Once you have decluttered and organised a few areas in your home, you want to stay organised. Three key things will help you now and years into the future:
Habits
Regular maintenance
I’ll jump between these distinct actions to help you understand how they work and interact.
How to Create Habits
Habits are regular actions done without realising them; they differ from routines in that routines are more elaborate and sometimes consist of a string of small habits. When teaching others about decluttering, I sometimes find that their first priority should be establishing a new habit. A frequent example is cleaning up dishes in the kitchen. This is a habit, and if it's established, you will feel funny not doing it. Similarly, if your habit is leaving dishes throughout the house or on the kitchen bench, to break this habit, we need to consciously work on it. Habits are often tied to internal factors. Internally we have to ask ourselves some hard questions on why we do what we do if we don’t like the results of say a messy house.
You probably know that habits can be changed, but they generally take a minimum of 21 days to take hold. If you have habits that don’t serve you well, like leaving dishes or dropping your clothes next to your bed. It will take a bit of work and determination to deliberately alter them for 21 days or more: wash dishes and put clothes in the laundry box. Once the habit is established, it is easy, and you feel funny doing it any other way.
Good habits are always present in organised people’s homes. If you are feeling very disorganised. There is a good chance you are repeating habits that are not supporting your aim of being organised.
How to Create Routines
Routines are a bit more complex than habits and need a particular time allocated. Whereas habits are part of the task we are doing, like eating food off a plate, then cleaning the dishes. Or getting changed, then putting our clothes in the laundry. Routines might be several habits as 1 string of actions. Examples of routines are regularly washing, drying, and folding clothes. Or paying weekly bills or doing your budget.
Organised people will have a combination of routines and habits for things like their cleaning, laundry and paperwork. Routines and habits also work with organisation, cleaning and office systems; they are foundation blocks to make everything in your life flow!
Habits vs Routines: a Dance Analogy
The difference between a habit and a routine can be like a choreographed dance. The routine is the whole dance; the habits are the individual moves. Practising moves is important; doing a well-practised dance routine can be mesmerising.
Once you become really good at routines, you can use them at home, at work and for any goal or task you want to or need to achieve.
Maintenance: Keeping Habits and Routines Working
The last, but still very important part of when you are organising your life, is maintenance. This means that life is constantly evolving; it is fast, it is changing, and you need current systems. To have habits that serve you well and to be able to follow useful routines, regular maintenance is required. Just like the dancer, you need to stay fit and keep practising; otherwise, you’ll forget the dance. That is why you will find that any organiser will still regularly declutter items in their own house. They will also tweak systems as they, their family and circumstances change over time.
Organising is like a fabric we can weave into life; it is not something we do and then forget about. Daily practice is best and easiest in the long run.
Talking about daily practice and maintenance, read through this journal entry from several years back.
Journal Entry - Blast from the past
Looking around at my house today, it is nice, tidy and a bit lived in. When you are in a phase that you just want to stay organised, you don’t have to go for the whole “Vogue look” every day. Instead, you want to create a level of comfort for yourself which is fairly easy to maintain. When thinking of what I have done these last weeks and why it is at a stable level of tidiness I could break it down to a number of very regularly performed tasks; Put away as I go, Floors, Wipe, double check and laundry.
Write down your progress
Let's have a look at these:
Put away as you go: as soon as I walk into the house, I put things away! This means I nag the children to put their lunchbox away. Place paperwork on my desk and my bag in its allocated spot. Then I nag some more to have dirty clothes, shoes, etc. go in their respective places. I have done the maths: if you only leave 5 items a day lying around the house, one person could scatter 35 items throughout the house in a week (for the real mathematicians, that's 1820 items per person per year). If you live with multiple people, it becomes worse.
Floors: each person has a “thing”; mine is floors and floor clutter. If the floor is clean, my blood pressure is lower.
Wipe I could call this clean, but cleaning everyday sounds a bit intimidating – so I just tell myself to wipe areas that need dirt removed from its surfaces as I am moving through my home.
Double-check this is important at the end of the day. Did I leave anything out? If yes, I take 5 minutes to put it back.
Laundry: daily laundry, which involves washing, drying and putting clothes away, makes life a breeze at the end of a busy week.
Want routines that really work?
How to Organise Your Home and Paperwork shows you how to set up the paperwork, bill and budget routines that keep you organised.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Habits generally take a minimum of 21 days to take hold. If you want to change a habit, such as leaving dishes out, practise the new one for at least 21 days. After that it feels easy, and odd to do any other way.
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A habit is a regular action done without thinking, like cleaning up dishes after a meal. A routine is more elaborate and is often a string of small habits, like washing, drying and folding the laundry.
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Combine good habits and routines with regular maintenance. Life keeps changing, so declutter regularly and adjust your systems as you and your family change. Daily practice is easiest in the long run.
