To organize you must minimize.
As a professional organizer, many people consider the final result as the main task of my job. Go to someone’s home with a messy pantry, put everything in nice labeled bins, take an after picture and move on. There is a lot more to that final result than you may imagine.
Let’s look at a few definitions:
organize: verb. arrange into a structured whole; order, coordinate the activities of a person or group of people efficiently
organized: adjective. arranged in a systematic way
minimize: verb. reduce (something, especially something unwanted or unpleasant) to the smallest possible amount or degree
The words that stand out to me in these definitions is efficiently, systematic, and reduce.
Picture this: You are making cinnamon rolls!! You go to find cinnamon in your freshly “organized” pantry. You have 100 spices and herbs in labeled jars to look through. You pass up the cardamom that you use once a year if you’re lucky, 3 jars of tumeric, and the specialty jars of lemon pepper, chili blend, and Herbs de Provence you got as a gift years ago but never found a reason to use. You eventually find it behind the expired and mostly empty jar of oregano.
Next, you go to get the flour. You have whole wheat, pastry flour, self-rising flour, and two powdery half-filled rolled up bags of all-purpose flour on the shelf among the rock hard bags of brown sugar and stale marshmallows.
Finally you need vanilla. It’s on the top shelf of your cabinet with the birthday candles, decorative icing tubes, and cupcake liners. Don’t forget the mostly empty and leaking bottles of food coloring!
You make your cinnamon rolls and put everything back with all their “friends” for next time.
Now picture this slightly different scenario: You go to get the cinnamon and it’s among the 25 herbs and spices you use the most. It’s clearly labeled and not expired. Your single bag (or bin) of all-purpose flour is front and center next to the whole wheat you use for bread (the other flours have been discarded since they were very old and never used). The vanilla is still with the birthday candles and cupcake liners but is no longer covered in green food dye because there are only 4 bottles of food dye in their dedicated box and the leaking ones have been tossed.
Which version sounds most efficient to you? Which batch probably tasted better? In order to organize you must minimize.
Minimizing doesn’t mean eliminating completely (see definition). The last thing I want to do is to go to someone’s home and get rid of all of their stuff. I want you to know what you have and use what you have. If you have a jar of tumeric among 100 jars of mostly unused herbs and spices, even if they are “organized”, you probably won’t know or remember it’s there next time you pull out a recipe that calls for it. So you buy a new jar to add to your spice collection. We’ve all done it. If you minimize down to what you use/need/love, the important things will be a lot more accessible and visible so you know they are there. The leaking food coloring does nothing but make a mess, distract, and frustrate you. Toss it. Instead of getting rid of that second bag of all-purpose flour, we could decant them into a single container. Minimizing doesn’t mean eliminating.
This concept works not only in the kitchen and at home, but in your calendar and in your mind! Is there anything in your schedule that you could minimize in order to open up more breathing room? Are there duplicates you could squish together in order to save time? Here are a couple of examples from my crazy soccer mom schedule:
All 4 of my kids play soccer. It’s important to them and it’s important to us that they are active and learning how to be part of a team. Am I going to tell one child they can’t play soccer (eliminate) because there are already too many other siblings playing? Ha! Not a chance. In order to make it work this winter, we specifically looked at options that overlap in order to save taxi driver time. We of course are hoping to carpool as well. These tactics are minimizing the time we are spending in the car and freeing that time up for us to make dinner and attend to the other things that are important to us.
Combine errands with items on your schedule that make sense. I’m writing this post at my favorite coffee shop. You bet I also brought the return that needs to be dropped off just down the street. My girls have ballet tonight. I always plan to get groceries while they are there because it’s just the right amount of time for me to do it. Tomorrow I have an appointment 30 minutes from here. I already have several other errands in that same town ready to go.
Delegating is minimizing. Having my children do chores takes them off my plate and frees up time for me to play games with them later. Delegating is something that doesn’t come easy to me but when I do it, I rarely regret it. Hiring someone to clean your home (or maybe organize your kitchen?) frees up time for you to do other things that you probably enjoy a lot more.
Are there any items in your home or on your calendar that you think you could minimize in order to see things better? In order to free up time or create breathing room so you can attend to something that has been put aside that is important to you? As a parent especially, I find that any extra pockets of time we can find are such a gift. Don’t let them pass you up by being hidden behind clutter. Don’t let them be the cinnamon.