Beyond Tidy summary

So with a positive mindset in place, let’s start with the first of the eight principles: goal setting.

To set a goal, you first have to know what you want to achieve. Perhaps you want to get your time management skills in order or declutter your home so you can have guests over. Or it could be that you have too many clothes in your closet or need a system to manage your paperwork. Whatever it is, you need to know it before setting your goals.

Each of your rooms and spaces should have a clear definition of its purpose to focus your decision-making. Easy, right? Your bedroom is for sleeping and relaxing, isn’t it? Well yes, but often rooms have multiple purposes. A basement, for example, might be a family room, office, laundry room, and gym. If your rooms have multiple purposes, you need to designate clear zones and then allocate space accordingly.

How do you do this? Start by envisioning how you want the room to look. You can even create a vision board by finding pictures of organized spaces that appeal to you. Think about open or closed spaces, color schemes, and patterns. For each room or space, ask yourself what its functions are. Is it big enough for everything? Who will use it and who will see it – only family members or guests too? Do you need new furniture or to discard surplus items?

The process of sorting through your belongings can be overwhelming – especially if you go full-on Marie Kondo and empty all your drawers and closets into a pile!

To make things a little less daunting, sort through items in a space and put like with like. In the kitchen, for example, put things with a similar purpose together. This could be as straightforward as putting pots with pots, or less obvious like batteries, bulbs, and power cords in a utility pile.

It can be pretty stressful sorting through your belongings, but actually, it’s deciding what to let go that causes the most stress. Of course, you don’t have to throw everything out and there can be many reasons for wanting to hold on to things – perhaps for sentimental value, or because you paid a lot for it, or because you hope that one day a top will fit you again. But there are times when it’s obvious you need to do something – for instance, do you really need umpteen coffee mugs when there are only two of you?

When you’ve decided what needs to go, what do you do with those items? Discard anything that’s broken or stained, unsellable or unusable, and donate other items to people you know who might need them or to donation centers. Set yourself a deadline to have these items out of your house.

Brogan and Limpert have a mantra: “Everything deserves a home.”

When you apply this to the things you own, everything has its space and everything is returned to that home after use. This way, nothing gets lost. 

Imagine you’re about to cook a meal. You grab the pot you want to use from one room, your spatula from another, and go upstairs to retrieve your spices. If you really had to do this, how often would you even bother to cook? It would be both time-consuming and incredibly annoying.

OK, you’re unlikely to organize your things in this way – you’d find everything you need in the kitchen. You’ve learned to have a very clear association between cooking utensils and your kitchen. It’s safe to assume you’d find the same in someone else’s kitchen, too.

One of the causes of clutter is buying first and worrying about space later. To avoid this, you need to monitor your space and make your buying decisions accordingly.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. You visit the supermarket and pasta is 50 percent off. What do you do? Well, you know that you have a specific place for pasta in your kitchen and that at the moment it’s full. So what you don’t do is buy more pasta thinking you can put it somewhere else. You have no available room for pasta right now, so you simply don’t buy more.

Have you ever heard of the Zeigarnik effect? In 1927, Russian psychologist Dr. Bluma Zeigarnik discovered that people remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones. Uncompleted tasks distract us from things we’re currently working on which means that any unfinished tasks result in mental clutter.

In the same way, if you don’t finish organizing, you run the risk of creating more clutter and ultimately more work!