Smart Organizing

The No-Exception Rule

Sometimes significant things in our lives are chronically neglected, like taking vitamins every day or exercising regularly. For these small but important details in my life, I decided to impose the “No-Exception Rule” on myself. As soon as I hear myself thinking of an excuse to put off my stretching exercises or vitamins, I remember the No-Exception Rule and just do it.

The No-Exception Rule offers significant help in organizing our lives as well, not so much in the big things but in the important little ones that trip us up daily if we don’t do them. Apply it to things that tend toward inconsistency, things like detrashing the car after each use, making the bed, reading and deleting emails, hanging up coats and clothes, and putting makeup away after it is used.

One caution is necessary. Use this powerful force for only one or two important details at a time. It feels great to make strides in these little areas. Once you conquer the one or two areas you have selected, you may be inspired to move on to applying it later to other small areas or even to larger issues in your organizational life.

I have improved in taking vitamins and stretching from about 50 percent of the time to about 98 percent of the time. The No-Exception Rule has proved very effective in my life. It is definitely a strong influence for change.

Mary Pankiewicz

Clutter Free and Organized

Knowville, Tennessee

www.clutterfree.biz

The Roots of Disorganization

Disorganization is not always an individual matter. Sometimes the house is just the floor on which we do a dance of disorganization with others. It may be that someone in the house (maybe you) is resisting keeping the house nicer because he or she wants to show anger. An example may be a child who is leaving stuff around the house and not cleaning up the room as a statement of independence or a spouse who leaves things messy as a weapon in a family conflict.

A more subtle example is that deep in your own heart you may be angry about the nature of life that forces you to spend your time doing grunge jobs that you hate. Or maybe you hear the voice of your mom, the neatness police, echoing from the past and you resent it.

Our messy behavior may have deep roots that need to be considered. We can’t move forward until we understand the origin of our resistance.

IN THE TRENCHES WITH SMART HOMEMAKERS

From Dianne—Making and Using a Brain Clutter List
A brain clutter list requires about 20 to 30 minutes of as uninterrupted time as you can muster. It is wonderful for getting things done. This list boils down to everything in your head that you think needs to be done immediately and long term. Just get a piece of paper and begin writing everything you think of that needs your attention. I used my PC—seems I go faster if I type it. You list whatever comes to mind from the water bill to the laundry to the storm windows to the kitchen floor to paint your nails to shampoo the carpets to hang that picture to clean out that closet to make out your will— whatever. All of it. Don’t think in terms of today, tomorrow, or next week. Just sit and begin listing everything you need to attend to! The miniscule tasks to the big tasks will come to mind, and you need to put them all down. JUST GET IT OUT OF YOUR BRAIN AND ON TO THE PAPER. You’ll be amazed at what comes to mind. Don’t let it overwhelm you. You are listing these things, not getting up to worry over them and do them right now.

When you are done, breathe, breathe deeply! Relax. This is so very important to relay to you! I highly suggest you don’t really look at the list when you are done. Set it aside. Wait a day or two before doing step two.

Step two is looking at the things you wrote down and giving them some kind of time in your life. I work best if I don’t try to overdo scheduling. The simpler the better for me or I get all caught up in the scheduling and I don’t get anything done.

I use Post-it notes and I slap one on each of the monthly calendar pages of my main wall calendar. For instance, my porch needs to be stained. This has been on my mind forever. Well, I am finally putting it away in its proper place now. I will do that next April! Done and over with. I release that to April of next year. And you know, I feel soooo much better about that particular task now, and if I even begin to let the thought creep in that I will . . . nope. That is in April! :) Good, very good feeling!!

I think a brain clutter list is so refreshing! It helps me so much to GIVE certain things to the future so that I can zone in on the present. This acknowledgment of things and then the giving of them to a time later helps me relax about today. And if you whisper a prayer to the Lord about certain things that are really getting to your gut, he will indeed help you!

From Della:

I have arrived. For now I can visualize in great detail for the first time the other phases of this project: Sort and file my papers; destain and repair and hang up my clothes; convert my second bathroom into a library lined with bookcases; sort my possessions into permanent possession boxes with labeled categories and place on shelves around abode; paint my walls, in pretty, already-picked-out colors; decorate.

Now those phases don’t seem like work at all. They seem simple and easy, because I have come over the mountain. I have reached the summit and planted my flag, saying: “Hey, world. Here I am.” And it will be all coasting from here.

