I Have No Time To Be Organized

Copyright 2005 Kerry Flinders

I hear that all the time. "I don’t have the time to be organized". My clients say this to me like I will believe them. What I say to them is, "Then you can’t afford to not be organized"!

As a Professional Organizer I know the amount of time it takes to organize each and every space in your house, no matter what condition it starts in. I realize that time is valuable. However, when I hear people tell me that they don’t have the time to be organized I have to stop from laughing at them.

Being organized "saves" you time. It "gives" you time. Being organized helps you eliminate all the time it takes you to search for things. When you are able to simply go to the place an item is supposed to be, and it is there, over and over during the course of a day, then you will actually find a lot of time freed up in your schedule. This time can be used more wisely, or perhaps it’s time to just spend with family and friends. Or even time just for yourself.

Being organized also saves you a lot of stress. Think about the last important paper you went searching for. Besides remembering how much time it took to locate it (or perhaps you didn’t find it at all) think about how stressed out you were until you found it. If it took you a long time to locate, chances are you were pretty stressed out for a while after you found it too. I don’t even want to elaborate on the stress you must have felt, or for how long, if you didn’t find that important paper.

(I have lost pink slips to our cars, on two different occasions, because my important papers were unorganized. Two different times!)

So, having mentioned that I know that becoming organized takes precious time, I want to stress that the time it takes to organize your spaces is far less than the time you spend each year searching for things. You may take 2 hours organizing your kitchen one weekend, but if you keep it that way with a little maintenance though out the year, then you should never need to do that job again.

There is a "trick" I teach to my clients to convince and show them that becoming organized really won’t seem like it’s taking all that long.

First of all, you do NOT need to organize your entire house and its entire contents in one day or even one weekend. Please. It didn’t take a weekend to become disorganized and cluttered, feel free to understand that it doesn’t have to take a weekend to recover.

Here’s the "trick". Do things in small intervals. In fact, when I am on job I rarely stay and organize with my client for more than 4 hours at a time. In my own home, however, I rarely organize for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time. On many occasions I spend as little as 10 to 20 minutes tops.

How can it possibly take so little time to organize an area? I tackle it slowly. Take the kitchen for example. While I’m waiting for the water to boil on the stovetop I might open a drawer, quickly empty it out, weed and purge it, then replace the items in their correct spaces. There, one drawer in my kitchen is completely organized. After a week of meal preparation, with a little organizing thrown in here and there I can organize all of my drawers.

One morning, while I was supervising my teenage son while he cleaned out the refrigerator (my children have 1 chore a day, on most days), I emptied 3 junk drawers, weeded and purged, then put everything back in only 1 drawer, freeing up 2 other drawers for my kitchen needs. I finished my junk drawer organization way before my son finished emptying out 4 relatively empty shelves, wiping them clean, and then replacing the items. And these were JUNK drawers. Three of them. It only took me about 17 minutes to do them all.

Tackle your clutter one area at a time. Feel free to even break up that one area into smaller jobs. Whenever you find yourself with a little extra time here or there do some organizing.

When you’re waiting for your hot rollers to set go though your closet. Simply remove all the items you haven’t worn for over a year. Put them in a bag for charity. Now your closet is on its way to becoming organized. Tomorrow, while you wait for your hot rollers to set put all the shirts together, pants together, dresses together and such. On the third day straighten up and purge your shoes. Within a week you could have your entire clothes closet clean and organized, and it really never took you more than 15 minutes each day, over a course of several days.

I organize, and even clean, my house in this manner all the time. I personally do not like to work for an entire weekend organizing my spaces. But when you do a little work, a little bit at a time, then before you know it you’re all clean and organized.

Don’t ever try to trick yourself into believing that a little work here and there won’t make a difference. It will and it does. You can find the time to be organized. And you will be thankful you did.

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