Start by creating an Organizing Road Map for each and every room in your home. Here is an example of an organizing road map for my bedroom.

When filling out your Organizing Plan, choose the areas that have the biggest clutter issues first. Are you frustrated by your cluttered kitchen counters? Does your master bedroom make you want to run screaming from the room instead of wanting to stay and relax?

By choosing the areas of your home that will have the biggest day-to-day impact on your life first, you will feel energized and motivated to keep going!

The trick to creating a successful organizing plan is to break your organizing projects down into manageable, fifteen minute projects. This is the key to staying motivated and to creating a lifelong organizing routine.

15 minutes a day can keep the clutter away!

You may think that fifteen minutes does not sound like a lot of time, but let me assure you that you can accomplish a lot in that amount of time!

It takes less than fifteen minutes to reorganize a junk drawer, and let me tell you: organizing your junk drawer will change your life. You probably think I’m overreaching here, but I promise you, it will absolutely change your life. Before I got organized, I could never find the scissors. It’s a small thing, but I would have to look around and search through messy drawers to find a pair almost every single day. Now that I organized my junk drawer properly, I save time each and every time I use it. Just saving me one minute a day looking for scissors will save me 30,000 minutes over the course of my lifetime. That is over 500 hours and over twenty total days! Yep, looking for something for just one minute a day is stealing more than twenty days of your precious life! So yeah, organizing your junk drawer really will change your life.

 

Choose just one cupboard in your kitchen a day to make more efficient and functional instead of trying to do the entire kitchen at once. If your closet is a mess, choose just one rod of clothing to go through at a time, instead of every article of clothing that you own.

Of course you can tackle more if you want to, but by breaking your projects down into manageable chunks of time, you will never get overwhelmed and left with unfinished organizing projects, which can make you feel like a failure. The secret to staying motivated is that wonderful feeling of accomplishment and pride that comes with starting and completing an organized space! I am totally an organizing junkie now. I literally get a little “high” from organizing my sock drawer…I may need to get some sort of a life outside my home!

I, like millions of other people, recently read a widely successful organizing book that encouraged people to grab everything in one category and pile it in the middle of a room. You are then supposed to go through that pile and only keep the items that bring you “joy”. While I loved the concept of this book—and it has seemed to work for so many people—I found it to be an unrealistic approach for me. I am busy… and kind of lazy. I have three kids, pets, and way too much junk. I don’t have time to pull out every single item of clothing in our home and pile it in the living room. And after pulling all that stuff out, I most certainly would have zero desire, or time, to put it all away neatly again. I must admit, when I read that book I was kind of like, are you for real??? That type of organizing approach, while it may be effective, takes hours and hours to complete each project. Who has time for that?

For me, I need the fifteen minute a day approach. It is a realistic and easily managed amount of time to dedicate to organizing your home each day. Maybe I have ADD, but I become completely bored half way through big projects and usually end up abandoning them to go and watch Netflix. I need quick and easy projects I can completely finish before my ADD brain kicks in and forces me to move on. You should see me try and paint a room, it never ends well. The average one hour television show has more than fifteen minutes of commercials, which puts the amount of time you will spend to get a clean and clutter-free home in perspective.

 

Even the most cluttered and dysfunctional homes can be transformed this way, I promise. This method works amazingly well for a number of reasons. First, everyone can find time for just fifteen minutes a day, no matter how busy his or her schedule (or how lazy we feel that day). Secondly, having quick and easy projects means we can actually complete the task we start, giving us a sense of pride and accomplishment and keep the motivation going. Lastly, once you have worked this method into your daily schedule for a few weeks, it will become a second nature habit that you no longer have to force yourself to do.

Let’s be real for a minute. If you, like me, struggle with clutter and housework, we have probably developed some bad habits along the way that have put us in this situation. Being messy is a habit, and habits are hard to change overnight.

The good news is you can develop new habits and it only takes about thirty days to make it happen. If you spend just 15 minutes a day organizing your home, not only will it look a million times better at the end of just one month, but you will now have made daily organizing a lifelong habit!

So while I love the concept of that highly successful organizing book (which was self-titled as being “life-changing” and “magic”), the truth is, even if we got rid of every unused and unloved thing in our homes today, our homes would just fill up again before we knew it. We are constantly acquiring new things, whether we like it or not. Children outgrow clothing, we receive gifts throughout the year, and there are always little things here and there coming into our homes each and every month. Unless we learn to deal with clutter and organize our belongings a little bit everyday, our homes would just fill up again overtime and we would be forced to continue repeating the process over and over again.

This is how I transformed my home in just fifteen minutes a day:

When my daughter Abby was born, my first daughter Izzy wasn’t even two years old. I wanted to have my kids close together so that they could be lifelong best friends (fingers crossed it works out) but I had no idea how much freaking work two under two would actually be. I suddenly found myself a stay-at-home mom with a toddler and a baby and needless to say, housework was not a priority. Getting through the day with all three of us fed and somewhat clean was basically my only priority.

