Now that you have developed some systems for reducing the decisions that you have to make daily, you should find that you have a bit more time and energy. There are very few of us that feel that our homes or workspaces are perfectly organized. We are continually losing our car keys and misplacing important pieces of mail. We go shopping and forget something that we needed to buy, and we miss appointments we thought we’d be sure to remember.
In the best case, our house is neat and tidy, but our closets and drawers are cluttered. We might even have unpacked boxes from the last move, even if it was more than five years ago. Our home offices accumulate paperwork faster than we can tackle it. Our garages, basements, attics, and the junk drawers in our kitchen are disorganized and messy.
Obviously, these are not problems that our ancestors had to deal with. When you think about what our ancestors might have lived like, it’s easy to focus on the technological differences. They didn’t have electricity, central heating, indoor plumbing, or cars. They spend more time grinding wheat and skinning fowl. They tended to eat what they could get their hands on, which included rats, peacocks, squirrels, and locusts.
The things we take for granted today didn’t exist in European homes until a few hundred years ago. Before the 17th century, homes in Europe consisted of a single room that was shared by the entire family. The number of possessions the average person has today is far higher now than for most of our history. This has made organizing our belongings a distinctly modern problem.
Today, families tend to amass more possessions than their homes can comfortably hold, resulting in garages becoming cluttered with old furniture and unused sports equipment. It has been reported that 75 percent of Americans can’t park their cars in their garages because they have too much, non-essential objects filling them. When confronted with this kind of clutter, women’s stress levels spike, leading to fatigue, chronic cognitive impairment, and suppression of the body’s immune system.
Adding to this stress is the fact that many of us feel that organizing our possessions have gotten away from us. Very few of us think that our homes are well organized. One solution to keeping your house organized is to put systems in place that will help you tame the mess. This means developing an infrastructure for keeping track of things, sorting them, and placing them in locations where they won’t be lost. The task of these types of organizational systems is to provide you with maximum information with the least cognitive effort.
The number one issue we face with putting organizational systems in place is that it is a daunting task that we fear we won’t be able to stick with. The good news is that we already use organizational systems throughout our home that protect us from the creeping chaos that surrounds us. Because we employ the use of a silverware drawer, we seldom lose spoons and forks. We don’t forget our toothbrushes because we know to use them in a particular room and have a specific place where we store them. However, we do lose reading glasses because we have a tendency to carry them from room to room and have no designated place to put them.
A great deal of losing things arises from structural forces or the various nomadic stuff in our lives that aren’t confined to a specific location, like the toothbrush. This neurological foundation is now well understood. We’ve evolved a specialized brain structure called the hippocampus that is used for remembering the spatial location of objects. The hippocampus is an essential center for place memory.
Our place memory has evolved over thousands of years to keep track of things that didn’t move. It is incredibly accurate for remembering stationary objects that are important for our survival. It isn’t, however, useful for keeping track of things that are moved from place to place. Utilizing simple affordances, or ways that our environment can serve as mental aids, to keep track of the objects in our lives can rapidly ease the psychological burden of trying to keep track of everything.
The next step for beating information overload is to get your home organized. This is crucial because a tidy house is a reflection of an orderly mind. More than that, it can also create a tidy mind, and here the correlation becomes ‘two ways.’ Having a tidy home can make it easier find things, which saves both time and stress because you’re no longer hunting for keys. It can also make your space more relaxing. Our brains actually crave organization and order. When you get your home tidy and organized, you’ll have a calming space that you can relax in, plus you’ll gain confidence because you’ll actually know where everything is located.
Get Ruthless
One of the single most important things you can do on your journey to beat information overload is make your home tidier and easier to get around by being ruthless and throwing things out.
You might object at first with the idea of parting with your possessions, however, reducing the number of items that you have in your home can make your house considerably less stressful and help you stay on top of your chores.
A great place to start would be with your knick-knacks and ornaments. Go through all the things you have on display in your house and get rid of half of the items. Doing this allows you to create a more minimal space, which can immediately reduce the amount of stress that you feel when in your home. At the same time, you’ve also created a lot less work for yourself by creating surfaces that can be easily cleaned.
By getting rid of half of your decorations and knick-knacks you’ve also increased the average quality of the things that you do have on display. The items that you choose to keep will be your favorite items, meaning they will get more attention and more focus, compared to all the things that were detracting from them.
Another way you can be ruthless in organizing your home is by going through all the boxes that you haven’t looked in for the last six months, removing anything of value and getting rid of the rest. The idea is that if you haven’t used something in six months or more, then you don’t need it. You’ll quickly find that you don’t miss any of those items.
Creating Designated Rooms
Another thing you can do is to try and create more separation between the different rooms in your house and think about how they’ll affect you unconsciously. For example, if you currently iron your clothes in the living room or bedroom, you’re making harder to relax in that space. This is because you associate these rooms with work now.
Consider making one of your spare rooms in your home a place to do chores, like ironing. This way, if that room becomes untidy, then it won’t spill out into the other rooms of your house.
Alternatively, if you have kids and pets that make it hard to keep your house tidy, you can save just one room in your home, letting it become the place that you go to unwind with a book. It’s important to remember for this to work you have to make rules that will help it stay pristine. Make sure that you don’t do any chores in the room, keep food out of the place, and don’t let toys start to accumulate in your space.
Keeping Things Clean
Most experts will tell you the best way to keep your house clean is by cleaning up as you go, rather than letting things pile up. While this is a good tip, it may be difficult for you to stick to it, especially if you’ve never worked this way before. Here are a few things that you can do to make keeping your house clean.
When it comes to your kitchen, you only need a certain number of dishes and cookware to survive and entertain. You just need to keep enough items to serve the maximum number of guests that you have. Anything above this number provides you with the excuse to continue to use clean plates rather than washing the dirty ones. The way to look at it is if there’s nothing clean to eat off of, then you’ll be forced to stay tidy.
Getting Organized
Our brains are inherently good at creating categories making them a powerful lever for organizing our lives. We can organize our home and work environments in such a way that they ultimately become extensions of our brains. This will require us to accept the capacity limitations of our minds.
The key to developing categories that are useful is to limit the number of types of things they contain to no more than four different kinds of things. This is relatively easy to do. If you have a drawer in your kitchen that holds cocktail napkins, matches, candles, and coasters, you can conceptualize this drawer as things for a party. Utilizing conceptualization when organizing your home helps to tie together these unrelated objects together at a higher level. Our brains are hardwired to make such categories that are cognitively flexible and can be arranged hierarchically.
When organizing your living space, your goal should be to off-load some of the memory functions from your brain into the environment. It is essential to keep your environment visually organized so that you aren’t distracted when you are trying to relax. This is why you want to create designated places for things, so you can quickly locate them when needed.
Two essential steps for setting up a home organization system is,
1) the categories that you create need to reflect how you use and interact with your possessions, and
2) you need to avoid putting different items into a drawer or folder unless you can come up with an overarching theme.
If you aren’t able to do this, creating a miscellaneous or junk drawer is okay, but if you find that you have more than one junk drawer, you need to take the time to re-sort and regroup their contents.
With thousands of different objects in our homes, we need to be proactive about reducing stress by participating in things that reset our working brains and allowing our mind-wandering mode to kick in regularly.
