Schedule 15m of Organizing Every Week

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, we’ll talk about the benefits of scheduling 15m of organizing every weekend. 

I am someone who functions best with my chores scheduled in. I do financial chores on Tuesday, pay bills on Friday, laundry on Thursdays, fold clothes on Fridays, and on Saturdays I do 15m of outdoor chores and 15m of organizing.  I realize that this seems utterly oppressive to some people. I get it — different strokes for different folks, but let me make the argument to you why I think you should do 15m of organizing a week, whether it’s on the same day each week like me, or just has a place on your weekly to do list. First, let’s talk about

Organizing burnout

I typically have A LOT of energy for a project when I first get started.  For example, I love rototilling and planting my garden in the spring — then I lose steam and have less energy for weeding and maintaining my garden throughout the summer.  I frequently will get a major organizing bug if I find a decent pocket of time. I’m going to clear out my whole closet, or totally redo our basement, or go room to room and trim down everything we own!  And I start out full blast, but then I get distracted or tired of it or bored and that’s it!  I don’t touch organizing again until I have the time and energy for another big project.  I call that phenomenon Organizing Burnout.  Spending hours and hours organizing is going to lead to burnout. And frankly, the massive effort involved in any of these large projects is enough to make me never start them and avoid them forever.  Instead, it seems much more palatable to bite off tiny 15m projects once a week.  It doesn’t require too much energy to get started and it helps me

Build My Organizing Muscle

Maybe you don’t need to do this and you are really good at getting rid of stuff and trimming things down.  I have a bit of a hoarding tendency that I have to fight against.  I like hanging onto things “just in case.”  Without regularly exercising my organizing muscles, I’m at risk of giving into hoarding entropy and being surrounded by stuff I don’t need or won’t use.  The answer for me is regularly doing 15m of organizing each week.  Plus, if my organizing muscles are strong, then I am more inclined to organize something quickly between weekly sessions as well. It gives me 56 opportunities per year to tackle little projects.  Okay, before I go too far, let’s talk about what kinds of things I do during my 15m of weekly organizing.

15m Tasks

Just about anything can justifiably belong on your list.  Here are some for me.  I can organize:

• a single drawer in the kitchen or bathroom
• one shelf in a linen closet 
• A storage bin
• stuff that is under a bed
• one drawer in a clothes closet or 12” of hanging clothes
• 1/2 of the freezer
• the apps on my phone that have gotten out of control
• one directory in Google Drive

I also put some cleaning/tidying things on there:

• Tidy the garage - it’s not necessarily organizing, since I’m not necessarily getting rid of things
• Clean out the fridge
• Wash 15m of windows
• Replace burnt out lightbulbs
• Remove cobwebs from tall ceilings
• Clean out car

There are many Saturdays where I spend my 15m dealing with piles. You know what I’m talking about.  The pile of stuff that you need to make decisions on, that needs to be returned,  or needs to be stored somewhere, but you haven’t had the energy to give it enough thought. We all have piles like that.  Some of us have multiple piles.  It’s very satisfying to deal with a pile since we usually put them in obvious places so that we don’t forget about them. Once we deal with them — they disappear!  So satisfying.  Also, you can

Break Big Projects into 15m Bites

Say you need to organize your garage. It might be something like a three hour project. So, split it up into 12 15m units.  Like this:

• 2 shelves of each storage until (4 units)
• Tool drawers (3 units)
• Half of the tool cabinet (2 units)
• Sports bin (1 unit)
• Hanging tools (1 unit)
• Everything else (1 unit)

You can do all of those chores consecutively, or sprinkle in another task on weeks where you are getting bored of doing the garage.  Eventually, you’ll get it done and you might be more thorough since you’ll be fresh when you start each week.

Keep a List

I keep a list of stuff I want to do on my 15m of organizing, so I can just launch into the project without much thought.  I put things on there that need 15m of concentration that I don’t have the energy for during the week.  These don’t necessarily have to involve organizing, but they definitely help to keep the house tidy. For example, I need to repair the hinges on our ottoman.  It’s probably no more than a 15m job, but I’ve been putting it off FOREVER.  Stick it on the list and it will eventually get done. If you find that you are avoiding a task on your list, it may not be in a small enough chunk. Find a way to break it into 2 or more parts and you’ll be more inclined to tackle it. 

There are some weeks where you’ll want to keep going — like for a full hour. That’s probably okay, but don’t make a habit of it. The beauty of the 15m organizing task is that it doesn’t seem daunting, can be completed between other weekend activities, and eventually adds up to real progress in organizing your life!

Now that I’ve been doing 15m of organizing every Saturday for almost 6 years, I’d love to tell you that you eventually just run out of things to organize and your house is perfect!  That, unfortunately, has not been my experience.  It is the way I ward off the eventual entropy of disarray.  I’m now finding myself going back and reorganizing bins and drawers that I’ve done before — it IS much easier the 2nd time around — but it is still needed. 

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!