You can do it now or save it for later. Most of the time if you save it for later, the piles have grown and it’s now going to take you longer to complete. Spend a few minutes tackling it in the moment and save hours on the back end struggling to tackle your task.

Start practicing mini habits and before you know it, they will be incorporated into your everyday life, and you’ll be able to accomplish more than you ever thought possible. It will change your life! Start with very small attainable goals. It will be as easy as picking something up and putting it back where it belongs.

Why are you procrastinating? What are you doing now that allows you to be distracted? Are you too busy?

7 Mini Habits You Can Start Now

Start placing your keys/phone in the same place. Every time you walk in the door, place your keys in a designated spot. You’ll never run late again because you forgot where you placed your keys. Same goes for your phone. Have a designated spot for your phone and practice placing it in the same spot. You have a home for your toothbrush, right? Why not one for your keys and phone.
 
File receipts. After arriving home from shopping, take receipts out of the car, wallet, or pocketbook. Place them in a monthly pouch, file, or envelope. After you get in the habit of doing this, at the end of the month, match your receipts to your statement, staple, and then file. Your monthly pouch will then be empty and ready for you to fill with the current month’s purchases. Don’t have receipts? Make a habit of keeping track what you’re spending on a monthly basis!
 
Take trash out of your car. Is your car becoming a trash can? Practice taking out your trash every time you get out of the car. You get out and the trash goes with you.
 
Open mail every day. Take a minute everyday to open your mail. It will take you no time at all to categorize it and decide what to keep, shred, throw away, attach to your to-do list or to file.
 
Take something out, put it away. It’s very elementary, but how many of you actually do this?  You wear a shirt and instead of hanging it back up or putting it in the laundry, it ends up on the floor and before you know it, you have many small piles. Practice taking things out and putting them back.
 
Keep a running shopping list. If you used the last of the paper towels and know you need more, write it down on a running shopping list. Clear the mental clutter and practice writing things down as you need them. You’ll never have to waste time and struggle again thinking about what you need to purchase.
 
File papers in the moment.  You’ve just paid a bill, but you don’t feel like filing it right now. Why? Take a few seconds and file it. Practice tackling tasks like this that will only take a few seconds. Items like this that get pushed to the side are the tasks that end up taking hours later. Are you paperless? Make sure you’re keeping organized folders in your email or on your desktop. Practice the same habit.  
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Break an overwhelming process down into pieces. This is exactly what you are going to do with these mini habits. These tasks don’t seem overwhelming when you break them down into mini habits that are very achievable. Start tackling these mini habits and they will get you one step closer to achieving your organizational goals.

Which mini habit will you work on this week?
 

Are you stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious? Are you disorganized?

Wouldn’t you love to have more free time, less stress, more energy, and more money in your pocket? These are just some of the advantages of being organized. There are more, and you will experience every one of them once you get organized.

The first thing you have to do is realize that your disorganization is affecting your quality of life at work and at home.

Here are 10 signs it’s time to get organized

1. You spend countless hours searching for things. It’s time to get organized if you walk around in circles in your home or office searching for items.  You are wasting precious time due to your disorganization.
2. You are wasting money purchasing duplicate items. How many times have you looked for an item in your home, but couldn’t find it so you went out and purchased another one? Get organized, and this will never happen again.
3. You have one room in your home where you can’t see the floor. There is one room in your home that you drop items in because they don't have a permanent spot. The door to this room usually stays shut and nobody is allowed in. I bet there are some things buried in that room that you have been looking for or forgot you had.
4. You have piles of mail that haven’t been opened. You have mail exploding out of drawers, in cabinets, on the top of your desk and flooding the dining room table.  You probably leave it there because the process to tackle it is just too overwhelming. Are you tired of looking at these piles? Wouldn’t it be nice to actually sit at an organized, clutter-free desk?
5. You are embarrassed to have guests over. Do you have a panic attack when the doorbell rings and it’s an unexpected visitor? You love to entertain but haven’t been able to have guests over because you don’t want them to see how disorganized and cluttered your home is. It’s time to get organized and start partying again!
6. You shove items into an already stuffed closet when you know guests are coming over. The holidays roll around and you find yourself stuffing items into closets, cabinets, or the basement. You are creating more work for yourself. Get organized and you’ll never have to run around the house stuffing items into closets again.
7. You can’t see the bottom of your clothes closet floor. If you have to step over clothes to get into your closet, it’s time to declutter, downsize, and get organized.  
8. Mentally, you feel like you are moving in 10 different directions. You feel like your head is going to explode. You may be a little anxious and stressed. Start using a to-do list. Clear the mental clutter. Get it out of your head and onto paper.
9. You are showing up late to appointments or forgetting about them entirely.  Your friends and family know that you will show up at least an hour late to any event. You were probably trying to find a match for a shoe. How many times has your spa or doctor called to tell you that you missed your appointment?  Your time management skills are lacking and it’s time to get back on track.
10. You’ve had a life-changing event that has thrown you for a loop. Maybe you just went through a breakup or are going through a divorce. A family member may have passed or you have just moved into a new home. Any of these life events will sometimes turn your life upside down. You may have been an organized person before this change,  but now you’ve let things go and before you know it, things are out of control and you are finding it difficult to get back to where you were several months ago.

 
Think you can’t get organized? Everybody can get organized - at any time! It just takes a little patience, skills, and hard work. If these areas I mentioned above are dragging you down, think about making a change. What are you waiting for; make that change for the better - Let's do this!

Join me for Organizing Basics via Zoom - 
https://www.kristinmacrae.com/upcoming-events.html

If you are a disorganized person, you probably don’t function with working organized systems. You will find that throughout your home there are probably bags of random items, rooms full of stuff that haven’t been looked at in years and closets that are exploding at the seams. You are probably purchasing duplicate items because you don’t know exactly what you really have. You are also probably wasting precious time searching for things. 

If there aren’t any organized systems in place, you are going to find that once you decide to tackle a project, there may be many layers to that project. I think it’s really funny when I’m working with my clients and their husbands will come home and say, “What have you been doing for the past 3 hours? It looks like nothing has been accomplished.”

If you are decluttering and organizing and taking the entire room apart, there are going to be layers, and at the end of 3 hours it may look like nothing has been accomplished. When there are layers to a room, your project is probably going to be a little more complicated than you thought. The contents of every bag, every piece of paper, article of clothing and anything else in that room will be touched and gone through piece by piece.

Why Do These Layers Form? 

​These layers form because when there aren’t any systems in place; people will throw items into a bag or throw them in a closet or a pile. Usually, if there aren’t systems in place, people don’t want to take the time to create the system so things will just get thrown. Before you know it, you have piles all over the house, in bags, in closets and some really important stuff is getting mixed in with the non-important stuff. 

As you are peeling back the layers, nothing found is ever categorized so this process will also take a little time, because you are sorting through all types of random items. 

What’s in the layers? 

Items that don’t have a designated spot in your home will get tossed in the layers. Anything that you don’t have a system for will get tossed in the layers. You’ll state that you will get to it later, but it gets tossed in a room and you will forget that you threw it in there and it will become part of the layers. There will be important papers, money, memorabilia, and some unimportant items too.

How much time have you wasted searching for those items?
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How much money have you wasted purchasing duplicate items that were found in the layers?