From Carol:

I never learned nor had a feel for what should be thrown away and what should be kept. I was afraid of throwing something out because I was sure that as soon as I did, I would need it. I still have a problem with tossing metal juice lids from frozen juice cans, and bottled water bottles. It took a LONG time to get to that point (but I did!).

I felt overwhelmed and powerless—mentally frozen and physically exhausted just thinking about it. I just couldn’t bring myself to deal with doing all this cleaning and decluttering. It was too much for me, so I avoided it by “scrubbing cracks with a toothbrush” to make myself feel that I accomplished something while ignoring the real problem.

From Ella:

You don’t have to do it “right” the first time. Housework done poorly is better than housework not done at all. Only the perfectionist in us has to have it done perfectly. Waiting until I could get it done perfectly or right is what got me so far behind in the first place.

The Bare Bones Way

Once you have your priorities in mind and are willing to face making changes, do sweat the small stuff.

As you know, like us, police have priorities. How they handle them will teach us much about accomplishing our goals. Using the pyramid as an example, the police place quality-of-life issues on the bottom. They are issues like noise, graffiti, urinating in public, broken windows, and the like. More serious crimes are obviously more important.

However, a strange thing happens when police pay attention to the “unimportant” little things on the bottom of the pyramid. Fascinating studies have shown that when small matters are not attended to, people think nobody cares about the neighborhood or the behavior of the people in the neighborhood. Once they get that idea, other breaches follow naturally. Somehow, keeping on top of the small things makes crime go down.

There must be a principle in there somewhere, because the same thing happens with housekeeping. When we attend to the little things consistently, the big things follow in the right direction consistently. When we let little messes begin, disorder avalanches behind them.

For those of us who struggle with organization, order can unravel quickly. Why does it work that way? The answer has to do with the concept of breach of integrity. A little something wrong destroys the effect of the whole thing.

Think of it this way. If a beautiful model, dressed in designer clothes and carrying herself elegantly, smiles at you and reveals a missing front tooth, the whole effect is ruined. A dam holds back the water until a small hole appears. That small hole is not going to remain small. The flow of water will widen it until the whole dam is ruined. The same is true with the house. If you have prepared a lovely living room for company, complete with flowers and shining surfaces, a dirty sock on the floor ruins the whole effect.

In a similar way, once a person develops a system for organizing the house, if one part of the system begins to crack, the whole plan is in danger of disintegration—at least until the crack is repaired. And repairing cracks again and again is exhausting. It is much easier to keep the whole thing working well than to keep repairing it.

This “keeping it together” is called maintenance.

Choose Your Details Wisely

The people who keep on top of things are those who take care of the right details properly and on time. It is essential for maintenance. In the mountain of important factors that maintain organization, this tip is one of two or three that rises above the clouds.

Don’t be misled. I am not talking about perfectionistic attention to doing things without flaw. Just the opposite. Just do “it.” But make sure the “its” you are doing are the significant ones.

IMPORTANT SEQUENTIAL DETAILS

Taking care of details is not as simple as it seems. Grandma’s adage, “A stitch in time saves nine,” was a clever little rhyme that aimed at this principle. But, like all quickie sayings, it left out some fairly important considerations.

Let’s consider how it worked for her. Grandma did hand sewing. She could easily see that if a knot came loose in her needlework and the thread started to unravel due to pressure or whatever, it would not be long before the whole seam would pull open. If she had just caught that first stitch before it unraveled, she would have saved herself the work of stitching up the whole seam. So Grandma was reminded as she sewed day by day to keep up with the details of maintenance.

Good for Grandma. It probably worked great for her, but that is not the whole story. All stitches are not created equal. Some details are important. Others are not.

The ones that are important are the ones I call important sequential details. Like the stitch Grandma was so fixated on, these details are part of a bigger project. Making the bed is important because it is a significant part of the larger project of having a nice looking bedroom. Unloading the dishwasher in a timely fashion will keep the dirty dishes from having to back up in the sink. Handling the mail quickly keeps piles from forming. Those are all stitches in time.

In addition to these regular details that keep things moving smoothly forward are little unexpected but important details. Housekeepers who never seem to be working at cleaning or organizing are masters at these. Like a mongoose after a cobra, they are always on the alert for an offending mess to eliminate. A piece of fluff is on the rug, they dip down and pick it up on the way to the kitchen. A stain on a blouse? They give it a quick spray of stain remover. They stay on top of things so it appears that they never work. In reality, they don’t work much because they have the house and their habits so under control that tidiness moves forward with a minimum of moment-by-moment attention. What they do not do is hop from one unnecessary detail to another as it catches their attention or comes to mind.

