Incredibly Easy Ways to Be More Organized at Home continues the series on Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Life.
See here for what this series is about, and scroll to the bottom or click here for a list of other entries in the series. Also see the end of the post for details on submitting your own incredibly easy life-improvements.
Note: Some links here are affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission when you purchase them, at no additional charge to you. I only suggest things I honestly believe in.
Incredibly Easy Ways to Be More Organized at Home
Home.
It’s where the heart is. Your personal sanctuary. Where you keep all your stuff.
Everyone wants their home to be pleasant and organized. But it takes a lot of effort to reach that state, and consistent effort to maintain it.
There are, however, incredibly easy ways to be more organized at home.
Ways that don’t take any willpower, involve minimal cost, and will result in less effort and time commitment.
Let’s look at some of those ways.
Incredibly Easy Ways to Organize Your Personal Items
1. Make sure everything you own has a place that it belongs
Every single item you own needs to have a specific location that it’s supposed to go. A place where it’s “away.”
That doesn’t mean it always has to be away, or you have to straighten up every day. That wouldn’t be incredibly easy.
But people often have items that don’t belong anywhere. They’re constantly being moved from one place to another. Which just makes life difficult.
Not only does that mean your home can never be tidy, but it also makes it much harder to find those items when you need them.
So if you own any items that have no home, just look at them and decide where they go. Even if it’s an arbitrary snap judgment, having some “away” is better than not having one.
If you’re having trouble choosing between multiple locations, pick the first one on the list. There, I helped you decide.
2. Buy a box of 50 cheap disposable pens or pencils, and some cheap notepads. Throw some into drawers in every room in your house, as well as your car.
Have you ever wanted to quickly jot something down, but not been able to find a pen or paper?
That happens to everyone, but there’s an easy way to ensure it never again happens to you.
Buy a box of 50 cheap pens, which you can get for $7, (or pencils if you prefer) and 10 notepads, which you can get for $11. Then put a notebook and a handful of pens in a drawer in every room in your house, your car, your purse, and anywhere else you might want to write something down.
Then you’ll always be able to write something down when you need to.
3. Keep a knife/box cutter, scissors, kleenex, and small trash can in every room, and your car
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
These are all very cheap items – a couple of bucks each. And it saves you a lot of hassle and unpleasantness to have them in reach when you need them.
Here are 10 box-cutters for $5. Here are 12 scissors for $13.
You’ll likely want to buy kleenex at your local grocery store, and trash cans to suit your own décor.
4. Get a bed side-pocket
There’s a lot of stuff you might want to keep on your nightstand.
A lamp, book, medication, phone, charger, ipad, notebook, journal, gratitude journal, planner, kleenex box, sleep-mask, water bottle, etc.
This may be more stuff than can fit on a nightstand. And it definitely makes it hard to keep your nightstand looking neat and tidy.
An easy solution is to put a side-pocket on your bed. You can neatly tuck most of this stuff away while still keeping it conveniently in reach.
Here is a selection of them. The cheapest is $5 for two, but most are in the $10 – $20 range.
5. Use pill organizers
As you get older, you have to take more and more pills every day. That’s just a basic fact of life.
With every pill you take, you have to get out the pill bottle, open it up, shake out a pill, then close the pill bottle, and put it back away.
Multiply that 20 or 30 seconds by every pill you take, every day for your entire life, and it adds up to a lot of wasted time.
Plus there will inevitably be situations when you’re in the middle of taking your pills and then suddenly stop and say, “Wait, did I take my [XXX medication]? I can’t remember.”
That can be downright dangerous when it’s a medication that you need to live, but where taking double the dose can have catastrophic effects.
That’s why you can buy smart medicine caps that will display the last time they were opened. But there’s a much easier, much cheaper solution, that will also save you time:
Just get a weekly pill organizer like this:
Once a week, fill it up with your pills. Then each day, you can pop it open, dump all of that day’s pills into your hand, and take them one after another.
It’s way faster, and you won’t have to worry about forgetting a pill.
If you take pills in the morning and evening, get two daily pill containers. They only cost $2.59.
6. Replace your socks with a bunch of identical socks of a few different types
I already suggested this in Three Dumb-Sounding Life Hacks That Work, so I’ll be quick about this.
Throw away all of your socks, and then buy a bunch of identical socks in a few different colors. (White, black, and brown.)
Then you never have to worry about sorting socks. Just dump them all in a drawer, and when you’re getting dressed pull out two random socks of the same color.
If a sock wears out, you only have to throw away that one sock, instead of also having to get rid of its partner. So this will save you money in the long run.
Incredibly Easy Ways to Organize Your Storage
7. Store items where you use them. Buy multiples if you use them in multiple places and they’re relatively cheap.
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
Why waste precious minutes of your life wandering from room to room when you don’t need to?
Keep items in the rooms where you use them.
8. Store things with other things that are related
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
If two things are always used together, keep them together. That saves time, and makes it less likely that parts will get lost.
