Calm the Chaos: 5 Simple Steps for Being More Organized This Year
Organization is nothing more than a series of healthy habits that you include in your everyday routine. Creating rituals of beneficial activities/tasks that you can add to your morning or night allows you to create a sense of order in a most likely chaotic lifestyle. Adding a little bit of extra time to your routine in order to get your tasks straightened away properly will help ease anxiety and prime your mind and body for the rest of the day. Here’s a few simple steps that you can implement today to support a reinvigorated and more organized lifestyle for this new year.
Throw a small load of laundry in each day.
Laundry doesn’t have to be a delegated day of the week that you dread. Spread out your laundry chore by putting a small load of laundry in at least once a day so that you never have a large pile to work through at the end of the week. This task helps diminish clutter and reduces any issues of not having enough clothes to make outfits for throughout the week. Additionally, once you remove the clothes from the dryer, rather than placing them on your bed or in the basket, immediately fold and put them away.
Make a standing grocery list of what needs restocking in pantries and bathrooms.
As the pandemic persists, it’s best for all of us to limit our exposure to public places as much as possible. Keeping an organized list of groceries that need to be acquired instead of trying to remember what food items you’ve run out of is one way to reduce the number of trips you make to the grocery store every week. This is useful for not only food pantry needs, but also toiletry needs throughout the house. There are apps available to download, such as Ibotta, that allow you to keep a list of items you’ll need to get at the grocery and notifies you when those products are on sale or if there is a coupon available to use on the app.
Use a wall calendar.
There are lots of options for family calendars that display in a common area in the home. This can be used to communicate with the whole family about kid’s pick-up schedules, work events, to-do’s and even meals for the week! Having a shared physical place to map out the month and week provides more benefit to the entire family than mobile individual calendars, which work great for personal reminders.
Clean up your at-home workspace.
With so many people working from home, it’s easy for these employee conditions to get overwhelming and jumbled up with other paperwork in a non-workplace setting. The best way to stay on top of your projects and work agenda while in the comfort and mindset of your own home is to consistently clean up your work area. Keeping an organized desk or work room will allow you to separate your home life mindset from your workplace mindset, so that you can focus on tasks that need to get done instead of getting distracted by homelife concerns. Decluttering papers and throwing away any trash a little every day will go a long way when it comes to overall office organization. Check out this helpful article with some of the best desk organization ideas!
Take out the garbage at least once a day.
Typically the kitchen trash fills up the quickest so keeping that maintained and emptied daily keeps things tidy. A general rule of thumb is to empty the other garbage bins in the house once a week when you’re putting out the trash for pickup. Be sure to toss items as you use them. For example, water bottles or cans can be placed in the recycle bin after use rather than letting them accumulate on tables or desks.
These are just a few daily tips that we hope help you feel organized and make for an amazing year!