The holiday season is a time when it’s easy for our organizing efforts to start to unravel. If you’d rather wake up on New Year’s Day with something other than “get organized” at the top of your resolutions list, give these three ideas a try.
1. Re-commit to the daily 15.
One of the very best ways I know to get organized and stay organized is to spend 15 minutes a day focusing on keeping your home organized. During busy times like the holidays, that 15 minutes may be spent dealing with surface clutter that crept up throughout the day, as opposed to moving ahead on a bigger project. Make it your goal to spend a little bit of time each day keeping yourself on the comfortable side of surface clutter. Doing so will ease your stress throughout the season and prevent a big clutter backlog to deal with in January. So if you’ve fallen off the 15 minute a day bandwagon (or you never got on it in the first place) now is the perfect time to recommit!
2. Keep some breathing room on your calendar.
If finding fifteen minutes a day to stay organized feels like it will be hard to come by, then you may tend to over-schedule during the holidays. If so, make it a point this year to be intentional about how you spend your time. Keep some breathing room in your calendar (blocks of time where you plan nothing) so you have time to catch your breath and recharge your batteries.
3. Create some breathing room in your home.
Before the holiday season gets into full swing, allocate a few “daily fifteen” sessions to create breathing room. If you have young children, declutter their toys to create space for new items on their way. Clear some space in the kitchen cupboards or pantry for holiday baking items and seasonal food. (This will keep items off the counter during the holidays!) Create room for guests’ coats by culling through the coat closet and letting go of anything that no longer fits. The breathing room you create now will have a huge payoff in December.If you’ve worked hard this year to create order in your home, it doesn’t have to unravel over the holiday season. Put into play a few simple tips and strategies, and you can ring in the new year already organized. What strategies do you use to stay organized during the holidays? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Happy organizing!
I have fallen off the 15 minutes daily habit so thanks for the reminder .
You’re welcome!
I have just started reading and am not fully into the 15 minute daily challenge. Is that just a surface clutter/what you accumulated that day (or within short time)? I’m kinda doing that although I haven’t gotten to it daily. Sometimes I just come home from work, eat and go to bed! I do wash or load my dishes! From my readings, I got the impression it was more like clean out a room for 15 minutes. I feel more accomplished with longer blocks and so I don’t leave something out until next day. But then, of course, its more of a weekend thing. I did enlist DH and we cleared out a huge pile of filing (2 years more), including shredding. I can now breathe in the office and continue to work in smaller bites.
At simplify 101 the 15 minutes a day can be used for whatever you need to make progress on. If you’re just starting out with getting organized, then fifteen minutes a day is a terrific way to get started on bigger projects and make progress instead of waiting until there is a bigger block of time available. Or the fifteen minutes can be used for clearing daily surface clutter and putting things away. It’s really a matter of where you are in the organizing journey and what needs to happen most in your home. The key is to do a little bit each day so things don’t build up and become overwhelming…and if they are already feeling overwhelming, giving yourself permission to dig out the same way it built up…a little bit at a time.