Today’s post is all about how to get organized. With 13 of the best tips to not only get organized but help you stay organized as well.
There are many advantages to feeling organized in your home. You save time, save yourself from unnecessary stress and frustration, save money, and more.
It’s easy to see the benefits of having your home organized. But sometimes the problem isn’t why you want to get organized, but how to actually get organized, to begin with!
And that’s what today’s post will help you with!
I’m sharing 13 of the best tried and true tips you can use to help you get organized. And stay organized too!
These tips are all simple, practical, realistic ways you can bring more order and organization to your home and your life. Helping you not only learn how to get organized. But also helping you get there in a way that doesn’t feel overwhelming or stressful either.
How to get organized
If you’re ready to learn how to get organized at home, these tips will help get you there.
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1. Clear the clutter first
The worst thing you can do when you’re trying to get organized is organizing clutter. Organizing clutter will only end up wasting your time, space and even your money if you buy a bunch of bins and baskets to organize the clutter.
If you have more than you use, need or love, it’s clutter. And no matter how much you organize it, it will continue adding stress to your days and taking up your time unnecessarily.
Get rid of the clutter first. Then you can organize what you actually use, need and love in your home.
Not only making it easier to find, access and use the things you need and love. But also making it easier to keep your home tidy, organized and easy to manage. Simply because you’ll have less that needs to be organized, less stuff to fit in your spaces making organizing easier and less stuff to worry about keeping organized.
Check out this post for tips to help you clear the clutter from your home so you can efficiently organize what’s left.
2. Assess what’s left
After decluttering a space, take a few minutes to assess what’s left. Consider if the items belong where they currently are. Does it make sense to keep these items here? Is there a better spot for them based on your space and where/how you use the items?
It often makes it easier to stay organized if items are stored in a convenient spot based on where you most often use them.
Taking a few minutes to assess where you store the items you’re planning to organize can help you ensure your home and organizing systems will be effective, make sense for you and be easy to maintain.
3. Designate a place for everything
Items that don’t have designated homes or places to keep them can be a big problem in most homes. These items tend to be the ones that are left out on surfaces and floors. And float around the house causing clutter and mess.
This is where the old saying, “a place for everything, and everything in its place” proves true.
A designated place to keep each item not only makes it easy to find an item when you need it. But it also makes it easy to return the item to its home when you’re done with it. Reducing mess and making it easier to keep your home tidy and organized moving forward.
Now that you’ve cleared the clutter and assessed what would be best kept where finding designated homes for each item will be easier. When you have less stuff, it’s easier to find homes for everything. And easier to organize it all because you’re not trying to fit too much stuff into every space.
4. Label love
When you’re getting organized and designating homes for each item, labels can be your best friend.
If you want your home to stay organized moving forward, you have to make it easy to maintain the organizational systems you set up. And having clearly labelled spaces is a great way to do that!
Labels make it easy to identify what goes in each space, find what you need when you need it and put things away where they belong when you’re done with them.
You don’t need to get fancy with your labels either. Of course, you can invest in a label maker if you want. But you can also use simple, inexpensive solutions like sticky notes, tape, DIY labels, etc. to create labels that work just as well too!
The goal doesn’t have to be a magazine-worthy space. The goal is simply to label spaces so you and your family can easily find things and maintain the organizational systems you’re setting up.
5. Divide to conquer
Dividing large spaces into smaller sections can be another invaluable tool to help you get and stay organized.
Large, open spaces, like a large open drawer, shelf or cupboard, can easily become a jumbled mess. It’s easy for these larger spaces to become dumping grounds where piles of stuff end up in no particular order. Especially if you’re using the space to house smaller items.
The solution to this is to break the large space down into smaller sections. Not only does this help group like items together. But it also helps maintain order because items stay where they belong rather than floating around getting mixed up and lost amongst each other.
Again, dividing a space doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy. There are plenty of drawer organizers, shelf risers and containers you can buy to help divide and organize larger spaces.
But you can also use things you already have to make the space more functional. Reusing boxes, containers, and other items you have on hand works just as well too! It doesn’t have to cost a lot or look like a magazine spread to be functional.
6. Know thyself
One of the biggest barriers to getting and staying organized is working against your natural habits and tendencies. You want it to be easy to keep your home organized. And it’s hard to maintain an organized space if you have to completely break an old habit or tendency and create a whole new one.
For example, if you always come in the back door, but create a place for coats and shoes by the front door, you’ll probably still end up with coats and shoes piling up at the back door.
Or if you always sort your mail in the kitchen, creating a place to organize and deal with mail in the kitchen will work with the habit you already have, not against it.
