Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Small Bites: Total Destruction

A few days ago, I was wrapping up with a client who was so enthusiastic that she told me she’d keep going on a big pile of clutter that we hadn’t gotten to yet. I wanted to be supportive, but I’ve seen this movie before—so I had to urge caution.

It’s not that you can’t get organized without me—you can, and you should—but you need to take little bites. I’m a professional: I know how to make a huge mess, create systems and organization as I go, and wrap it up in under four hours. But you, and I say this with love, are amateurs. Just as I wouldn’t try to swim the English Channel if I had just learned to swim, you shouldn’t start your solo organizing career by tackling the biggest pile in the house.

Sometimes, I’m with a client and they have some big, random pile. When I inquire about its genesis, they tell me, “Well, I was trying to get organized, and I had it all out on the dining table, and then I had to pick up the kids/serve dinner to the in-laws/hide everything because we were having a party, so I just swept it all into a box.”

Right. Oh, what tangled webs we weave. This is why I urge caution.

This is also why I encourage half-hour sessions when you are working alone. I firmly believe that even the most overwhelming task can be conquered in half-hour chunks, but if you don’t like time as a boundary, choose a very small physical space: just the top of you bedside table, for example.

The point isn’t to hold you back (never!). The point is to focus your efforts so that you can be very thorough. If you actually walk things into the rooms they belong in, or file the papers that need to be filed, you won’t end up with more little piles that get swept into a box and become a project for another day.

There are many more distractions today—far more than when I was an easily distracted child. In addition to work and kids, there are smartphones, and email and social media all demanding attention. Many of us have neither offices nor secretaries, and work and family responsibilities overlap and overwhelm. No one wants you to conquer your clutter more than I do, but I am realistic, and the last thing I want you to do is spend two hours making ten piles that you have to abandon. So trust me: Take it slowly. One tiny bit, one half-hour at a time. The goal is to totally eviscerate the pile. Root it out. Leave nothing. By working in tiny sections, eventually you’ll conquer it, rather than just temporarily tame it.