A Guide for Self-Organization: Home Life

Home organization

Planning out our home life duties sounds like the most boring use of our time possible, but the impact it will have on your ability to get tasks done and keep your home looking nice is irrefutable!

Planning out your home life can look different for each person, but some things that really helped me: a calendar, to-do list templates, a physical inbox, and an organizational system to keep it all together.

If you haven’t checked out my first posts in this series, I strongly recommend checking those out first: A Guide for Self-Organization: Planning and A Guide for Self-Organization: Goal Setting.

If you’re starting at Day 1 of trying to clean your home from a pit of depression or something similar, don’t worry! These ideas can still work for you too! Being organized with your cleaning now, in the beginning, will help you devise a way to keep the clutter and dirt away for good.

Calendar

Although a calendar isn’t necessary, I have found it incredibly useful when it comes to helping me time block out my days. I have a section time blocked for cleaning and home life, for tasks like going to the store, and taking care of my animals.

This helps me stay the most accountable with the time I have available.

If you’ve never time-blocked before, time-blocking is when you block off periods of time in your calendar for something specific.

I choose to use Google Calendars which lets you have multiple calendars at once that can all be color coded.

To-do list templates

To-do list templates have saved me a bunch of time and help ensure I don’t forget anything while cleaning.

Personally, I have a weekly template and a deep clean template. The weekly template has all my days and tasks that I need to do daily in order to keep my apartment in order. The deep clean template is for when I have a little more time on my hands and my apartment could use a little more love.

Each template helps make my life easier because it maps out exactly what I have to do and the template itself gives me an easy way to keep track of what I’m doing, what I have done so far, and what more still needs to be done.

You can get templates in multiple ways. Personally, I use Notion to create my templates for cleaning. If you’re not familiar with Notion and prefer to keep your notes in physical books or worksheets, you can easily create (or find) a template that works best for you that you can easily print out each week. Bullet journaling is another great option for to-do lists but try printing out your template and adding it to your bullet journal to cut down on the time spent rewriting your template each week.

Organizational System

Your organizational system will be the system you perfected in A Guide for Self-Organization: Planning. It also will be combined with your templates to help minimize the amount of double work you’ll need to do staying organized.

Your organizational system should include places for daily cleans, weekly cleans, monthly cleans, and deep cleans. It should already list out the actions you need to take for all of these to help keep you on track and organized.

Starting from the bottom.

For many of us, when looking for an organizational system for our life and homes, this means we are starting from the absolute bottom. This typically often looks like an unclean, unorganized messy home and anxiety about where to even begin.

So, before our organizational system can really work the best for us, there’s a key few things I think that need to be done to help kickstart you off on the right foot. For some, this may take a few days, but for some these things make span longer, taking months to complete.

Don’t let this deter you. Having your organizational system in place before setting out on the journey of cleaning up your home life means that you will build helpful habits around keeping your home tidy and orderly WHILE you get through the mess. I promise you, these small wins will give you the motivation to keep going if you’re serious about getting your home clean and organized.

Start small.

One of the most important things you can remember when it comes to taking back the cleaning and organizing of your home is that this is not a race.

Cleaning and organizing a whole home is hard work! Starting small will help keep you from burnout and will help keep you on track to keep making small gains that will add up over time.

This could mean only making progress in the small windows of time you currently have available. You’ll be shocked just what you can do in a small 10-15 minute window of time though!

Pro tip: Rather than deciding WHAT you are going to clean, focus on how LONG you are going to clean. In the beginning, there may just be too much that is overwhelming to really keep a good focus on all the items you plan to clean during a set period of time. Instead, simply set a timer for a set period of time, and then clean. Once the timer goes off, you’re done!

I’ve found myself to be more productive during this method and it greatly decreases the risk of burnout. If you have ADHD or are just having trouble focusing some day, focusing on what tasks you want to accomplish could literally take you all day, even if the task should only take 20 minutes. I cannot say it enough - focus on time!

Make a basic routine.

This is where those pre-made templates can really come in handy.

Before you do anything, outline a small routine that you will do daily. The goal of this task is to help make sure the progress you’re making in each area is being kept up with on a daily basis so you only have to do the hard work of starting from the bottom once.

This may seem like a lot in the beginning but you’ll begin to notice the impact that even just a 10-15 minute daily clean can have on your home and your daily life overall.

For myself, I have a weekly pre-made template that I use in Notion. Each template has the days of the week on them and under the days of the week, I list all the tasks I need to do for that day to keep up with my home. This likely sounds overwhelming but remember this list shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes each day! Each of my days has been 6-10 tasks.

An example from my template:

Some days have more items than others. Like Tuesdays, my animal tasks includes quick cleaning all my chinchilla and rabbit pens. I chose those days to do a little bit more because those are the days I get out of work a half hour earlier. Be mindful of your time and how your weekly schedule looks and organize daily/weekly tasks accordingly.

Saturdays are my biggest days with weekly tasks like laundry and mopping/sweeping my floors, but even these days are mostly manageable for me even on my worst days. Why? Because every time I stick to my routine, the easier it is to do each of these tasks. For example, when I keep up with my dishes, it takes me less than 5 minutes to quickly go through all my dishes on any given night.

Keeping up with this list is the most important part of home life and organization in my opinion. This list is meant to keep things manageable and doable without letting anything become too overwhelming from being ignored.

Your home doesn’t have to be clean to start with a basic routine, a basic routine can get you started on your road to cleaning more deeply and thoroughly.

Having a small routine that I did every night, even though my home was still somewhat a mess, helped me build back up my self-esteem and boosted my confidence when it came to what I was able to actually manage when cleaning!

Identify your best times for getting your small routine done.

