Don’t make the mistake of letting little odds and ends derail your home organization project!
A lot of organizing advice involves how to make big decisions around how to dispose of your more important belongings:
⁉️ Should I keep or donate grandma’s china?
⛷️Is it time to accept that skiing days are behind me and it’s time to sell the gear?
🎨 What are the odds the kids will ever want proof that I kept all their art projects?
However, small decisions about little belongings can be equally important in home org projects. These seemingly innocuous, small little nothing items are actually very insidious and can break your momentum before you realize what’s happened!
Example:
When you are working diligently to clean out your kitchen drawers and find yourself with a package of shoelaces in your hand, do NOT stop to wonder how they got there (into the drawer, that is, not your hand 🙂). That initial thought will lead to others such as:
- Where should shoelaces really go?
- Should shoelaces spark joy?
- Is there such a thing as a shoelace bin?
- Should I run out to the Container Store just to see?
Pausing your progress to contemplate the mysteries offered up by the junk drawer is a sure fire way to bring your project to a complete, screeching halt.
But….these items belong somewhere so what should you do with them? Take the quiz below to find out.
When you find yourself considering a random object during an org project, you should:
- Throw the item in question back into the drawer, preferably towards the back.
- Assign blame to a family member for how the item might have ended up there.
- Create a temporary holding area (box or bin) to be the receptacle for these items and keep moving.
Let’s review the options:
Throw the item in question back into the drawer, preferably towards the back.
While the tactic of delay might be advisable in hostage situations, it will not be your friend here because:
- You know that “one of these things is not like the other” and even though the odd item will be (temporarily) out of sight, it’s going to continue to call to you (“hellooo?? why did you throw me back in here? I’m a shoelace, why am I with the can opener?) and distract your org energy going forward.
- You set a bad example for yourself. The slippery slope of not dealing with “just this one thing” creates a mindset where you will now be far more likely to toss every other mystery object back in the drawer, thus creating a slightly rearranged but equally dysfunctional space as the one you started with.
Assign blame to a family member for how the item might have ended up there.
This might create a welcome distraction from the organizational task in front of you but the relief will only be temporary. After the recriminations, apologies, etc., you will still have to consider the matter of the shoelaces and where they belong.
Create a temporary holding area (box or bin) to be the receptacle for these items and keep moving.
Ding, ding, ding - this is the winner!
By creating a “pending pile” you solve a couple problems at once.
👍 you continue to free up physical space by swiftly removing the odd item that doesn’t belong
👍 you keep your mental state focused instead of distracted
Once the bigger project is done - the drawer organized, the closet sorted - then you can come back to the pending pile and deal with those items at a later date.
Once these not-easily-categorizable bits and pieces are removed from their original home, it can become more obvious what to do with them. Seeing them in a neutral environment can make it more obvious where they actually belong.
It might seem dramatic to give these little odds and ends such power but it’s critical to recognize them for the project killers that they are. Treat them as you would a creepy hitchhiker by the side of the road - don’t make eye contact, just toss them into the pending pile and keep your foot on the gas!
The moral of this story is:
Don’t let the stragglers be the stranglers of your organizing success.
