So you decided to get organized. You go to the container store, or Target, or even The Dollar Tree and buy cute jars, bins, boxes, and baskets. You get home and start putting stuff in them. Soon, you’re struggling to figure out what should go in which container, some things don’t fit in the containers, and there are a lot more decisions to make than you expected. Let’s say that you survive this stage and get all your stuff into the containers and all the containers stacked onto shelves or into cupboards.
A week goes by. Maybe a month. You look around and wonder, “What happened?! Why is this all a mess AGAIN?”
“Getting organized” is the second most popular New Year’s resolution, right after “lose weight.” If we keep setting this goal year after year, why do we keep failing?
In today’s video, I’m going to share the three reasons I believe most of us fail at getting organized. BUT I’m also sharing solutions that will help you overcome each of these stumbling blocks!
Watch the video below:
1. “Getting organized” is the wrong goal.
Look, you’re a smart, capable woman. If getting organized was really your problem, don’t you think you would have figured it out by now?
Someone once said: “Clutter is a postponed decision.” Think about it: the pile of mail on the counter represents a postponed sorting decision of what to recycle, bills that need to be paid, other actions that need to be taken.
Decision-making is our problem, specifically, decision fatigue. It takes emotional and mental energy to make decisons, and we’re doing it from the moment we get up and decide whether or not to hit “snooze,” to picking out what to wear, to picking out our kid’s clothes… on and on it goes. We make HUNDREDS of decisions every day, so it’s easy to want to save our energy by postponing them when possible. Unfortunately, that catches up to us eventually.
Instead of what all marketing messages would want you to believe, your solution doesn’t lie in more cute containers. First, we need to keep only what sparks joy. Then, we can find a home for it.
Adding more stuff to our stuff is just making the problem worse. We need less stuff, and that even includes cute organizers.
To make decisions easier, we need a simple rubric to follow with yes or no questions. And we need to practice to build up our decision-making muscle strength. It gets easier!
2. We don’t have a plan for getting organized.
We get to a point where we JUST CAN’T TAKE IT and jump in somewhere – without a real plan. Then when the going gets tough and we’re overwhelmed, we fizzle out.
We need a plan that works for our life, that’s comprehensive, and at the right pace. It’s tempting to buy into ideas like “just throw out one thing a day!” but the reality is that we rarely bring in one thing a day, so at that pace we’ll never catch up to the clutter we’ve already amassed. But few of us can take time off to fully dedicate our days to completely KonMari our space in a month either.
Somehow the first time I read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” I glossed over the fact that Marie says most of her clients take at least six months to complete their “tidying festival” of going through their entire house, one category at a time. I guess after watching the movie magic of the Netflix show, I assumed they did it all in a month or so.
But whether you’re a sprinter or a marathon runner, you must have a plan.
3. We don’t have a system for getting organized.
“We rise to the level of our goals, and fall to the level of our systems.” –
James Clear, Atomic Habits
First, let me say Atomic Habits is blowing my mind and I highly recommend it if you want to study habits further. I highly recommend reading chapter one here:
To summarize: a “goal” is the outcome you want. A “system” is how you get there. It’s made up of habits that incrementally bring you closer to the outcome you want, but can also be maintained past the one-time event of reaching your goal.
His illustration seems particularly fitting: “Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. But if you maintain the same sloppy, pack-rat habits that led to a messy room in the first place, soon you’ll be looking at a new pile of clutter and hoping for another burst of motivation. You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause.”
Bonus: We lack support.
We’re afraid of failure. Maybe we’ve tried getting organized before and failed, so we don’t tell anyone what we’re trying to accomplish, and we just hope for the best. Without any support or accountability, we miss out on the external motivation that can be so hugely powerful to accomplishing a big change like this.
It’s not unlike losing weight. We could do occasional workout videos in our living room when no one else is home. Or, what if we join a running group that expects us to show up? Maybe we also put money down and have skin in the game by hiring a coach to help us change our mindset around food and exercise and keep us accountable. Which method is more likely to get us the results we want?
Maybe in the past, you’ve looked to the wrong people for support. You told someone what you’re doing, and they responded with skepticism, their own story of failure, and implied that you couldn’t do it. We know that that person was just projecting their own insecurity onto you, but it doesn’t feel great.
You need the right kind of support – people who share the same vision for a life without the stress, burden, and overwhelm of clutter and chaos at home. A life of streamlined systems and peace, with reclaimed energy to spend on what really matters, instead of picking up the toys on the stairs for the 50th time.
Enter: The Minimal-ish Mama Decluttering Course
In my course, The Minimal-ish Mama, We will address each one of these pitfalls for your journey to getting organized.
- We will deal with decision fatigue by using a simple rubric to decide what to keep and what to let go of.
- We’ll also start small, so you can build up your decluttering muscles and see progress along the way. Those wins will give you the motivation to keep going!
- You’ll get a step-by-step, day-by-day plan so you won’t get overwhelmed or waste energy figuring out what to do.
- We’ll build systems to maintain your progress beyond the 30 days of the course.
- Plus, you’ll be doing it with other likeminded people, other moms who also want more out of life: a simpler, streamlined, stress-free way of living.
This course is designed for moms, by a regular mom (not even a cool mom, I’m way too nerdy for that! Haha!). I’m not what I would picture an “organizing expert” to be – I’m a busy mom of two kids who really lives in her house. You won’t find a Pinterest worthy pantry with clear jars all labeled with matching labels here – sorry to disappoint!
However, I HAVE learned how to declutter and organize in the midst of being a mom with little kids. I can distill all I’ve learned by experience and from studying habits, systems, decluttering, organizing, KonMari, minimalism for all of my adult life, and share it with you.
If I can make your life just a little bit less stressful, a little bit easier, or a little bit less lonely, that’s 100% worth it to me. My goal is to help you create space in your home, schedule, and soul.
To find out more about the course, pop in your email on this page so I can send you the details. And would you do another thing? Share it with a friend or family member and ask them to do it with you! Get that support!
Currently Seeking Beta Members
The Beta Group Course Membership is an opportunity to get LIFETIME ACCESS to the decluttering course for a deep discount in exchange for helping me create and shape the course.
Basically, you’ll be my guinea pig in exchange for personalized decluttering help at a discount. By joining the Beta Group, you’ll provide feedback on the course content before it launches. I may ask you to test run some solutions and tell me how it went.
As a thank you, you’ll get access to the course FOR-EV-VER. The fee basically just helps to cover a couple of hours of my time. After the course, I’ll ask you for your honest feedback so we can make it even more awesome.
At $29.99, this is the lowest price this course will ever be, guaranteed. And I’m only taking the first 10 guinea pigs – I mean, beta group members!
(Plus, I’ll send you a free gift: my jumpstart guide for decluttering!)
If this course isn’t for you, I totally respect that! We will still have a series of free videos on my Youtube channel for you to enjoy. So subscribe, hit that bell notification so you don’t miss the next video in our series: From Clutter to Clarity.
