I want you to picture this. You walk into your home and look around. The living room has piles of paper stacked on the couch, clothing that was meant to be donated is piled in the corner and you can’t see the coffee table. You walk into the kitchen and coffee mugs are spilling onto the counter, hundreds of grocery bags are hanging out of a cupboard and there’s a huge stack of mail piled up on the counter. You then walk into the dining room where the table is piled with toys, old paperwork, a puzzle that’s only half done and a few moving boxes from a year ago are stacked up in the corner. You don’t even want to go out to the garage because you know there’s just a small path waiting for you to snake through to get to the other side. And there are other areas of the home that have these same issues…
So, where do you start? The whole house needs help, you’re already busy and the clutter is draining you just thinking about how to tackle it. You can macro organize it or you can micro organize it. What’s the difference?
If you’re so laser focused on the most minute details of your project, it may take you a very, very long time to get your home into shape. Sometimes the best strategy is to have a macro or a larger focus as your first step. Let me create an example for you.
Let’s say you’re organizing your family room. Right now in the room there are two small couches, a coffee table and a comfy chair that will all stay in the space. But stacked on the floor and in boxes, you have hundreds of books that you would like to keep in the room, you have a collection of one thousand CD’s that you are keeping and twenty games for family game night.
Macro organizing would mean that you go through the books, CD’s and games and decide what to part with and what to keep. From there, you would purchase the necessary items to store them such as bookcases or a large shelving unit. Then you’re going to load them up with the books, CD’s and games. Now, everything has a home and your books are no longer in boxes on your family room floor. It looks great, it’s functional, you can find what you need and you can go back later and fine-tune each area. But for now, you have a space that’s working and it’s no longer cluttered.
In comes micro organizing. You know you have this whole house that needs to be organized, but instead of quickly getting the books, CD’s and games onto shelves so they’re accessible, you painstakingly organize them in a way that takes a very long time. You might organize the books by color, you might alphabetize the CD’s and you may take every game apart to account for all of the pieces and nicely organize the pieces inside the box. Is this a bad thing? No. But it is a strategy that can make it take much longer to get your entire home in order.
You can always go back at a later time to check on all of your game pieces. etc. Now, it may be frustrating to feel like you have to go back to the space again, but I guarantee you will feel better if you macro organize for the greater good of your whole home. And, it will feel much less stressful when you return to each area to micro organize as it will be manageable and you won’t have the clutter of the whole home still hanging over your head.
Monika Kristofferson is a professional organizer and productivity consultant in the greater Seattle area.
