A (19:14)
The very first step in a situation like that is to figure out how to break down the project, right? Particularly if we're talking about like the clients I was talking about earlier. If we're talking about a huge house where disorganization is in every single space, then you, you just have to figure out how to slice off a piece of it, right? So in your bedroom, your closet, you might organize that separately from organizing your dressers or if there are a lot of like loose things or stuff on the floor, you might start with, you might just start with surveying all of the stuff that's out on the flat surfaces and kind of deal with, let's deal with the stuff that's not out and then let's go into individual storage areas and deal with the stuff that's in those things. And the model that I have continued to use this, I use this when I was an organizer. I continue to use it with my clients. When we're talking about organizational topics in coaching to this day is from Julie Morgenstern. She wrote Organizing from the Inside Out. She's a well known figure in the professional organizing world. And the acronym is space. S, P, A, C, E. And here's what each word stands for. S is sort. So if, for example, if you're dealing with like a guest room that became the catch, all for stuff that you don't know where it goes, or one of my clients was prone to what she called doom bags and doom boxes, right. The quick cleanup of the guest space means that all of that stuff gets thrown into doom boxes and doom bags and shoved into the guest room closet. The idea, idea here is just to pull things out and sort them in a way that makes sense to you. And by the way, the to you there is really important. If I'm working on a closet with a client as an organizer, it might be as simple as shirts and pants, or it might be like my one client who had five distinct categories of T shirts, all of which made sense to him. There were his undershirts. He wore a suit and tie to work every day. So plain shirts that are well fitted to go under a button down shirt. There were his sports shirts. St. Louis is a, is a big sports town. So if he's going to the Cards or the Blues or the Billikens or any number of other teams that we have those, those shirts for those purposes, athletic wear. And then there was going to the hardware store. That was my favorite category. So that was like the, the cozy thing that I'll throw on if I'm doing bumming around the house or doing errands on a Saturday or Sunday. And then interestingly enough, he had this category of comedy T shirts that he never wore, but it was a, it was a valued and beloved collection of his. Right. So that was not only its own category, that was one that ended up not making it back into the closet. And the thing that can be tough to deal with with adhd, with our all or nothing thinking, is especially if you're dealing with a room, like a catch all room, where you're finding unopened mail alongside Christmas gifts that you haven't done anything with from two or three years ago, alongside whatever else. It can be really frustrating that this part of the process kind of makes a mess. First, it doesn't the mess any better. It just puts the mess in better organized piles. But once you've done the sort, then it's easier to do step two, which is purge. So if you, if I just pull items out of a client's closet one at a time and say, do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want this? They have no context for whether or not they want that article of clothing. But if we have all of your sweaters together and we're looking through them one by one, it can be easier to a. You can see how many sweaters you own and you can contextualize which sweaters do I wear a lot and which ones do I not? One little hack that I like to use with clients who would have trouble with decision making in this realm is friends, acquaintances and strangers. So if you're thinking about something like sweaters or coffee mugs is a great example here. Because everybody has too many coffee mugs, right? Friends are your favorite coffee mugs. They're that. That's like your number one. Number two, that's if that coffee mug is clean, that is the one that I am going to grab and have my coffee in every single morning because it is my favorite coffee mug. The that coffee mug or those couple of coffee mugs are your friends. Acquaintances might be the ones that are good enough if the other ones are dirty, or the ones that you you like well enough to have around if you're having people over and serving coffee, the ones that, that are special to you for some other reason. For clothing, acquaintances can look like, yes, I might only wear this once a year, once every couple of years. I might only wear this if I get invited to a wedding or have to go to a funeral or have some very specific sort of event. An acquaintance could be something like an ugly Christmas sweater that really only has a purpose once a year. And then strangers. Strangers are, I don't know the last time that I've used or worn this, or I don't know when I've last interacted with, use or had a use for this particular item. And so the deal I would make with my clients if they were open to it is your friends are an automatic keep, right? We'll worry about, we'll worry about the storage aspects later. Even if you have a lot of friends, we will worry about how we store these friends later. Strangers are an automatic donate and acquaintances are kind of up for negotiations. So that's also when you do start to. And this is getting to the next step a which is assign a home. You know, if we only have this much closet space for sweaters and you have twice that amount of sweaters, we've got options, right? You can store some of your sweaters somewhere else, or we can go through this process again and downsize further. And that's where you really get into what are the individual goals here? Because for some clients, maybe storing the acquaintances in a guest room closet or in a basement is a perfectly viable solution and something that they are willing to do. Whereas for someone like me, if it doesn't fit in my closet, I might as well not own it if it is living in another. And I even have a really small house. Like it is not a big deal for me to walk into. My kid's room has two closets. And so one of those closets is kind of our coat extra closet. It is not a big deal for me to walk in to her room and grab something out of there or to walk downstairs and grab something out of storage down there. But, but if it's not out, I don't know that I own it and I'm just never ever going to wear it. Right. So when you get to the a assign a home, that's when you can start to evaluate how much have I kept and what space do I have. And if you've kept more than you have space for, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to downsize further. But that's your opportunity to evaluate what are the trade offs here? Is it worth it to store it in another space or do I want to make another pass at this and downsize further from there? C is containerize. And notice this comes pretty late in the process. A big thing that I have noticed with ADHD folks, particularly when I was going into homes and organizing, is we tend to buy the containers first. We tend to buy the containers without knowing what our organizing goals are. And so when I was doing hands on professional organizing in almost every house I worked in, I would start a quote unquote container store of all of the containers that we were finding in different spaces that had never been used. And we would shop from those first once we got to this step. But again, you've assigned a home now you know something about what containers you may or may not want to have. And I, I'm a fan of containers. In some instances, my kitchen drawers I have, I have drawer dividers in every single one of them, even though that makes less overall space because it makes it easier for me to put my hands on whatever cooking utensil I am looking for in that drawer immediately. So I am willing to sacrifice the space and to spend the money on the containers to have that. But you may find that you don't need it. And so that's why we assign a home first. Just live with it for a little while and maybe make do with what you have. I've used things like shoe boxes, old cell phone boxes actually because they're really sturdy. Cardboard can make great drawer organizers. Kind of, kind of playing around with what you have first and then evaluating what the need is and acquiring those items if needed. And E is equalize. So E is the, the moment of truth. Where does does the clean laundry make it? Into the dressers and into the closet where I've designated it to go do do dishes and utensils make it back to the spaces that they are supposed to go as new stuff is coming in. If I buy a bunch of new clothes and my closet space starts to get tight again, might it be time to make another pass and evaluate and. Or if you're somebody who's storing clothing in multiple places to rework how you're doing that to make take space in your primary closet.