31 Days of Organizing Tips: Day 4 (Process)

Welcome to Day Four of the 31 Days of Organizing Tips series!  I’m so glad you’ve joined me.  Throughout this series I’ll be sharing organizing tips to help you on your journey from overwhelmed to organized. 

Today I want to talk about the whole process of organizing. It’s easier to get organized if you can follow a few basic steps for each project. There are lots of very similar processes for getting organized, including Julie Morgenstern‘s SPACE acronym – Sort, Purge, Assign categories, Containerize, and Equalize (Evaluate), which is very popular and easy to remember. You can read more about it in her book Organizing From The Inside Out (affiliate link).

Another system I recommend is from Laura at I’m an Organizing Junkie. Many years ago, Laura developed a series of steps to follow with any organizing project. They work really well and I still follow these regularly when I’m organizing my clients’ homes.

Laura describes her process here. She also created a bookmark to remind us of the steps.  It’s pictured here but please go to her site to download it or pin it.  Laura goes into more detail on each of these steps on her blog too.

I love how simple this is and how easy it is to remember!

Each of these steps is important.  We’ve talked already about planning (P) and de-cluttering (part of O).

I kind of skipped over removing all the items from you space (R) but it’s definitely an important step if you can make it work. Organizing is one of those things where it feels like you’re making more of a mess while you’re in the middle of it but in the end it all pays off!

Whether you’re organizing a drawer, cupboard, shelves, closet or even a whole room, emptying everything out gives you a chance to start with a clean slate. Look at your space with fresh eyes. If things didn’t work before, you can change them! Move shelves around to accommodate your needs. Change items from one cupboard to another where they are more likely to be used.  Whatever you need to do to make the space more functional, it’s easier to do that when it’s empty. Plus, you can use that opportunity to admire how nice it looks without anything in it. And you can clean, paint, or decorate the space before you put things back!

Back to Laura’s steps. I’ll be posting lots of tips related organizing (O) and containerizing (C) in this series and I’ll cover evaluating (E), solving and simplifying (S) as well.  Hopefully you can follow the Smile (S) step throughout the series as you go from overwhelmed to organized!

Thanks Laura for sharing this fantastic organizing system and the bookmark to easily remember it! I want to be an Organizing Junkie just like you!

For Day Four, remove everything from the space you’re organizing (if you didn’t do that yesterday when you de-cluttered). Take the time to clean it out and go back to your plan to see if you need to make changes to the space. Also, check out Laura’s post and familiarize yourself with each of the steps and why they are important in the organizing process.

How did your de-cluttering go yesterday?  Have you used steps like Laura’s when you’ve organized before?  Which step do you think is the most important?  What is the best organizing tip you’ve implemented?

If you need help decluttering or organizing, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else. Happy organizing!