This is the first post in a new series on How to Organize Your Home. The series will focus on what it really takes to organize your home so you and your family members are happy with the end results. Enjoy!
A basic organizing principle is to sort and store like items together. Using a child’s room as an example, this principle tells you to sort Legos with Legos, transformers with transformers, and toy cars with toy cars. Makes sense, right? Sure…until you have a child who doesn’t play with just Legos, just transformers or just toy cars, but instead plays with all of them at once. I had a child like that.
When my son was young, he was fascinated by garbage trucks. We would chase real garbage trucks around town whenever we saw them, hoping we’d get to see the garbage truck pick up and dump a dumpster. Back at home, Collin’s room turned into a virtual junk yard. He spent hours using dump trucks to push “garbage” around his bedroom floor, scooping it into his garbage trucks to haul off to the landfill. What was that toy garbage? It was Legos, transformers, toy cars and any other small toy he could get his hands on.
The moral of the story is this: Sorting like with like in my son’s room—Legos with Legos, and toy cars with toy cars—actually made life harder for both of us.
I believe the underlying goal when getting organized is to make life better and easier, to free up time and space for more important stuff—the people and activities that make your life worth living. Spending hours and hours resorting Legos, transformers and toy cars into arbitrary like-with-like categories was actually moving my family away from this goal.
The solution was to sort based on real world use. For a period of time, all of the toys in Collin’s room were “garbage.” Storing all of his small toys in a single container made a ton of sense, even if his bedroom didn’t look organized from the outside looking in.
The Takeaway
Organizing ideas abound on the internet and Pinterest today. These ideas suggest what it means to be organized and, even more, how it looks. For example, Legos should be stored with other Legos (possibly even separated by color). For some children, this system will work great. For others, the families will spend countless hours sorting Legos by color because it looks organized, even though no one plays with these items this way.
When organizing a space, you can sort like with like, but first take a step back and really understand what “like” means in the space you’re organizing. How do you and your family members use this space? Which items are truly similar based on how you use them? If Legos, transformers and cars are really “garbage,” give yourself permission to sort and store them together, even if it doesn’t look like the Pinterest definition of picture perfect organization.
When your organizing systems are set up to support how you really use a space, your spaces will be easier to use, saving you time and frustration on an ongoing basis. It sure made my son’s days more enjoyable. In my mind, that’s the real reason for getting organized in the first place.
I’m a scrapbooker and I sort all my small embellishments by colour: so all the green buttons, eyelets, flowers, floss, and brads are all in one container. I realised this is how I “play”–I’m usually looking for “something green” (or whatever) and it doesn’t really matter what it is.
Great example! Thanks for sharing it, Alana.
This is exactly right-on and one of the best necessary organizing discussions not held very often. So much of organizing needs to be about use and not “logic.” Like: hanging all your clothes by color works for some, but hanging them by outfit would work for others. But we love eye candy, don’t we? Even if that is not the best way to organize. I am looking forward to comments, examples and ideas….from the readers and you, Abby.
Thanks so much Connie. Love your example about clothing – so true. Some people need clothes sorted by color…for others, outfit works best. ~ Aby
Hi Aby, I always enjoy getting your weekly quick tips in my email, but this is the best organizational tip I’ve read in a LONG time, from anyone. Thanks so much!
Thanks so much Marilyn. It really seemed to strike a chord. I got a lot of emails about it!
I couldn’t agree more! I bought a big mixed box of Legos for my son once I saw how into them he was and proceeded to set up this whole wonderful system of sorting them by colour when, halfway through, I realise he plays by function or shape instead. So I scrapped the colour sorting and sorted them by function (wheels, minifigures) and shape (and sizes of blocks) but in a very loose way. There is still one ‘mystery’ bucket I call it that he still loves to dig in to look for some elusive piece. That works much better for us and makes more sense come clean up time. Thank heavens because it saved me HOURS of colour sorting time…
Another great example. Love the idea of a mystery bucket. 🙂
I had always sorted my dishes near the dishwasher. Three upper cabinets…cups and glasses in one, plates in one, and bowls in the third. On Monday, I took a chance on something I’d been wanting to do. I put the plates and bowls near the stove because we serve from there. I put the glasses and cups near my “beverage” area because we drink out of them. Makes sense to me and that’s what counts.
Absolutely! I hope it works great for you, Alice!
Wow thanks for that perspective! I will take a much less uptight approach with getting my kid’s toys organized…..once and for all!