Most of us feel more comfortable, more confident and more at ease when our home is organized.  Home organization can give us great pleasure and satisfaction when we manage to achieve it, and the lack of it can be a source of much stress and anxiety.  Living in a home which is organized gives us the freedom to give better quality attention to other areas of our life, such as work, family, hobbies, community, health and so on, creating better balance.    Home organization is important to many people, and is something I’ve always been interested in and enjoy writing about.


The basics of achieving organization in our home are time management, routines, systems and decision making.  Running a home in an organized way is something which is a continuous activity, can be learned, and gets easier as habits are established.

Read more: Home Organization

A basic concept around which organizing works, is that items are grouped together with like items.  This is pretty basic, and applies to home organizing or any other kind of organizing, but it’s easy to forget this simple thing and end up with various places where an item, or more of those items, might be.  Home organization begins with having a place for everything.  Once you have that done, then everything can be in its place.

Grouping items can be done in stages, beginning with getting things into the correct room, for example personal items belonging to each family member in his or her bedroom, anything to do with food or cooking or eating in the kitchen and so on.

Beyond that, we are narrowing down to cupboards, closets, cabinets, shelves, baskets, drawers etc.

Read more: Organizing Your Home by Grouping Like Items

After a long bout of being unwell some time ago, I one day felt compelled to dig out and organize my desk, as I must so often do, and catch up with my filing so that I could more easily get on with my work.  Feeling inspired is one thing, but fortunately I know how to organize a year’s worth of paperwork, as organizing is my thing.  I jotted down how I did it as I went, so I might inspire or help someone else who has gotten a little (or a lot) out of control with papers piling up too.

My desk can need digging out after only a few days of neglect.  Although I do follow my own system for being organized, the sheer quantity of stuff landing on my desk every day soon piles up if not attended to.  Every day bills, forms, notes from the schools and the kindergarten, kids’ artwork, projects I’m working on and lots of little handwritten notes to myself (or sometimes really long ones) pile up on my desk, mixed up with ballet shoes to have ribbons sewn on them, toys to be fixed, and any random stuff for mummy to deal with – my desk is one big in tray and the organizing hub of my home.

Read more: How to Organize a Year's Worth of Paperwork

My basic approach to being organized and having my home and my time run as smoothly and easily as possible is having a good, workable daily routine and establishing good habits (and re-establishing them over and over again if necessary).

Our routines are the stuff that holds our life together and keeps it functioning, and prevent the need for floundering around wondering what we should be doing.  Good routines kill self-doubt.

When we manage to get a routine going which is working for us, something really cool that can happen and which should be encouraged and nurtured, is that we somehow, accidentally, start finding pleasure in it.  When we do find pleasure in our daily routines, it makes it easier to reinforce the good habits we have developed, and the pleasure is also valuable in itself, as any genuine healthy pleasure makes us more mentally healthy and resilient.

Read more: Finding Pleasure In Your Daily Routine