Organizing is like cleaning...only less often

The newest addition to our school room...activity bins. More details to come, once it's completed!

If you've been around my blog for any length of time, you know that my life feels complete when I am organized. I genuinely love organizing. I like things to be clean, too, but the problem is that I don't like to clean. Unfortunately, it's a necessary evil that you have to clean (or pay to have it done) when you like things to BE clean. Curses!

I was reorganizing our school room last week and something occurred to me: You can't just organize something once and leave it alone. Systems need to be put in place to keep a space organized and you need to work the systems. Even if you put things where they belong 100% of the time, every once in a while, it's still good to go through the space to purge, rearrange and make sure your systems are working for you. 

Recently, I found this to be true of our school room.

Now that we've agreed to keep Kaylin home for 1st grade, I felt like I needed to get serious about our school space. In November, I transformed my craft/scrapbook room into a place that was functional for teaching the kids and entertaining Jason during our learning hours. With Mike on board to make this a longer term educational decision, I came to the realization that the scrapbook supplies needed to go...and our school room needed to be strictly for school.

It was during this process that I started thinking about people who feel disorganized. Part of the problem is not having systems in place, but the other problem is likely the misconception that once you organize a space, you never need to organize it again.

Organizing is like cleaning...you can't just do it once and expect it to stay that way forever.

The good news is that you don't need to organize nearly as often as you need to clean your home. To keep a general feeling of cleanliness, we clean our house every other week, yet I only go through and organize high-traffic areas/rooms/closets a couple of times each year, if that.  Make sense?

So if you hate how disorganized you feel in your kitchen or your bedroom closet or your pantry, dedicate a couple of hours this month to tackling that dreaded space. It probably won't take nearly as long as you think and everything associated with that space will take less time once it's organized. Then next month, tackle another disorganized area.

You'll be so glad that you did!