by Tiffany Belle

Created on: April 10, 2008

What do you do after you have organized and uncluttered your home? How to you not go back to your old habits? Staying organized is actually harder than getting organized, because you have to train yourself to do things differently. It takes 3 weeks to establish a new habit. You need to make a conscious effort not to resort back to your disorganized self. Once you have uncluttered your home, staying organized involves picking up, putting away and discarding unneeded items on a regular basis. If you start procrastinating again, you will have more work later and will likely go back to your old habits. Here are some simple everyday strategies for staying organized by taking car of the small things.

Don't put it down, put it away. Before you put something down, ask yourself if that is where it actually belongs. Take getting dressed and undressed. Even when you are in a hurry, make sure that after undressing you throw your clothes in the dirty clothes hamper instead of throwing them on the floor. It's easy to collect a couple day's worth of clothing on the floor and then you find that you have much more laundry than you thought. It may be hard work in the beginning but if you keep after yourself, it will become second nature to put things back in the correct place.

Make sure you are enforcing rules with all household members. Whoever makes the mess it the person that should clean it up - Now. That means that everyone in the house cleans up their own bathroom mess, their own kitchen mess and their own bedroom mess. You can set your own standards (you may want to start out small with younger members of the family). Make sure you are enforcing the rules or else you will be the one cleaning up the messes of everyone else.

Unclutter areas as you go. Every morning or evening, walk through your home for about 5-10 minutes with a basket and collect all the stray items and return them to their rightful place. If you are following the first tip above, you should not need more than a couple minutes everyday to accomplish this.

Leave your area cleaner than you found it. Make it a plan to never leave a room in your house without improving the appearance of it. Toss out the newspaper in the recycling bin, straighten the pictures on the wall, close the cabinets drawers, put dishes in the dishwasher, and so on. Make your bed every morning, it will make your room look nicer and give you a better sense of calm about your room.

Make it easy to stay organized. Designate different boxes and areas for certain things. Make a box for putting library books in or for movies that need to be returned. Make putting things away a daily family chore. If you find that you are constantly picking up the same area everyday, see if you can come up with a practical solution for preventing future messes. For example, if your kitchen counter is constantly has empty bottles and cans on it, move the recycling bin closer to that area.

Buy less. Do you really need more stuff? The less that you have in the house, the less likely that it will become a mess. Think twice about buying things. Do you really need that souvenir, or can you just take a photograph instead?

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