Cyrus said:
The funny thing is, I too am lazy. So when things get messy then I can't take it any more and organize everything. I found that there IS a trick to staying organized though!
Everything has a place, and there's a place for everything!
I went to the container store and bought organizers. When things have a place, its almost effortless to just 'put them away'. When you have to go though things and place them here and there and sort this and that every time, no one wants that kind of hassle.People from the middle east/asia don't walk with shoes in the house. So they go in the jacket closet downstairs. They would end up going all over the place and marking up the walls. So I got one of these for around 10 bucks.
Nice pumps there Cyrus.
Instantly solved. There organized, it takes no effort, and the walls never get marked. Now try to organize your shoes w/o this thing. You have to pick them up, place them in a row. Make sure when you put them in their space in the row they don't fall over the ones next to them. With this little shelf I can just 'throw' them in their space and it won't spill over other shoes.
Yes, space to put stuff makes it a lot easier to stay organized. This is a bit more difficult when one lives in a small apartment with limited space for storage. Even when you're tidy, if you don't have a lot of closet space, things look cluttered quickly. On the flip side, one of the biggest reasons people have trouble keeping up with clutter is they just have too much junk they don't need. It's amazing how quickly we can accumulate
stuff.
For some reason, I've always found it easier to keep things tidy when I have to share space. The people who work in my lab with me all think I'm OCD because I'm constantly tidying up and putting things back in their places and I have specific places for everything. But I think it has to be that way in a shared space, partly so everyone who needs stuff can find it since everyone puts it in the same place, and partly because it takes very little time before everything looks like a complete disaster the more people you have each leaving just one or two things out and not put away.
Same thing when I've had roommates, I've been very particular about making sure everything was always put away and tidy. Part of it is just courtesy...my messes affect people besides myself in those cases.
Living alone, it's a lot easier to let things go longer without keeping up with the cleaning, but then I reach that point where I can't stand it anymore and go on a cleaning spree. A couple weekends ago, I did that with my home office. Completely reorganized, even got rid of an old desk that was taking up space and I wasn't using for anything other than hiding old crap I was avoiding organizing, so pulled all that stuff out of the drawers, threw away most of it since it was just piling up unused, and moved the desk to the garage...we have a recent graduate joining our lab as a technician and moving down here soon (a former intern) who doesn't have a lot of money, so I'm going to see if she needs a desk since it's a small size for small apartments, and if not, it's going to the trash (or free for the taking for whoever comes around the night before trash collection). Anyway, yeah, when I finally get around to a cleaning spree like that, I'm kind of the same way where everything will be stacked in size order or color order or whatever...it just looks so nice when I'm done and I keep it organized longer before entropy sets in again. But, the nice thing is it never takes me long to clean when it's time to clean (except my office which has a mind of its own) because yeah, I do have places for everything when I get around to putting them there, so it doesn't take a lot of thinking about where to put them. The real chore is when I do things like dump out all the drawers and pull everything out of the closets because I'm running out of room and decide it's time to toss things I never use anymore or that have gotten too worn out. That usually gets done twice a year coinciding with transitioning from cool weather to warm weather clothes and vice versa. When I pull the summer clothes out, it's time to go through the ones from storage and the winter clothes going into storage and toss out whatever is hopeless out of style, doesn't fit anymore, worn out, or that I've just realized I don't like enough to wear often...if it has sat in the closet the entire season without being worn once, and is something other than a suit that really does only get worn rarely, then it's time to toss it. It makes more space for everything else so that keeps the clutter down again.
