Keeping your home organized is one of your greatest challenges as a mom. Not only will you have to contend with all the messes and disorganization your children create, you’ll also have very short windows of time to contend with them.
At the same time, a more organized home can be psychologically beneficial to everyone in the family, and can make it easier to find what you need when you need it. Thankfully, there are some strategies you can use to make the process of organizing your home much easier and less stressful.
Improving Your Home Organization
Try using these tips to keep your home more organized without making it a full-time job:
- Make a command center. It’s much easier to keep your house organized if you have a central location for all the items you use on a daily basis, such as car keys, wallets, and phone chargers. According to Woodtex, one of the best ways to do this is to create a “command center” in your home. For example, you could designate one drawer of the table in the entryway to house all these items collectively; this will prevent you from allowing things like incoming mail to clutter up a separate room of the house, and will prevent most lost items.
- Focus on one room at a time. Instead of trying to organize your entire house at once, split the task into much more manageable chunks by focusing on one room at a time. If you’re trying to get the job done quickly, you could focus on one room each day. If you function better at a more leisurely pace, you could designate a new room to focus on each week. This will help you see your progress in real-time and avoid getting overwhelmed.
- Do a little bit each day. Even if you’re taking a slower-paced route to organizing your home, it’s important to do a little bit of work each day, even if it’s just relocating one batch of items. This will help you stay focused on your main goal, and will help you establish a consistent momentum, which means your good habit will be far harder to break. Keep track of your progress on a calendar or a mobile app so you can look at it and get motivated whenever you feel like quitting.
- You don’t have to do this all yourself. Put your partner in charge of reorganizing some of the rooms of your house, or get your kids involved by teaching them how and where to put their toys away. You could even make a chore wheel if that’s what it takes to keep everyone accountable.
- Label your designated spots. The common adage, “a place for everything, and everything in its place” is touted by home organizers because it forces you to find a resting place for all your items, preferably by category. It’s hard to keep track of this over extended periods of time, or with multiple people living alongside you, so keep things focused by creating labels for your most important spots (such as drawers and closets).
- Organizing goes much faster when you have fewer items to organize. And according to MindBodyGreen, decluttering your house could help you be more successful in every area of your life, including your career and your relationships. Take the time to go through your old things, and throw away or donate anything you haven’t used in the past year. You’ll be surprised how good you feel afterward—and how much faster you’ll be able to reorganize your home.
- Consult with a pro. If you don’t have the time to organize your entire house, or if you’ve tried, only to become frustrated and confused about where to go next, it might be worth the time and money to hire a consultant. There are thousands of professionals out there specializing in interior design and decluttering, and they’ll be more than happy to point out time-saving tricks you can use to get organized—and, more to the point, stay that way.
Finding Your Rhythm
It’s important to acknowledge that what counts as “organized” for you may not be the same as what counts for someone else. Similarly, a strategy that works perfectly for your best friend may not work for you at all. One of the most important yet most neglected elements of home organization is finding your own personal rhythm; it takes time and effort to figure out exactly what you need, and exactly the right strategies to keep things in order. Don’t be discouraged if your first attempts at home reorganization don’t go the way you thought they would.