UNIMPORTANT RANDOM DETAILS

Details that are not important for overall maintenance are things like keeping used slivers of soap to melt them into liquid soap; ungluing an empty favorite decorator tissue box, refilling it with new tissues, and regluing it (I am not making this up); keeping, storing, and categorizing empty plastic butter tubs—and, of course, their matching tops. These, and all details like them, are not part of a larger plan. To do them does not make any significant contribution to the organization of the house. They are unimportant random details that would best be left undone. Such things as straightening silverware, organizing and alphabetizing CDs, cleaning in too much detail, decorating or working on crafts when the house needs attention. These distract you away from your overall goal. They take unnecessary time and sometimes space that does not contribute to the overall beauty or order of the house.

Like Carol who scrubbed cracks with toothbrushes to avoid more demanding but significant jobs, many women spend time attending to these unimportant random details, thinking they are doing the right thing. In the back of their mind, they wonder why they are working so hard and have so little to show for it. It’s because they are doing jobs that are not part of the important 20 percent.

Stop attending to that kind of detail in your life. Attend consistently and with vigor to important sequential details.

DAILY DECISION MAKING

“Ah!” you may say, “but how can I know which are the right details, the 20 percent that is important to attend to?” The answer has to do with awareness of the place of the detail in the overall organization plan. Two key points are that any detail should be visually significant and part of a larger organization plan.

To decide if a detail is visually significant, ask the following questions:

Does neglecting this detail bring public embarrassment? For example, removing dirty laundry or recycled plastic bags from the foyer or the living room is a priority.
Does neglecting this detail hurt organizational morale? Dead flowers in a vase in the bedroom are demoralizing and should be removed quickly.
Is it insignificant as far as making a visual impression? Paying attention to neatly lining up shoes in your closet or carefully placing jewelry in a jewelry box do not make a visual impression and so are not significant.
Does the detail serve to inspire you? A clean sink, a rapidly emptied dishwasher, a shining coffee table, a beautifully made bed, while not significant in themselves, carry a heavy weight because they are able to keep us motivated.

If a detail is not a part of a larger organizational plan, it should not be given high priority. Ask the following questions:

Does neglecting this detail hold up the organizational flow? Misplaced car keys hinder moving forward. Setting up a spot to keep keys and developing the habit of putting them there are priorities.
Does neglecting this detail cause chronic stress? Perhaps clean laundry piles up unfolded (or folded) in the living room. To relieve stress, change the system and the place for handling laundry.
Is the detail part of a larger important picture? Maintain the integrity of the whole operation of a well-organized and beautiful house by keeping on top of any details that if neglected would distract from the beauty and order of the house. Sometimes this will mean attacking a hot spot of clutter or putting away a pair of shoes. Sometimes it will mean wiping an unsightly smudge off the front door. There are a lot of little things that can be done but don’t contribute to maintaining the well-kept home. Learn to focus only on the significant ones. You know the principle. Spend time only on the top 20 percent that will really make a difference, either for getting the house organized or keeping it in order. The insignificant 80 percent can be ignored forever, given a lick and a promise, or put off till later. That is the Bare Bones Way.

Decision Time—Choose Your Top 20 Percent

Are there any details to which you need to attend?

Choose one area of your home where you can improve the visual impact. Often the best place to start is in some public area, such as the entryway. Name that point and what you are going to do about it. I will:
You need to identify whatever keeps holding you up and frustrating you, such as lost keys, empty condiment jars in the refrigerator, or missing pens and paper at the telephone. (See below for a resource to help find things.) Or perhaps it is something that is hard to access, such as the vacuum being upstairs in the closet when you use it downstairs most often. Choose one area that needs to work better and set up a system to correct it. I will:
Finally, attune yourself to some little miscellaneous thing that has bothered you but has not been addressed. Maybe it is something broken that needs to be fixed. You may have become used to it that way. You could fix it easily yourself but haven’t. Or you need to get somebody else to take care of it. Perhaps it is something that needs to be returned and has been sitting by the front door or in the garage for too long. You are stymied because you don’t have the receipt or you don’t know if they will take it back. Call and find out. If you can’t return it, give it to charity. Begin to take care of these little things today. I will:

Resource: If you consistently lose keys, television remotes, a favorite toy, or cell phone and spend frustrating hours looking for them, purchase a paging system invented by Sharper Image, called “Now You Can Find It!” It will electronically beep for up to four tagged items when you come within thirty feet of the lost thing. Contact SharperImage.com or 1-800-344-4444.