Think about what you can maintain
It’s also important to only get as detailed with your organizing as you can realistically maintain. If you like to get really specific with your organizing categories and can maintain that moving forward, go for it. But if you know that’s not something you’ll prioritize maintaining, keep your organization simpler.
For example, maybe you like to organize your makeup with eye makeup in one container, lip color in another, face products in another, etc. Or maybe you prefer putting all of your everyday makeup in one basket and that feels organized enough.
Sometimes organization fails because it gets so specific that it’s too much to maintain. So spend a few minutes really thinking about what will work best for you. And only organize as much as you can and will realistically maintain.
7. Reduce visual clutter
Another thing to consider as you’re organizing is whether you prefer seeing your stuff out in plain sight, or if you’d rather organize it out of sight to reduce visual clutter.
Neither is better or worse. It’s about deciding what works best for your preferences. You might be someone who completely forgets about things unless you can easily see them. Or you might be someone who feels overwhelmed by too much visual information to take in and prefers storing things out of sight.
You want your home to make life easier for you and create a home you love spending time in. So it’s important to decide if you prefer hidden storage or more visual storage options.
8. Consider accessibility
Finding spots to keep each item is an essential part of getting and staying organized. Making those spots easily accessible is also important. If an item is too difficult to access or put away, it will be hard to stay organized going forward.
Focus on keeping items easy to access and easy to put away to help your organizing efforts last. Helping avoid items being left out because it’s too difficult to put them away. Or being thrown into a closet or cupboard because it’s too much work to access their spot.
Put your most frequently used items in the most accessible spots, like at the front of a cupboard, drawer or closet. And less frequently used items in slightly less accessible spots since you won’t need to access them or put them away as often.
9. Get creative
Sometimes having easily accessible spots to keep each item requires getting a little creative as you’re organizing.
Simple solutions like using the back of cabinet or closet doors to hold over-the-door baskets or organizers can not only create extra storage space in your home. But it can also give your spaces some breathing room and create more easily accessible spots to keep things.
Other creative ideas include things like using shelf risers to divide a tall shelf. Or making use of vertical space to use previously unused space in your home.
You likely won’t need to get creative with every space you’re organizing. But if you are short on space and want to maximize accessibility, a little creativity can go a long way to help you get and stay organized.
10. Focus on one area at a time
As with most projects around the home, it’s often more effective to focus on organizing one area at a time. Be sure you finish what you started before moving on to the next area.
Not only does this help you focus and actually finish getting an area organized. But it also gives you the opportunity to notice what’s working and what’s not so you can learn from your own trial and error and continuously refine your organizing skills and systems.
If decluttering and organizing your entire home feels like a lot of work, or overwhelms you, focusing on one area at a time is great too. You can break the work down into little tasks you can tackle one at a time to make progress organizing your home without feeling overwhelmed.
11. Establish rhythms
Equally important as getting organized is having systems, habits and rhythms in place to stay organized.
Getting in the habit of having a set time to tidy up and reset your spaces will go a long way towards keeping your home tidy and organized.
Not only that, but when these rhythms become habits, it helps automate the task of keeping your home tidy and organized without requiring much extra brainpower to make sure it gets done.
Simple rhythms can be things like spending 10 minutes every evening resetting the main spaces of your home. Or getting in the habit of cleaning your kitchen each evening so you start the next day with a tidy, clean space.
12. Get your family involved
If you share your household with other people, it’s important to get them involved in your organizing efforts too. If no one knows where things are supposed to go or what needs to be done to maintain your organized spaces, the organization won’t last.
Also, if how you organize a space goes against the natural habits and tendencies of someone else in your family, it’ll be hard for them to maintain it too.
Sometimes compromises are necessary. At the very least getting input and feedback from your family can make sure the organizing solutions you’re trying to establish will work for everyone and work for the long run.
13. Stay flexible
Getting organized is often a matter of trial and error. You often have to live with an idea first before you’ll know if it’ll work for you or not.
If a space you’ve organized isn’t working for you or isn’t easy to maintain, it’s time to reassess.
Stay flexible, notice what’s working and what’s not. And don’t be afraid to try something new until you figure out what will work best for you, your space, your preferences and your family.
How to get organized: keep it simple, but be consistent
Use these tips to help get your home organized in a practical, realistic and stress-free way that will work for you and your family. Then, once you’ve figured out what will work best for you, be consistent about maintaining it.
Developing a few habits and rhythms to stay on top of your home, the stuff you own and the way you’ve organized it is well worth the effort to keep your home functioning well for the long run.
What’s something that’s helped you figure out how to get organized and keep your home functioning well? Is it on this list, or something else? Leave a comment and let me know!
