Hi.
I’m Lorie Marrero, creator of the Clutter Diet book and on-line program, and today we’re
going to talk about those recurring problem areas in your home and how to fix them once
and for all.
I’m going to share with you four mistakes that I commonly see people making – people
like our members and our clients – so that you can learn from their mistakes and not
do them yourself.
So first of all, I see people not approaching their organizing projects as a system.
So people love to jump in and just clean something up and shuffle things around, but it doesn’t
solve the ultimate problem that caused the situation to happen in the first place.
So I’m putting some questions up here on the screen for you that you can ask yourself
that will help you kind of put that Sherlock Holmes hat on and get that objectivity back
into your situation.
And you want to look at the origins of the problem and go through the chain of custody
of these items and figure out how this is happening so that you can make a system that
works for good.
So the second mistake that we see people making has to do with the systems too and that is
not figuring maintenance tasks into the system that you create.
So I always tell people that we don’t brush our teeth 60 times in one day and then stop
and do it again a month later.
We have to brush our teeth twice a day because that requires regular care.
And areas in your home require that too, like your dishes and your mail.
It doesn’t work if you do it on a haphazard, you know, once-and-for-all kind of basis and
then you stop and wait another few months and do it again.
So think about that when you are creating that system, make sure that you know what
those tasks are and, more importantly, who needs to do them.
You’ve got to [POP] assign ownership to those tasks.
The third mistake that I see people making is that they have unrealistic standards.
So unfortunately through the media – let’s say magazines, television shows, things like
that – we have an unrealistic picture of what our homes are supposed to be like.
So we do not have teams of stylists and interior designers fixing up our living rooms every
day.
We live there, so we’re going to have some toys out, we’re going to have some glasses
and dishes around, it’s part of our daily life.
So we need to reexamine how we feel, if we have a little bit of perfectionism in our
minds, and make sure that we get more realistic about how things are supposed to be every
day.
I know [POP] having children really did this for me.
I really accepted that there were going to be more toys laying around most of the time
and that I would like to sacrifice some of that cleanliness and order for more quality
time with my kids.
So the last mistake I want to point out is that people are going around without having
proper resources and information for a problem that may be very chronic and challenging for
them.
So there is an organization called The Institute for Challenging Disorganization, and it’s
ICD, and the website is challengingdisorganization.org.
They specialize in helping people who have ADHD, helping people who have struggled with
disorganization their entire lives, people who have hoarding disorder in varying degrees,
and even traumatic brain injuries.
There are some situations that are very challenging.
And if you have recurring problem areas through most of your house, I encourage you to look
at challengingdisorganization.org, check out their clutter hoarding scale, and even find
an organizer, a consultant, to help you in person or even on the phone.
This can be very helpful, it might just give you that breakthrough tip that you need to
make progress and feel better in your home.
So if you need some breakthrough tips and a little bit of objectivity, most of the time
we can help you on our on-line program and we have a team of organizers available seven
days a week, we answer every member question, you can go in there and get very affordable
help, upload photos and show us what’s going on, for about the price of a pizza.
You can check us out at clutterdiet.com/learnmore.
See you next time, and may you always be happy and grateful for having more than enough.