Your environment reflects and influences your mind.
This is a key element to understanding your inner world. Look out for your surroundings and keep them clean to actively influence your health.
Today we want to start with cleaning and organizing your home. A home is supposed to be a safe space to relax and heal. As we are confronted with this personal space every day, its influence is undeniable.
To motivate you even more, let’s start with the benefits of an organized and clean room:
1. Mental and Mood Power Up:
As we’ve said, your room reflects and influences your mental state. An organized room will help you organize your thoughts. This reduces stress while promoting focus. Stress reduction also enhances your ability to relax in this environment, which ultimately enhances overall mood.
2. Efficiency:
It is no secret that a tidy and organized room provides structure. Knowing where you’ve left something you need will save time. Besides knowing where your items are, you’ll also always know whether you have something in the first place. If you keep your room organized and can’t find something in its designated place, it may be time to rebuy it.
3. Self-Discipline:
Keeping your room organized is a habit. This habit arises from consistency and helps in other areas of life. If you want to read more about habits, you might enjoy last week’s post: ‘An Everyday Thing – How To Form a Habit.’
Now let’s start with the real difficulty: How do I start organizing my room, and how do I keep it clean?
Step-by-Step Guide To Organise Your Room
1. Blank Space
If you’re at a point of needing to clean up, you probably have a bit of messiness in you too, someone that just loves keeping unnecessary items. To start, remove everything from the area you want to organize.
Let’s say you’re working on your desk. Every pen, every piece of paper, rubber, tape, whatever it is, get every single thing out. While you do so, start grouping them into categories, e.g. keep, toss, donate, relocate.
1.2 Declutter
When grouping your items, be honest. Only keep what you really need, meaning something either functional or something that brings you joy. Tossing items away can be hard, but it’s for the better, trust me.
I used to be a big messy. I kept the strangest little items which reminded me of situations such as old bus tickets. As these things obviously don’t have a function anymore, they were only lying around making my place seem messy. But, as they still filled me with joy, so here’s what I did:
I bought a photo album; honestly, any book or album would do. From now on, every item that reminds me of important and joyful moments goes into this album. This way I can keep them, they are organized in one space, and I actually look at them again.
2. Zones
To not say grouping again, we’ll call them zones now. Create zones for different activities or areas. These could be: work, sleep, self-care, drawing, etc. This way, you have everything belonging together in one place and won’t need to run through your whole room collecting everything once you need it.
When designating a zone, it is helpful to place it near its area of use. Let’s say, for example, place your writing items near a desk, or place your self-care items in your bathroom, etc.
3. Smart Storage
Use your space effectively! Shelves, bins, drawers, and makeup organizers, there are plenty of options for you to optimize your usage of space. These also provide structure. For a long time, I was keeping my makeup in a normal makeup bag. When I got ready, I had to take everything out and ran out of time to put it back once I got ready. I never once faced this problem since I have an organizer.
To identify the bin you’re searching for (e.g., for spices in the kitchen), start color-coding or labeling your items. This will help you to easily find them and save time once again.
4. Arrange Mindfully
Keeping your room organized will be painful when having to rearrange every time you need an item. To prevent that, be mindful when organizing and put items you use more frequently in spots that are easy to reach.
On the contrary, place less frequently used items out of the way. Remember, they won’t move when they’re not used, so having them in sight can be bothersome. Think of putting them, for example, on the highest shelf of your wardrobe or behind your bed.
What a wonderful room you have now that it’s clean and organized! How do you feel? It’s relieving, isn’t it?
Well, to make sure to keep this up, here are the 4 essentials to keeping your room clean:
How to Keep a Room Organized:
1. Daily 5-Minute Reset
Sounds horrible, is horrible, at first – but it’s worth it. Most often it only takes one deep clean effort, and afterward, cleaning your room won’t take up more than five minutes. If everything has its place, you won’t have to think about where to put it. Also, keeping your room clean on a daily basis won’t allow extreme chaos.
2. Preventive Minimalism
If you don’t buy unnecessary items, you won’t have to clean out unnecessary items, or in other words – nip the root in the bud. Don’t forbid yourself everything; joy is an important factor as well, but make sure to stick to the essentials most of the time.
3. Monthly Declutter
Besides your daily five minutes, you might want to engage in a monthly declutter. But, to be honest, most of the time, decluttering once in 2-3 months is enough, depending on yourself.
A monthly declutter is most useful after you’ve first organized your room. Why? The first time we’re organising, most of us are probably still hesitant to throw away some of their unnecessary stuff. Once you’ve lived in a clean environment and realized that throwing some things away wasn’t as bad as it initially felt, you’ll get more comfortable and be able to get rid of the rest more easily.
Afterward, adapting a more essential-focused approach won’t allow too many unnecessary items into your space, resulting in larger time spaces between your declutters.
4. Create a Routine
This is basic, but we’ll say it again: Habits and Routines. Creating a cleaning schedule, whether it’s for a daily reorganisation or a monthly declutter, will reinforce consistency and help you keep your room clean. But, if you want to learn more about building routines, we suggest once again you read last week’s article. Click here.
You are existing in your environment. Environments have always formed us. Whether in impactful ways regarding evolution or in subjective ways regarding mood, paying attention to one’s environment is an extremely useful tool in determining mental state and enhancing work efficiency.
Does your environment control you, or do you control your environment?