I remember feeling like I was working all day long, but I was literally accomplishing nothing. I did, however, spend hours every day just looking for stuff I had misplaced, like my car keys. Oh my word, those freaking car keys. I would constantly lose them or my wallet or my cell phone…and sometimes the baby (well, just that one time). I felt like a giant failure as a mother and as a homemaker.

By the time Abby was nine months old, I had started a home daycare and well, you can imagine how my house looked after that. My days were pretty much filled with snot, poop, and singing the same brain-numbing kid songs a thousand times. I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and had zero time for myself.

So what changed? What was the trigger that transformed my home and my life from chaos and clutter to calm and clean? Peter Walsh. I discovered a show on TLC called Clean Sweep and it literally changed my life. The entire television show was dedicated to transforming families and their homes through organization. After watching a few episodes and absorbing every word Peter said, I bought all of his books and began my new life as a crazy, obsessed-with-all-things-organizing person.

I’ll never forget the first time I organized something and it stayed organized (for longer than a nanosecond)! It was my master bedroom closet and I used the same method that almost every Professional Organizer uses when organizing a client’s home. I used the SPACE acronym. This method works and (thankfully for me), it makes organizing fast and easy (even for us ADD moms).

S   is for SORT

P   is for PURGE

A   is for ASSIGN

C   is for CONTAIN

E   is for EVALUATE

 

I started by taking everything that was in my side of the closet out. Then, following the SPACE method, I started with “S” for Sort. I sorted all of my clothing into similar piles. Long sleeve shirts together, short sleeve, skirts, pants…you get the idea!

Then came the “P” part of the process…the dreaded Purge part. I went through each sorted pile and picked out the items I didn’t like and the ones that did not fit.

I heard Peter’s gorgeous Australian accent in my head telling me to remember the 80/20 rule. The truth is, we wear only 20 percent of our wardrobe, 80 percent of the time. This tidbit of knowledge made getting rid of those ugly shirts much easier. Yes, I spent $50 on that hideous sweater, but it was still hideous and therefore not worth keeping. It was easy to let it go when I reminded myself I was making room for the clothing I loved and wore often.

Sorting into piles makes purging much faster and easier. With a heaping pile of sixteen pairs of black pants, it was suddenly obvious I had way too many and could easily purge my least favorites. I will share so many more painless purging methods with you in Chapter Three.

Next came the “A” for Assign. We are going to talk more about this important step in the next few chapters. For my closet, I assigned my pants and skirts to the bottom rod and my shirts on the top rod, which was easier to see and access. I usually wore the same pair of pants a few times, but I always wore a new shirt everyday. Because I wore a new shirt more often than new pants, I assigned them the easiest to access area in my closet. We will discuss why this step is so important in getting and staying organized in Chapter Four.

 

Now came my favorite part of the organizing process, “C” for Contain! I took a look at the piles I had left after hanging all of my pants and tops, and found that I had a small pile for workout clothing (evidence of my hatred for sweating), one for bathing suits, and a large pile of pyjamas (pyjama pants are totally acceptable to wear to Walmart, right?). Now that I could easily see each pile of clothing already sorted, I could see exactly what size container I needed for each sorted pile. Our bedroom was small and had no space for a dresser, so our tiny closet had to accommodate almost every article of clothing I owned. I purchased some containers from my local dollar store for each of the remaining piles, labeled those containers and put them on the bottom shelves in my closet. Voilà! An organized and functional closet!

The final “E” in the SPACE method is for Evaluate. As you acquire new belongings, or as you and your family use the space, you may need to re-evaluate and tweak your organizing system until you get it right. Understanding and working with systems for your unique organizing style will be a big part of this step.

 

This first project took me about thirty minutes to complete, which was longer than the fifteen minutes a day I recommend, but still a reasonable amount of time to complete and see immediate results!

When I was done with my closet, the final result was an organized and functional space that actually stayed clean and organized. The real impact came the next morning, when I woke up late and had to rush to get dressed before my daycare children arrived. I was able to find my clothing so easily and in half the time it usually took. Here is where the life-changing magic stuff gets real! Those thirty minutes I invested in reorganizing my closet continued to save me time every morning when I got dressed. It was at that moment I realized that creating an organizing system was an investment of my time—an investment that would continue to pay for years and years to come.

After I completed my closet, I was so amazed at how much more functional it was that I starting picking one small organizing project to do every day in my home. One day it was my sock drawer, the next day just one cupboard in my kitchen. Before I knew it I was looking forward to my daily organizing time, and my home was transforming into a clutter-free oasis right before my eyes.

Now, six years later, I still spend fifteen minutes a day on my home. Some days it is simply tidying up our main living areas, and other days it is reorganizing or straightening a drawer or cupboard. Once a week I spend fifteen minutes doing a 21 Item Toss (I cover this painless technique in the next chapter) just to be sure that my home never becomes a cluttered TLC-special kind of house again.

If you take nothing else from this book, just please remember, transforming your home doesn’t have to be an overwhelming or expensive undertaking. All it takes is just fifteen minutes and the willingness to start, right now.