Brian: You’re all individuals! Crowd (in unison): Yes! We ARE all individuals… From ‘Life of Brian’
One of the most common traps people fall into when organising things in their homes is assuming that there’s a ‘standard’ or ‘ideal’ way to do it, or for it to look, when they’re finished. Often our ideas of how a well organised home should look are subconsciously influenced, not by real people whom we know, but by adverts and shops where everything is staged.
Now I’m not saying that your home can’t look as tidy as those ideal staged homes look, if you want it to. But the point is that it can’t be the same. The reason why it can’t be the same or teach you how to arrange your possessions is because it isn’t a real home where someone actually lives a real life. Even if you worked this out, there’s another trap for you to fall into. Supposing you know someone who’s really tidy all the time. All you have to do is watch where they put things and copy their habits for your house to look the same, right? Actually, that just won’t work.
The reason it won’t work, is that you are, in hundreds of tiny ways, an idiosyncratic individual. You don’t use your house in the same way that your tidy friend does, and you don’t have the same schedule or domestic routines, even assuming that your family sizes and houses are similar. You home has to be a machine that’s tuned to you as an individual so that it can easily accommodate your habits and empower you to get what you need to do, done easily.
In hundreds of tiny ways, you have a pattern of use in your own home which is as unique as a fingerprint. Maybe you always watch TV from a particular chair? Read to fall asleep in bed? Always shower before bed? Compost your kitchen waste? Do your mending whilst you watch TV? Listen to talking books whilst you clean? Have a cup of tea in the garden at dusk in the summer? Maybe what you do is similar to other people, but the whole pattern will never be identical to another’s. That’s why your home can’t be identical to another’s, and arranging your possessions as they do, will never work for you.
What you need to do, is take note of what your tasks or habits are, and arrange the things you need to them in convenient ‘workstations’ around their home. The one that’s most standard, house to house, is the one for storing your toothbrush, which is why I was able to use it as an example in ‘Banish Clutter Forever – How the toothbrush principle will change your life’. But virtually every other tiny system, such as leaving your books by your bed for your bedtime reading, or having a chair that catches the evening sun in the garden for your cup of tea, will have to be one that really reflects the way you actually live. Only you can do the detective work to enable to discover your habits, and only you can leave things in the right places so that your habits are accommodated.
The huge benefit of doing that, is feeling that your house really does support you in living as you want to. That feeling is well worth the effort involved….