Once you have your small daily routine all laid out, next you’ll need to pick out a time that works for you each day. Leaving it up in the air is going to be a sure way that it doesn’t get done and something else takes it place.

By having a set time in place, you’ll also make this more of a habit and routine that sticks. Routines and habits that are done each day become much easier over time to do them as we begin using our unconscious mind to carry out the tasks rather than using our conscious mind which can be more exhausting.

Even if you can’t set aside the same time every day, still decide on a time for each day of the week, and then respect that time! If you have family members or roommates who often distract you, make sure that they understand you should not be interrupted during this time as well.

Pro tip: If you like to wake up to a clean home, consider making your cleaning routine something you do right before getting ready for bed.

Declutter.

More stuff means more clutter.

When I was at my worst, I couldn’t keep my home organized or clean. It was constantly a disaster, more than I would ever like to admit. I had no idea how I was going to tackle getting my apartment back to normal. The task felt impossible.

My psychiatrist saw pictures of my apartment and knew I needed help. So he began helping me.

Between appointments, we would decide which areas I would need to have tackled by my next appointment. Then, I would bring new pictures to my next appointment and we would pick out a new area to tackle.

Decluttering was one of the best things he’s ever helped me with. It gave me a sense of control over what felt like an impossible task and it taught me a lot about what I actually need to be comfortable and happy with.

One tip that was helpful for me when I was decluttering was to pick a set space or area for each item and only keep what could fit in that space or area. For example, my make-up has a bin. When I first decluttered, I decluttered all my makeup until it fit down into that one bin. When bringing new things into my home, I will sometimes have to declutter one thing from my makeup bin to fit another new item. This may sound very limiting to some people but this is what will keep clutter and disorder from overtaking your home in the future!

The amount of stress that was gone from my life when we finally finished (this took weeks) was more than I can explain in words.

People always say declutter, so maybe it’s an annoying add, but people say it because it works!

Maintenance

Once we start tackling our decluttering and cleaning, there are a few key things we can do to keep up the momentum that we have got going. These things will be helpful whether you’re just starting out or whether you’ve finally gotten your home back in order.

Everything has a home.

A key part of staying organized is keeping things in their proper places. This is one of the essentials for combating clutter!

With this in mind, everything in your home should have it’s own home. Literally NOTHING that enters your home should enter without having a home space picked out for it.

Sometimes, when bringing new items home, this is our alert that something else should leave if we can’t find a home for the new item. Getting rid of an item whenever you bring a new one into the home is one way to make sure your decluttering stays intact.

Declutter regularly.

Just as you should make time to plan, you also have to make time to keep up your organized home. This means addressing decluttering regularly as items will be constantly flowing into your home.

Setting aside time weekly to do quick check-throughs and declutters, or setting aside time to tackle one area each weekend, is a good way to help ensure the decluttering you did initially stays intact and beneficial.

Personally, I did such a large declutter when I did my first one, I don’t need a declutter routine because most of my apartment is down to the bare minimum anyways. This can be the benefit of making those choices early on in the decluttering process.

The only things I still have to spend time decluttering on a continual basis is makeup (I have an Ipsy subscription so every month there are new items coming into my home) and my clothes every so often just to see if there’s anything I’m done wearing or is looking too raggedy to continue justify being seen in public with it on.

Keep up with your basic routine.

Keeping up with your basic routine is going to be one of the biggest things that has the most impact on your ability to keep your home clean and in working order.

It is easy to fall off track once or twice with our routines, but don’t let yourself fall off track for more than a day.

I know how hard it can be to keep on top of your routines, especially during a mental health crisis, but REMEMBER, this is why we kept the routine small. Keeping the routine small helps ensure that even on our worst days, we are attempting to do something! We may not be able to finish the entire routine, but doing half one day and half the next day, still helps contain the mess without letting it spread or get out of hand and become an impossible task again.

Physical Inbox.

Have a physical inbox to put incoming mail or papers that need attention. This could be anything, I use an old napkin holder. It easily holds my documents but the space doesn’t allow me to let the papers clutter up there.

Take time once a week to sort through these papers.

This will help greatly diminish the amount of areas in your home that are getting cluttered and overrun by papers. It will also help make sure that none of the important papers are getting lost in the rubble.

Split any papers up into 3 sections: toss or shred, file away, or take action on.

Toss or shred any you can get rid of right away.

File away anything that you may need in the future. Don’t let this part catch you up. For example, you may receive a credit card statement every month and you may feel the need to keep this. DON’T! Credit card statements can be found in your credit card account, so you already have your statements organized online. Don’t make it complicated by keeping things that are already stored in other safe places.

Items that you need to take action on should be stored out in the open where you don’t lose track of or forget that it needs accomplished. Keeping it in your physical inbox may be enough to remember.

Use your calendar to schedule time into your day to take care of the actions you need to take with these items. Once done, either toss or file away.

Delegate tasks.

If you have other family members or roommates that should be helping out with the cleaning or organizing of your home, use them to your benefit. Delegate tasks to each person (preferably things they prefer to do) and give yourself back some of the much needed time to work on the rest of your goals and tasks.

Don’t give up.

Even if the tasks feel overwhelming to begin, starting with just one thing will help get the momentum to your new life started!

Staying on top of your home organization can seem like an impossible task when you’re just starting out, but once you get into a routine, things WILL begin to flow more easily for you. Tasks will become easier to accomplish and take less thought. You’ll find yourself beginning to fulfill your tasks even when you’re not feeling your best because it’s become easy to maintain on autopilot.

You just have to give yourself time to get to that point.

With all the tips and tricks I’ve laid out in this blog post, I hope you feel excited to begin tackling your own home organization journey today!

Take a minute to leave your own tips and tricks in the comments below! I’d love to hear them!