Episode 14: How To Get Organized AF
Spring has finally sprung, and since we’ve all been stuck in our homes for ages, this is the prime time to spring clean your life! In this week’s Quickie episode, we dive into simple ways that you can organize your home, your work life, and your time.
The first step to cleaning your shit up is understanding some of the psychology behind organization, which can help change our behaviours.
A number of studies have looked at what clutter does to people’s minds. Many point to how people who are stressed out, exhausted or burnt out can feel calmer and more at ease when they are immersed in hyper-tidy environments. Research in Psychology Today found that women with cluttered homes had higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. And Princeton University found that clutter makes it more difficult to focus on a particular task efficiently.
Organization takes time, and it can feel super daunting, so the key is to break it up and take it one step at a time. Try devoting 30 minutes a day to organizing an aspect of your life or space. There’s an awesome website you can use called UnfuckYourHabitat.com that breaks organizing down into small fun challenges and checklists.
There are generally four key areas of your life that could benefit from more organization.
Tidying up your home
If you’re a little Type A and you want to learn from the best, check out Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, or watch her show on Netflix, Tidying up With Mari Kondo.
She’s the organization queen and her organizational style, the Konmari Method of Essentials, has been used by millions. The Konmari Method follows these 6 principles:
Commit yourself to tidying up: if you want to go all in, instead of cleaning one room a day, devote an entire day to doing your whole house or apartment.
Imagine your ideal lifestyle: Visualization is key. How do you want to feel in your space? Thinking of your life in concrete terms like, “I want to live in a calm space that sparks creativity” is much more impactful and inspiring than, “I want a clean home.”
Finish discarding first: You need to purge before you start! And in true Marie Kondo style, before getting rid of any items, make sure you sincerely thank each item for serving its purpose.
Tidy by category, not location: Instead of starting with your closet, start with your clothes. That might include your front hall closet, storage bins, your shoe rack, and your closet.
Follow the right order of categories: Marie has developed a tried and true order of tidying up that she swears by:
Clothes
Books
Papers
Komono (AKA miscellaneous items)
Sentimental items
Ask yourself if it sparks joy: Having things in your home that inspire you and make you happy is important. If you love it, that feeling will radiate into other areas of your life.
If you’re not quite ready to go full Marie Kondo, here are some quick fixes that make a difference.
Have a strategy: Organization is less about “tidying” and more about thoughtfully strategizing where things should live for easy access and making the most of your space.
Group items by task: In the kitchen, keep everything you need for making your coffee on one tray, and keep all your baking supplies in one section. Tackle that out of control tupperware drawer and make sure every set has a matching lid. And only keep things on your counters that you use on a daily basis—the rest can be stored away.
Make the most out of all storage opportunities: Taking advantage of vertical space for storage is a great hack. These Amazon shelves are perfect for decluttering counters and displaying your favourite products! And never pass up on good under bed storage. Ikea has some awesome pullout underbed drawers where you can keep off-season garments, extra blankets or shoes, or sentimental memorabilia that you don’t use often.
Use decorative objects for storage: Corralling miscellaneous items in pretty baskets will keep your counters clear (shoutout to our fave home decor guru Alexandra Gater for inspiring us to do that!) On her YouTube channel, Alexandra recommends storing dry goods and bathroom products in labelled jars for a package-free, unified look. We’re also using decorative boxes as a filing system to organize documents, mail and paper bills.
Organizing your computer and work files
When it comes to getting organized at work, the best place to start is with your to-do list. Listen back to our productivity episode, episode 6, where we explore three productivity methods to organize and crush your to-do lists!
Now let’s talk Desktops. It’s a divisive subject, where some people exclusively have a few tabs open at a time and a perfect document filing system, while others have 1,000 tabs, a crowded desktop full of screenshots, and a computer that freezes daily. Experts recommend Bookmarking tabs you aren’t immediately using and maintaining a solid bookmarking system, or saving them to apps like Pocket to visit later. You can even use browser extensions to manage your tabs and schedule them to reopen in the future! But if you need to keep a lot open at once, make sure you group related tabs into separate windows, and if you're an Apple user, you can create different desktops for different purposes like Work and Personal.
Another place to focus on is your Inbox. We recommend setting up a folder system, setting up auto-filing rules, and using Outlooks clean-up tool! It deletes any redundant emails in a thread and keeps the latest one, one where someone was added or one with an attachment. Check out this link to learn how to use it. It helps to consistently carve out the first and last 30 minutes of every work day to organize emails and prioritize your day.
Organize your finances
There’s no better feeling than having your financial shit together, and all the hard work is done for you if you use software or apps that track your spending and your investments for you. We’ve said this before back in our Budgeting episode, but apps like TD MySpend and Quicken will break down your spending from all cards and accounts into categories so you can really see where your money is going.
Another time-saving suggestion: If you’re still getting bills by mail, it’s time to join the 21st century and sign up for online billing so you can easily track, save and search your bills and expenses digitally. That will really help come tax time. If you stay on top of organizing your receipts throughout the year, tax season won’t be such a daunting time! Try to organize your receipts by year, and then by month, and note on the receipt what the purpose of that expense was. And if you need help getting your taxes organized, check out our Canadian tax prep checklist to help you track everything you need before you submit!
Organize your time
Between work, hobbies, appointments, working out, cooking, time for friends, and side hustles, it can be hard to keep track of it all, so really using a calendar for everything can help you make sense of all the shit you have going on in a week. It sounds obvious but guys it ACTUALLY helps. And if you live with your partner or have a business partner, getting a shared calendar is a game changer! It helps you prioritize your time and balance all the craziness that life throws at you. It’s also a great way to reflect at the end of the month and see where you spent your time and what changes you might want to make for the month ahead. Cailyn plans her entire day (and life) on her Google Calendar.
Whatever part of your life you’re looking to organize, we hope that these tips help you get a head start! xx