How To Break The Logjam With One Magic Question

If you’ve got a lot of clutter to organize, it can be overwhelming and it can be hard to know where to begin.  Perhaps you have found yourself here in the past and have found the challenges complicated, but the answer lies in very simple question.

Getting organized always begins with a basic sorting of like with like.  You may get things into boxes and free up some valuable surface area. As a result, you may feel more in control, and you are, but don’t stop there.  You don’t have a system that will keep you organized unless your items are easy to find and access.   So what do you do with these carefully sorted boxes?

The answer is simple: divide and conquer.  But how exactly do you do that?  For each item, ask yourself the following:

Why am I keeping this?

Often when I ask a client this question, he or she thinks this is a challenge to toss the item.  It’s not (necessarily).  When you answer the question WHY you are keeping something it leads to the answer of WHERE it should go.  When you have all your like items sorted, it is much easier to make decisions because you are in a focused mode, but since we keep the same items for different reasons, sorting isn’t enough.

Let’s take the example of video tapes.  Sorting all your video tapes into one area is a great first step because now you are in “video mode,” but now what? Grab any video and ask yourself why you are keeping it.  If it’s your 3 year old’s Elmo video, it goes near the VCR where she will still watch it.  If it’s your TWELVE year old’s Elmo video, it goes in the donation box, because she has outgrown it.  If the next video is also on a dvd, then that video can join Elmo in the donation box.  If the next video is your Hawaiian vacation video, then perhaps it goes with your keepsake box. If the next video is broken (or horrible), it goes in the trash. If the next video has no label on it, then you may need to review it.  DON’T review it now.  Keep going with the others.  Keep asking, why am I keeping this?  Stay focused and break up ALL the videos in this fashion.

You have now broken up the video mountain into manageable molehills.  The active videos go on a shelf where they can be seen and accessed; the donation box advances to the car, and the review box is a simple task.  It’s simple because you can now be strictly in a “video review mode” that will take minutes.

You don’t have to address all these molehills at once, but they are manageable now because you have simply asked “Why am I keeping this?”