The Most Important Aspect of Organizing - Guest Post

Autumn from Space for Living and I connected online several months ago and I’ve been loving her posts ever since.  She has great examples of organizing projects she’s worked on and regularly posts  10 Minute Tuesday challenges.   We share a common outlook on organized living, and I think she’s done a fantastic job of summarizing it in her own words:

“I am Autumn from Space for Living. I am on a quest for an organized home that emphasizes practicality over perfection and joyful living over clutter.  With a 3- and 4-year old running around, I focus on making my home efficient and livable - not a “perfect” picture from a magazine or a model home.  I am constantly inspired by ideas to make the best use of what we have. I love sharing these organizing solutions on my blog and with my organizing clients.”

Be sure to check out her blog for some more great posts like the one she’s sharing today.  …just don’t expect any bone-in chicken recipes there.  (See our bone-in chicken Twitter conversation from a few weeks ago to understand why.)               {Jill Marie}

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Are you missing one of the most important aspects in organizing your life? I know with a lead in like that this better be good! I’m talking about… Routines.

Routines are perfect ways to infuse organization into your days. It’s like that saying come to life, “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Once you spend the initial time to set up your routines, they can save you tons of time.

Routines do not have to happen at a set time but instead they serve as more of an outline to follow; easy to follow steps or an order in which to do things. It takes about a month for them to become automatic, but once you are familiar with your routines you do them without even thinking.

When I first sat down to write about routines, I wrote a whole dissertation of the beauty of routines, complete with evidence of how they work and examples from the real world, blah, blah, blah… Yup, that is how much I love routines. But the much shorter version is:

• Routines allow you to get simple things done quickly
• Help you stay focused
• Even if you get interrupted, with a routine in place you can get right back on track
• Help you become more efficient with your time and therefore use your time for the things you’d rather be doing
• Helps you delegate tasks easily to others if you are gone (sick, traveling, etc.)

Everyone has established routines whether they are realized or not. Think about your morning, do you have a standard order of tasks for getting ready? What do you repeatedly do every morning, whether good or bad and whether it’s working or not?

We all can have those moments of mindlessly moving from one task to the next, like when you drove right home after work instead of stopping to do the errands you’d planned. It felt effortless to head home because you so used to that route. Creating routines has the same effect, except you can make routines work for you because you’re setting them up to accomplish what needs to be done daily or weekly.

Without routines I have certainly found myself sitting in front of the TV right as I walked in the door, or placing the dirty dish on the counter instead of the dishwasher. Only you have the power to write and edit your routines and then follow them through. Start small and you will see major changes.

Here is my simple and revised morning routine:

• Rise and shine
• Head to the bathroom first!
• Make my bed
• Assemble lunch/Make breakfast
• Get dressed
• Throw in a load of laundry
• Empty dishwasher

This is all before 8:00am and if this was all I got done for the day (which sometimes happens) I still feel very accomplished!

If you would like more on routines check out Flylady. My routines are adapted from her program. I first discovered her site as a new mother transitioning from the structure of a work day to a crying baby who seems to determine the schedule. I didn’t understand how a whole day could go by without a single thing being accomplished, except my baby was fed and changed of course! I used Fly Lady’s simple morning and evening routines to start and end my day. It gave me some structure and it was indeed a life saver. I have since incorporated other types of routines throughout my day and my kids’ day. I especially enjoy them when life seems to move at the speed of light and I can get things done without much time and effort. And isn’t that what we all want, to save our precious time?

Do you follow routines? Have you had routines in your life and since fallen off the wagon? I almost hate to ask, but I must, any routine haters?

Ready for Part II: We’ll pick a few tasks and create the routines together.

images via-Things Organized Neatly/Coffee-jynemb/Blurry trees-Kate Ter Haar