Discover 7 Creative Organization Tips to De-clutter your Life

A cluttered home won’t only give you a headache—all that clutter will also slow you down. Five minutes spent looking for a missing sock here and ten minutes spent looking for missing keys can add up. This robs you of time you’d rather spend with your family, so it may be time to de-clutter.

Use these 7 smart organizing tips to de-clutter your life!

1: Keep Working Rooms Ready for Work

Some of the rooms in your home are mainly for leisure, while others are primarily functional. Life quickly becomes chaotic if your functional rooms—such as the kitchen and bathroom—are disorganized or cluttered.

That means that smart home organization should start in those rooms. Here are five tips for organizing your kitchen, including setting up smart work zones.

Storage is a key challenge in bathrooms, where space is limited; here are five space-saving bathroom storage ideas.

Your basement, laundry room, garage, and shed are more functional spaces that can be organizationally tricky; here are tips for tackling those areas.

2: Rein in the Snail Mail

The amount of mail that even one person receives in a week can be hard to believe, so the mail is one of the easiest and quickest things that can get out of control in your home. If you’re just throwing your mail in a pile to deal with later, that pile can quickly become an overwhelming mess that would take ages to deal with.

Your best bet for keeping your mail streamlined is having a simple system. Instead of just dumping the mail in a pile when you bring it inside, quickly sort it into groups that each have their own place: magazines in the magazine rack, coupons and ads in their own spot, and personal correspondence in its spot.

Keeping an easy organizing system near the door makes this system easy to stick to, such as a decorative file box with dividers.

For bills, The Week Magazine recommends keeping a decorative box with everything you need to pay your bills inside—checkbook, ink pen, stamps, your bills as they come in—under your coffee table. That way, it will be right there at your fingertips during the commercial breaks while watching your favorite fall programming.

3: Keep Schoolwork Organized

You want to save your kids’ schoolwork and art projects to look back on as they grow, but all of that paper can quickly turn into a disorganized jumble. One way to stay organized is to buy large, slim-style plastic storage containers with lids that you can slide under your kids’ beds and label one for each school year.

You can store your child’s schoolwork from that year in the proper container, keep it free of dust and moisture, and take digital photos of larger projects if you can’t keep them.

4: Store Medicine in the Kitchen

Pharmacists don’t recommend storing many medications in the bathroom medicine cabinet because the damp environment can harm them. Instead, store your medicine on a high shelf in the kitchen, out of reach of children, in labeled sealable plastic tubs.

Each person can have their own container with their name for prescription medications. For non-prescription medicines, label one container “cold/flu” and another “first aid,” etc., for quick, easy access to what you’re looking for.

5: Keep Special Occasion Items Organized and Ready to Go

You don’t use some things all the time, but you really need them to be there when you need them. One example is holiday decorations: you use them once a year, and packing and storing them the right way is the key to making sure you can find all of them next year.

Use these smart holiday cleanup tips to keep your decorations ship-shape!

Another thing you may mostly do on holidays is bake. Baking requires specific equipment and ingredients that you don’t use for other things, but you need them to be there when you want to bake again.

The Week Magazine recommends using a small movable cart to make a baking cart. Load the cart with everything you use for baking, from cookie sheets to flour, to baking soda, and keep it in the back corner of the pantry. When it comes time to bake, you can just wheel out your baking cart, and you’re ready to go!

6: Keep a Donation Bin

We all like to help those who need it, and if it can also de-clutter your home, it’s a win-win! One clever organization tip is to keep a small donation bin near your home’s door, so when you have a gently-used item you no longer need, you can drop it into the container on your way out.

This way, you can de-clutter a little at a time and keep your mind on giving back to the community. When the bin is full, donate it to your local charity.

7: Be Prepared with Storage Containers

This is a simple idea, but sometimes the simplest ideas are the most important. Make sure you have plenty of appropriate storage containers for your closets, shelves, and drawers.

Drawer organizers make all the difference between a jumbled-up “junk drawer” and a drawer with handy odds and ends, and having plenty of storage bins for your shelves—even if you don’t have anything to put in them yet—will ensure that things stay in their place when you do start filling the shelves.

And storage containers don’t have to be boring: here are some fun DIY mason jar storage ideas. Style it up!

Did you know that when you de-clutter, it can create positive Feng Shui and benefit your health? Read up on the basics of Feng Shui and how you can apply it to your life with our blog post here.

Photos courtesy of Rubbermaid Products, Alec Perkins, and HGTV.com.

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