ilanasf

I finally hired a professional organizer, and WOW did it turn me around. I’ve been working with her for 2 months and now I actually take pride in striving to keep my place organized. It isn’t perfect yet, but at this point I am mostly working on sorting through the old piles of stuff I’ve accumulated over time that sit in my bedroom. She helped me determine a good system for sorting. Now the living room, entryway and kitchen all look pretty darn decent!

I’ll share with you 2 things she’s helped me do, under the umbrella of “starting new habits for organization” rather than the tendency to do nothing/be a slob. First off, you need a place for everything (and thus “everything in its place”.) I had this going for some things already.
1. When I come home I set a timer for 12 minutes. 2 to visit the bathroom and 10 to put away everything I’ve brought in the door with me. That may include washing tupperware from lunch and sorting the mail, or starting to empty a suitcase. If I’ve put it all away and the timer hasn’t rang, I put away other stuff around the apartment.
2. My kitchen counter always got covered in receipts, papers, plastic bags and other junk. One day when my organizer was here I cleaned off the whole counter. The only thing without a “place” were the receipts- I just didn’t know what to do with them. She suggested I use a small accordion folder I had (that was already empty). I place my receipts in order by month, and can always recycle them after I’ve gotten my credit card bill for that month. It turns out receipts don’t need to be kept longer than that unless they’re for tax purposes or if you may want to return the item purchased, and they don’t ever need to be shredded unless your whole credit card # is on them. Generally they only have the last 4 digits and that’s ok to put in the recycling.
So now I put the receipts in there and everything else in its place… and my kitchen counter has been clean ever since!!

I bought a small filing cabinet off craigslist- it has one drawer for files and 2 small storage drawers. I put assignments & notes from art class that could fit in the file drawers.
I put art paper in one of the small drawers.
I put my pens, tape, rulers, etc in the other small drawer.

That what essentially what I needed to accomplish when I listed this as one of my things. I also have a large rubbermaid tub with all of my jewelry supplies, and another medium sized bin with glues, sewing supplies and “other” – need to sort & purge that one. These days I mostly just use the glue or needles & thread and not the other junk in there!

last night I went to bed before 12:30 for the first time in a while.however this was due to back pain – bad enough that I just couldn’t sit at the computer or on the couch to watch tv- nothing to do but go to bed. I called in sick for the first couple hours of the day to tend to my back and sleep some more.