9. Store things with accessibility in proportion to how much you use them
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
Many people arrange their items in a way that maximizes storage space, or is aesthetically pleasing.
But it makes way more sense to arrange items for convenience.
You don’t want to have to keep moving your trifle dish that you use once a year so you can get to the frying pan you use five times a week.
If there’s a fancy serving platter that you only break out for parties, stick that in the basement with the Christmas decorations, to make more room in your kitchen for the stuff you use all the time.
10. Put wires and loose items in small ziploc bags before storing them so they don’t get tangled
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
It takes an extra 3 seconds to put things in a ziploc bag before putting them in a drawer.
And it saves you 30 seconds to two minutes when you take them out of the drawer.
That’s a win.
Incredibly Easy Ways to Up Your Labelling Game
Some people love labeling. They own six different label-makers, and will lovingly organize things into boxes with beautiful tags, often with their own metal plates.
My wife is one of those people.
But that’s not incredibly easy.
If that doesn’t describe you, I’m not going to suggest you try to become a label-lover.
Instead, here are some incredibly easy strategies that are good enough.
11. Use painters tape and a sharpie to label stuff. (Bins, leftover food, organizational stuff, etc.)
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
Painters tape is a wonderful tool.
It won’t fall off things like post-its are prone to do. But it is still easily removable and won’t mark things up.
That makes it an excellent way to non-permanently label things.
12. Use a sharpie (and perhaps painters tape) to mark the expiration date on items that have a long but not indefinite shelf-life.
Expiration dates tend to be written in small, hard-to-read print in arbitrary locations.
This can cause problems for items that last for a long time, but not forever. Such as dry foods, condiments, frozen food, pet food, HVAC air filters, etc
Which means that you’ll usually only check them when you’re about to use something, often leading to disappointment as you discover the food you were about to eat is no good.
Or you’ll occasionally do a fridge/pantry cleanout, where you go through every item one-by-one, discovering just how much you’ve wasted and have to throw out.
A better strategy is to write the expiration dates in easy-to-read sharpie when you first put the item away.
That way, whenever you look in your fridge or pantry, you’ll be able to see at a glance what’s expired, and what’s still good.
More importantly, you’ll be able to see what’s nearing its expiration, so you’ll know what you should use soon to avoid wasting it.
And this is extra useful for items like HVAC filters, which don’t have a specific expiration date printed on them, since the end of their useful life depends on when you start using them.
Incredibly Easy Ways to Be More Efficient With Time
13. Set alarms on your phone for all your daily tasks (exercise, medicine, bath time, etc.)
(Submitted by anonymous reader)
It’s good to have reminders about when to do things.
Especially things you might forget about, or slack off on. Or if you’re trying to build structure for children.
So you can set recurring alarms/reminders on your phone for all your recurring tasks.
Things like exercise, taking medicine, meditation, bath time, writing in your gratitude journal, kids’ bedtime, etc.
14. Trade money for time (if you can afford it)
They say that money can’t buy happiness. But that’s only partially true.
Money can buy happiness if used in the right way. And one of those ways is to trade money for time.
If you can afford it, pay for services that save you time.
Hire a weekly cleaning service.
Use Instacart instead of shopping yourself.
Use a food delivery service instead of picking up your own food.
With fees, markups, and tip, the food delivery service will end up costing $15-$20 more than picking up the food yourself.
But if that means you get to spend 45 minutes of quality time with your family instead of sitting in traffic, that may be worth it. (Depending on your financial situation.)
15. Find ways to combine two things you need to do
(Submitted by John Tchoe)
Walk to the store to get exercise at the same time as doing chores.
Find a shopping center that has two stores you need to go to.
Use an exercise bike while on that boring conference call.
Fold clothes while on the phone.
Find your own ways to combine two tasks.
16. If there’s something you can do in under two minutes, do it now
(From David Allen’s Getting Things Done)
If you have a quick and easy task to do, just do it and get it out of the way.
Then you don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Note: I’m not a huge fan of the GTD system. I think it works for some people, but not for most. Though in general, there’s no One True Time Management System, and you should experiment to find what works for you.
Conclusion
So that’s 16 incredibly easy ways to be more organized in your home life.
No willpower needed. Costing very little money. And they’ll end up saving you time and effort.
None of them will change your life on their own. But these small easy wins add up to giving you a significantly better life.
Do you have any thoughts on the items on this list?
Or suggestions of others to add?
I’d love to hear from you.
If you have suggestions of incredibly easy ways to be happier, or any other ways to improve your life, please send them to me so I can include them in a future entry. You can comment here, e-mail stevenraymarks at gmail.com, or tweet/DM to @YourselfHelping.
Other entries in the Incredibly Easy series:
- The Incredibly Simple, One-Sentence Guide to Investing
- 10 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Health
- 10 Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier
- 11 Incredibly Easy Things to Stop Doing to Be Happier
- 15 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Sleep
- 13 Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Finances
- 17 Incredibly Easy Ways to Save Money While Shopping
- 12 Incredibly Easy Ways to Save Money on Utilities and Vehicles
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