Once you have decluttered and organised a few areas in your home. You want to stay organised, one of the key things that will help you stay organised now and years into the future are:

Habits
Routines
Regular maintenance

I’ll jump between these distinctly different actions to give you a good understanding of how they work and interact.

Creating habits

Habits are regular actions that are done without realizing them, they differ from routines in that routines are more elaborate and sometimes a string of small habits. I sometimes find when teaching students about decluttering that their first priority is establishing a new habit. A frequent example is cleaning up dishes in the kitchen. This is a habit and if it is an established habit you will feel funny not doing it. Similarly if your habit is leaving dishes throughout the house or on the kitchen bench to break this habit we need to consciously work on this. Habits is a place where we often move into some internal factors as well. Internally we have to ask ourselves some hard questions on why we do what we do if we don’t like the results of say a messy house.

You probably know that habits can be changed but they generally take a minimum of 21 days to take hold. If you have habits that don’t serve you well like; leaving dishes or dropping your clothes next to your bed. It will take a bit of work and determination to deliberately alter them for 21 days or more wash dishes and to put clothes in the laundry box. Once the habit is established it is easy and you feel funny doing it any other way.

Good habits are always present in organised people’s homes. If you are feeling very disorganised. There is a good chance you are repeating habits, that are not supporting your aim of being organised.

Creating Routines

Routines are a bit more complex than habits and need a particular time allocated. Whereas habits are part of the task we are doing, like; eating food of a plate, then clean the dishes. Or getting dressed in other attire then put our clothes in the laundry. Routines might be several habits as 1 string of actions. Examples of routines are regular washing drying and folding clothes. Of paying weekly bills or doing your budget.

Organised people, will have a combination of routines and habits for things like: their cleaning, laundry and paperwork. Routines and habits work also with; organisation, cleaning and office systems, they are foundation blocks, to make everything in your life flow!

An analogy

The difference between a habit and a routine can be like a choreographed dance. The routine is the whole dance, the habits are the individual moves. Practicing moves is important doing a well-practiced dance routine can be mesmerising.

Once you become really good at routines, you can use them at home, at work and for any goal or task you want to or need to achieve.

Back to maintenance

The last, but still very important part of when you are organising your life, is maintenance. This means that live is constantly evolving, it is fast, it is changing and in order to have current systems. To have habits that serve you well and to be able to follow useful routines, regular maintenance is required. Just like the dancer you need to stay fit and keep practising otherwise you’ll forget the dance. That is why you will find that any organiser will still regularly declutter items in their own house. They will also tweak systems as they, their family and circumstances change over time.

Organising is like a fabric we can weave into life, it is not something we do and then forget about. Daily practice is best and easiest in the long run.

Talking about daily practise and maintenance, read through this journal entry form several years back.

Journal Entry - Blast from the past

Looking around at my house today, it is nice, tidy and a bit lived in. When you are in a phase that you just want to stay organised, you don’t have to go for the whole “Vogue look” every day. Instead, you want to create a level of comfort for yourself which is fairly easy to maintain. When thinking of what I have done these last weeks and why it is at a stable level of tidiness I could break it down to a number of very regularly performed tasks; Put away as I go, Floors, Wipe, double check and laundry.

Write down your progress

Let's have a look at these do you

Put away as you go as soon as I walk in the house, I put things away! This means I nag children to put their lunch box away. Place paperwork on my desk and my bag in its allocated spot. Then I nag some more to have dirty clothes, shoes etc. go in their respective places. I have done the maths, if you would only leave 5 items a day lying around the house, it means one person could have scattered 35 items throughout the house in one week (for the real mathematicians that would be 1820 items a person a year) if you live with multiple people it becomes worse.

Floors each person has a “thing” mine is floors and floor clutter. If the floor is clean my blood pressure is lower.

Wipe I could call this clean, but cleaning everyday sounds a bit intimidating – so I just tell myself to wipe areas that need dirt removed from its surfaces as I am moving through my home.

Double check this is important on the end of the day. Did I leave anything out? If yes, I take 5 minutes to put it back.

Laundry; daily laundry which involves, washing, drying and putting clothes away makes life a breeze on the end of a busy week.