Since there seems to be a fast track to a lot of activities, I wanted to devise a fast track to getting your home organized using the same principles.
Fast tracking is primarily a way to shorten your project time as quickly as possible. It involves an established technique to cut down the time it would normally take on a project.
With any project, there are steps. To fast track those steps a method would need to be formulated to streamline the activity and establish a less comprehensive sequence for the scope of a project, yet still get the same result.
That said, we need to first know and understand what it takes to organize an area of your home, since that is the project we’re talking about here.
Organizing is a process. It has steps to getting organized. The key elements of those steps involve:
- Collecting up all the clutter and things that don’t belong in the space
- Sorting through stuff
- Deciding what to keep and what to get rid of
- Establishing a place for everything
- Obtaining organizing solutions (products) that improve the space – optional, as needed
- Putting everything in its place
Pretty simple, right? It is, except when a person gets bogged down on a step, like establishing a place for everything. That’s when it can get a bit tricky and take longer to finish the project if we don’t know where to put something.
In making sure stuff has a place, sometimes we need to buy something to keep stuff in – like storage containers and the like. And sometimes we just need to create a place from spaces we already have, or organizing products we have around but not utilized yet.
So, to fast track this step, let’s add a step before the step of “putting everything in its place.” Let’s add this:
- For items that you’re unable to find a place for, put it in a bin until you have a place to put it permanently.
Although that’s an extra step to the organizing process, it provides a faster track to organizing your space as a whole. It also buys you time to go out and find and get an organizing solution for those items – giving these a permanent “home”.
Some things already have a place but need better organizing solutions to make it a better space. A kitchen, for example, might be better off if the cabinets had space-saving stacking shelves for dishes, or bins to hold packaged like-items, things like that.
In this case, after the sorting of what you want to keep, put everything back and get what you need to make the space better later.
Same with a clothes closet – after sorting through the clothes and accessories and removing what you are getting rid of, you can get organizing products afterward to improve the functionality of your closet. Before you do, however, tidy up the closet by grouping like clothing together (shirts, blouses, slacks, etc.).
So, the fast track would be like this:
- Collecting up all the clutter and things that don’t belong in the space
- Sorting through stuff
- Deciding what to keep and what to get rid of
- Establishing a place for everything. For items that you’re unable to find a place for, put it in a bin until you have a place to put it permanently.
- Putting everything in its place
- Obtaining organizing products that improve the space – optional, as needed
Those added steps allows you to fast track your way to an organized space. It removes the obstacles that stop us along the way to finishing the project. Hence, a fast track to organization.
I didn’t want to complicate this process and, instead give you an outline and progression of getting organized. It is a process – a sequence of steps – that will get you from Point A to Point B.
Try not to get overwhelmed during this process. Take one step at a time if you have to, and ultimately you’ll end up better organized!
