t wait for the workday to be over with so I could continue organizing. Inertia really is a powerful force.
One other quick example of using space more appropriately. Right now, we have two big packs of paper towels on the floor of our pantry. We like buying those in bulk, but they take up a lot of room. We have an upper cabinet with two shelves in our kitchen that would be perfect for paper towels, but one of those shelves is jam packed with old vases. My wife and I have been together for over 20 years, and I’ve bought her a lot of flowers in that time, so she’s accumulated a lot of vases, many of which we’ll never use again. And yes, she has gotten rid of some in the past. The other shelf is jam packed with sports bottles and other containers – some that we’ve bought, some we’ve received as gifts, some I’ve been given when speaking to various insurance groups, and others I picked up in exhibitor halls at insurance conferences. We use a couple of them, but the vast majority are so far back in the pile that we haven’t seen them in years. If we could just reduce the vases and containers by half, that would free up a shelf that could easily hold 12 rolls of paper towels – three across, two high, and two deep.
With that in mind, I moved a couple towels to a lower shelf in a cabinet in our bathroom, completely freeing up our top shelf. That allowed me to move all of our bulk toilet paper from the cabinet below the bathroom sink to that upper shelf. Now we can stock up without wondering where we’ll put it.
Even with most of our Christmas stuff in the attic, I’m finding that we have a lot of Christmas stuff scattered around the house – some that we forgot to put up, some that my wife keeps in the house because she’s worried about it melting or breaking. Unfortunately, we don’t have all of this in one place, and we frequently forget to put some of the items out because we don’t know where they are. So one of our to-do items is to put them all in one place.
Same with other holiday items. While emptying out our front closet, I found a ton of Easter stuff – mostly eggs and fake grass left over from last year. My wife always makes Easter baskets for all the kids in the family. With Easter less than two months away, I put it all in one place so she’d be able to find the stuff when she needs it.
My best friend’s “wife” likes decorating for holidays more than anyone I know. He has an entire wall in his detached garage with holiday directions. A bit much for me, but the most important thing is they know exactly where everything is.
I was looking at our garage earlier trying to imagine what it could be, and it occurred to me that we could use this cubbyhole area for Christmas decorations. I’m getting older and nearly kill myself climbing up and down the ladder each year to take the Christmas stuff down, put the empty boxes back up, bring them back down, and put the full boxes back up there. It would take some work, but I think this nice area we have, which is currently being underutilized, might be perfect for this. And that would free up space in our attic for other stuff (unless we get rid of everything).
DAY THREE
I was eager for work to end. My wife had a hair appointment right at the end of the workday, so I had a couple hours to spend either on reducing the size of the island or adding to it. The pile is already pretty big, but I’ve decided to continue piling on.
I have done a pretty good job throughout the day of keeping the rest of the house neat. When we dirty a dish, I wash it right away. All of the clothes are washed and put up. Without actually trying to clean the house, I’ve made progress on that front as well, vacuuming and sweeping as I go along.
With my wife out of the house, I’ve decided to tackle the garage, at least the first phase. A while back, we put some of the overflow stuff from the house in the garage. Stuff that doesn’t really belong there, like big plastic bags with bedspreads inside, ones that are still good but that we’re not using anymore. I guess the idea is that we might want to use them again, but so far we haven’t. They just take up a lot of space. There are other items as well, so I’m going to add them to the island. The stuff that actually belongs in the garage will stay there for now – cleaning it up will be a separate project.
One thing I’m doing in some of the really messy areas is taking a before picture. Sometimes, once we’ve spent some time organizing, it’s difficult to remember what it was like before we started, but that’s important to see how far we’ve come. People like rewards, even if they don’t really mean anything, like the badges you get on your Apple watch when you complete their challenges or do your “required” exercises every day. Social media companies have recognized this as well, which is why they include the number of “likes” below your posts. So why not take before and after pics so you can reward yourself with a pat on the back?