Maintaining a Tidy Clutter-Free Space

Welcome to ‘Day 6’ in the month long series of articles cataloging
 Simple Organizing Solutions!  

 If you’ve been reading from the beginning, you’ve hopefully already, 1) Gotten the right mindset and motivation needed to get organized.  2) Zeroed in on one small area to focus your efforts.  3) Have begun narrowing down your belongings to what what you love, use and actually have the room to store. and 4) Considered how to cut clutter at the source by giving each item a specific ‘home’ stored in groups of like items (5)! 

Once you’ve assigned specific homes for those groupings of like items, you need to set a plan in place to consistently return those items to their ‘homes’.

A few {simple} ‘Ten Minute Tidy’ sessions a day keeps the clutter away!

You’ll be amazed at how much you can put away in only 10 minutes if items have a specific place to go!   You can do just about anything for 10 minutes, right?  You can always tidy up for MORE than ten minutes as well, but keeping the goal small and simple is easy to achieve and will at least get you into the HABIT of regular tidy-up times.  Set the timer and pretend company is coming!

The number of sessions to incorporate depends on how many people are consistently at home on a daily basis.

For example, If you’re a stay at home mom with several young kids, I would suggest 3 Ten Minute Tidy sessions (One just before lunch, one in late afternoon or just before dinner, and one either right before or just after the children go to bed)

If just one or two people are at home on a daily basis, one-two Ten Minute Tidy sessions is a good place to start.

Show them the ‘homes’ you have created (or better yet, create some or all of the ‘homes’ for your things together!) to teach them where things ‘go’.  If ‘homes’ have been created for belongings of small children, create some photo labels that will serve as a reminder for where to return their things.

The days of your being the ‘janitor’ of your children’s belongings could become a thing of the past!

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If you’ve got young children, play some special music to inspire their ‘Tidy-Up’ times.

I grew up cleaning up my toys to the tune of
‘Whistle While You Work‘ from Snow White:

As well as, ‘Spoon Full of Sugar‘ from Mary Poppins:

Another fun song is, ‘I Like to Move It’ from the movie, Madagascar:

Explain to your kiddos that things in the home have gotten ‘moved’ out of their homes and it’s time to ‘Move It’ back! 😉

Occasionally you’ll need to have a longer official complete clean-up sessions (at least once or twice a week depending on the amount of ‘stuff’ your family has to maintain) to completely reset everything to it’s rightful place.  However, having those regular ‘Ten Minute Tidy’ sessions will ensure your space does not reach an over-whelming or paralyzing state.