In this article find out what will make you an organised person. Decluttering and organising is both a skill set and a mindset for the organised person.

“The good news is everyone can learn how to declutter and organise as it is a logical process that doesn’t change much from room to room.”

— Sabine

The process to declutter and organise work in order as you can see in the image below:

Declutter
Clean
Organise

Declutter

Clearly one of the most well-known tasks if you want to become a more organised person. However, there is a misconception that decluttering is all that is needed to have a better organised home.

In reality decluttering is only a small part of organising. To be an organised person, you declutter and dispose of items regularly. You then continue to the next stages, clean, organise and maintain.

Clean

There are many resources on how to clean etc. so I won’t go into depth on this one but after you have removed items from your home. It is important to clean (remove any dirt). There is a pause between the period you have removed the items you no longer want and need. This pause is there before you place the items you want to keep in the place you are working on. In this pause make sure you clean, wipe away the cobwebs, remove the little pieces of sand or the big clumps of dust etc. I find both decluttering and cleaning allow a space to breathe fresh air. And even at this early stage, before you have organised walking into the room feels like the space has lifted.

Organise

Now we get to the meaty bit of the declutter and organise sequence “how to organise”. At this stage no matter which space you work in, you will place items in groupings and find homes for all items you own (with the use of pretty boxes if you like).

“An organised person knows, that when you organise. You have to find a physical home for each item you own.”

— Sabine

Maintain

Maintenance doesn’t need to be done when you organise. It needs to be done after you have put in all this effort to organise your space. At this stage you keep an eye on your newly organised space.

An organised person will always keep on eye on:

What is working?
What is not?
How often do you need to put things away to keep the space maintained?

Do you declutter and organise in one hit or break it up?

Depending on how big your project is you decide to declutter and organise in on or separate sessions. If you are doing smaller projects you can use the declutter, clean and organise sequence in one hit for example when you organise a drawer or declutter the bookshelf.

For big declutter and organise projects

You would break these steps up in different sessions when you do a big project for example when you declutter a garage or a wardrobe. With these big projects, it is best to keep the stages separate either with breaks in between or declutter one day, clean and organise on other day.

“What we want to do is show ourselves continuous improvement but stay clear of organising burnout by doing way too much or taking on too big a declutter / organising project at one time.”

— Sabine