5 Ways to Organize Anything

Clutter. Chaos. Junk. It’s all around you. It’s disorganizing your life, making you less productive, and generally adding to the mountain of stress you have to deal with each day.

It doesn’t have to be this way. You can get your life organized. And it won’t require some massive overhaul of your habits and routines. Just some smart tweaks that help you get your ducks in a row.

Maybe your personality leans a bit more towards the chaotic side. Maybe you’ve always struggled with even basic organization.

Those are no excuses. They’re just reasons you need to get yourself in gear and apply these 5 tips. They might not all be ideal for you. But choose at least one and start working on it today. You’ll notice results, fast.

Reduce the Junk All Around You

Before you can get organized, you need to reduce your pile of junk. That will make the whole process much easier.

But where to start? This all depends on what exactly you’re trying to organize. Here are two examples.

• Your Closet - Pull everything out. What haven’t you worn in the last year? Make a pile with those items and get ready to sell them or give them away.
• Your Schedule Pull up your calendar and identify any non-essential meetings, activities, and engagements. Identify the ones that are just cluttering your schedule and remove them. You can’t do everything, and admitting that is an essential start to the organization process.

Keep Everything in Its Place

Both physical and not-so-physical things must be kept in their proper places. If something doesn’t have a place or it doesn’t fit, it needs to go.

Take the example of your closet again. If your clothes don’t all fit in your closet, you need to reduce your wardrobe. And if your clothes are anywhere else, they’re in the wrong place. The same goes for your shoes, your accessories, and anything else that gets stored in your closet.

What about your schedule? You have some non-adjustable activities that must be kept in their place. Things like time with the family and other non-work (but still essential) appointments.

The same goes for your daily work calendar. You can’t schedule two things at once, no matter how badly you might want to. If you know a meeting is going to run an hour, don’t schedule it for 30 minutes in your calendar. It’s going to cause clutter - which is going to cause stress.

Recognize your limits and keep your activities in their respective places, or time slots.

Learn to Say “No”

This is perhaps the hardest part of getting organized. If you want to keep everything organized - tangible or otherwise - you must learn to say “no” other things.

• You can fit one more pack of batteries in that junk drawer, right? No!
• You can cram one more pair of shoes into the bottom of your closet, right? No!
• You can get one more meeting in at the end of the day, it won’t throw off your schedule, right? No!

By saying “no” to non-essential activities and general life clutter, you’re saying “yes” to organization and productivity. It might be hard to reject things at first, but once you see the positive results it’s sure to get a lot easier.

Harness the Power of Routine

On the long term, this is critical. Routines will help you stick to your habits and prevent your organized life from falling into chaos again.

Routines are powerful. Many guys have been able to lose weight and get strong because of following a solid workout routine and organizing their schedules. The same goes for skincare. Many guys follow a daily skincare for men routine to fight the effects of aging.

Are you ready to organize your life and enjoy the results? Apply these tips, one at a time, and you’ll soon change things from mess to proudly organized.