It is difficult to focus on your 9-5 job and make time to keep your home clean and organised. No matter how hard you try, home organization can be tough. It gets challenging when you must perform a balancing act between avoiding clutter in your home and committing time to your job or other duties. 

If you have been battling clutter and disorganization, here are five practical tips to save you time and the stress of seeing your home in a mess too often.

 

1.  Plan Ahead During the Weekend

Using the weekend to plan your activities for the week will keep you organized and make you less prone to creating clutter during the week.

If you do not plan your chores for the week, even a thorough weekend cleaning will end up achieving little results, since you are likely to create a mess all over again the next day.

Meal prepping, choosing and ironing your clothes for the week and packing your bag for work can be a good start to achieving an organised and clean-looking space.

You may be familiar with the following situation; when you do not plan your outfits for the week, chances are, you will mess up your closet or suitcase during the weekday trying to find the right pick in the morning. This happens especially when you are running late and unsure about which outfit to wear.

It will only leave you creating a mess at home and getting to work late, which can ripple down and affect your mood. I have suffered this countless times in the past and I learnt my lesson the hard way.

 

2.  Do not Procrastinate

Procrastination will only pile up clutter in your room, home or even your office space.

If you see the need to empty the garbage bin, do it immediately. If the file on the desk belongs in the drawer, spare a few seconds and put it away.

Return items to their original position after you use them. This helps you clean up mess even before one is created. Not doing so makes you accumulate lots of jumble in your home.

Therefore, it is important to clean up immediately there is the need to.  This might seem like too much work when you start, but incorporating these little habits will get you organizing while accomplishing other tasks.

Time in the kitchen sometimes gets busy to the extent that if some tasks are taken for granted, they end up being a recipe for lots of extra work. For instance, when cooking, piling up dirty dishes in the process might not be a good idea.

Cleaning the dishes alongside cooking will save you the stress of having a huge pile of dishes to do after a tiring time in the kitchen. It also saves you time.

Immediately you are done taking a cup of coffee, wash the mug. If something drops on the floor, pick it up immediately. This is very efficient, saves time and saves you from worrying about all the work piled up that needs to be taken care of.

 

 

3.  Include Cleaning in your Daily Goals

Often, we are tempted to think of cleaning and organizing as a bonus activity but it’s not!

Once you add cleaning to your daily list of goals and allocate at least 10 minutes each morning to clean, you will see amazing results.

If you dedicate at least five minutes to cleaning every day, your house will sparkle, no doubt. Not cleaning frequently could make you lose track of how your house looks when its clean, therefore some dust on the flower vase for instance might look normal to you even when it is dirty in reality.

Allocate five to ten minutes every morning to clean and tidy up your space from now on.

 

4.  Keep Similar Items at One Place

One important trick to being organised is placing similar items at one place, so they are easy to find. Items in drawers, shelves, baskets or other storage spaces must be arranged depending on their uses.

Soaps, detergents, bleaches, washing powder and other cleaning products for instance can be kept at one place while, cosmetics and other body products are kept in another storage area. Tea mugs, saucers and similar items should also be stored at one place and so on.

A hack to keep your wardrobe organized is to sort and organize clothes depending on their color or what piece of attire they are.

Store all red outfits in one area and all blue outfits in another area (and so on) in your closet or suitcase, to make it easier to find an attire based on its color.

Alternatively, sort out all skirts and put them in one area, all trousers in another area, scarves in another, towels in another area and so on.  This makes it easy to find clothes and prevents you from messing up your entire closet just to find a single piece of outfit.

5. Organize A Portion A Week

Lastly, I want to emphasize on habit formation. Make it a habit to do one major cleaning exercise during the weekend. Whether it is dusting the louver blades, cleaning the fans or giving your oven some extra attention, allocate a weekend for each task. This works especially for very busy individuals.

If you hardly have time for a general cleaning exercise, ensure that you take one big task every weekend and implement it.

Otherwise you may get caught up believing you need a million hours to get them all done in one day which might never happen.

If you are always waiting for the right day (when you are totally free and feel like cleaning), you will make a mess of your home and the worse part, you may unconsciously get used to the mess. When this happens, do not be surprised if your next visitor declines the glass of water you offer them or is eager to leave your clumsy and unkempt home (Sorrry!).

 

What Next?

Your home can always sparkle and look organised if you went just a little bit extra to make it happen, and that is easy. It only takes some planning and little changes.

Use your weekend to plan for the week, do not procrastinate cleaning/organizing your home, include cleaning in your daily goals, keep similar items at one place and carry out one major cleaning and organizing exercise every week.

Make use of these easy and effective tips and let me know how they worked for you. If you have other tips to share, leave them in the comments section below and I’d be glad to read them.