Have you ever stood in a space in your home or office and thought, "I just want it to be better! I have no idea what that looks like or how, but I don't like it now"?
Well, I have bad news for you. You're going to have to do some hard work to figure out a few things before any magic can happen!
Identifying and naming why a space doesn't work for you is half the battle - it helps define your goals (which keep you on track when you're in the mess of sorting and editing) - but it also keeps you focused on the why of organizing in general - what's the point of pulling everything out, creating a mess, and taking time to put it back together thoughtfully? What's your rub? Why are you doing this? Ahhh... so you can find your keys. Ahhh... so you can concentrate on work and not get distracted. That's why.
The brilliant Julie Morgenstern, in her timeless classic Organizing from the Inside Out has a brilliant framework for working through any organizing problem: Analyze, Strategize, and Attack. In the first stage - analyze, you ask several questions about a space to discover where you need to head. I ask these questions ALL THE TIME with my clients in discerning what exactly they want a space to do for them:
What's working?
What's not working?
What items are most essential to you?
Why do you want to get organized?
What's causing the problem?
It's pretty easy to list what's working (or you could say "nothing!" and move along to the next question ha!), so today we are focusing on the second question, "what's not working?"
These are what I call "pain points" - things that annoy the heck out of you and keep you from functioning in your space. The door that doesn't stay open? Pain point. Whenever you sit down to watch tv and can't find the remote? Pain point. The lack of storage space in your living room? Pain point.
Here are some prompts if you need help zooming in on the issues:
I can never find my ________________.
I have no place to put _____________________.
There's no room for ______________________.
I am tired of _______________________.
I can't ______________________ because of the clutter.
I'm losing a lot of money on ______________________.
The disorganization makes me feel ___________________.
When people visit, I _________________________.
As Julie points out, once you complete this exercise, you now have a complete list of all the problems you want to solve, as well as what they're costing you, and what success in overcoming them will mean. Wow, that's a lot!
For those of us who love checklists (hello, it's me!), this new list is now a guide in where to go next. Once you solve each problem, you can check it off and revel in the satisfaction of a job well done.
This list also helps us clarify what exactly we are losing by staying in an unorganized state - oftentimes its monetary, but our time is also valuable, and if we spend our time trying to locate items, that's a type of spending we can't afford!
So the next time you get that "feeling" that something isn't right in your space and needs to shift, run through the questions above and see if anything pops out as the culprit. It's often simpler than you think to fix, and the relief of having your pain points resolved is next level peak living!
Comments