12 Easy Rules and Routines to follow For A Well Organized Home
Small habit changes and implementing simple rules and routines can make all the difference when it comes to having a home that runs like a well oiled machine. A routine is a process that is part of your home organizing systems that you can follow to take the guess work out of your day and week.
Try incorporating a few or even just one of these simple rules and routines into the way you move through your daily life at home. If you are able to delegate tasks to your kids, other family members, a nanny, your house cleaners or a house manager, use this list to aid you in creating and documenting the SOPS (Standard Operating Procedures) for your home so that everyone knows how the house runs.
12 easy routines:
Establish a “home wake up” routine for each morning. Think: putting in a load of wash, walking the dog, working out, meditating, packing kid’s lunches, etc. - whatever is important to you and necessary for a smooth day.
Create a nightly “shut down the house” routine. Think: emptying the sink and running the dishwasher, clearing off kitchen countertops, putting away any laundry done that day, prepacking the next day’s bags, etc. - whatever can be done before the hustle beings anew the next day.
Run your dishwasher nightly and unload each morning - even if its not full. It’s a great habit to get into and there is no need for you to be washing everything by hand. Personally? I don’t even pre-rinse. I take my chances and if something comes out not perfectly clean, I deal with it then by choosing to run it through again or scrub it by hand.
Immediately load your dirty cup or dish into the dishwasher instead of letting them pile up in the sink. When cooking, wash pots, pans and mixing bowls as you go. Tell everyone who is using the dishes and glasses to do the same, so you are not the only one loading the dishwasher. They’re not mind readers - tell them what you want them to do.
Choose one day each week (commonly Sunday) for a “reset” of shared spaces to declutter and return things to where they belong as well as review weekly schedules for each family member. Think: kitchen countertops, kids craft spaces, mudrooms and living areas. For schedules think: who has activities and practice when and where, any doctors or dentist appointments, and who needs rides and when.
Never leave a room or floor of your home empty handed. There is almost always something that needs to be brought to a different area of the home at any given time. Setting up a bin on the main floor for things that need to go upstairs or downstairs can help collect and contain things neatly instead of having them scattered around. The trick is to actually move those things where they’re going specially when that bin is full.
Declutter one thing from at least one space every single day - this can be trash, items that go into a donation bin setup in a mudroom or garage, or things that need to be returned to stores or schools. Keep things moving.
Create a laundry schedule and stick to it - whether it is one load per day, a load or two whenever you are home, or every Sunday and only on Sunday. You can also dictate who does which load. In order to stick to the schedule, buy additional pieces of whatever clothing is needed to make it to the next scheduled laundry day - whether it is bath towels, undershirts, workout shirts, or your kid’s socks (because these socks have a way of disappearing - am I right?)
Put groceries away in their proper place immediately after bringing them home or having them delivered. Go the extra step whenever possible and remove the excess packaging wherever it is required to better fit the items into your organizing systems in the pantry and refrigerator. A little more work up front saves you time when you’re scrambling to retrieve something to cook or to snack on.
Sort through and get rid of kid’s items at a minimum of once per week, if not everyday. Be ruthless when it comes to decluttering with kids because the incoming stuff constantly exceeds the outgoing. Think: trinkets, toys, outgrown clothes, socks with holes, papers from school, artwork not worth holding onto and gum (seriously, where does the gum keep coming from if I’m not buying it?)
Take something out? Put it back where it belongs when you are done. So simple but oh-so-important. Unless you have a full time housekeeper, nobody is going to put it back for you and it will only lead to piles of clutter that you have to deal with later. As Barbara Hemphill stated: “clutter is nothing more than postponed decisions.” And might I add, oftentimes due to a touch of laziness.
If a task in your home will take 60 seconds or less, do it right now. A whole bunch of things that take about a minute to do (or even less) end up taking a whole lot longer when you are finally confronted with handling all of them at once. Think: tossing those receipts into the trash, putting the pen and post it pad back into the junk drawer, sorting through the new pile of mail you just brought in, returning the couch throw blankets to their basket, and pulling a shirt or two out of rotation from your closet that you’ve been meaning to get rid of and placing them in the donation bin.
Starting small, but starting somewhere will get you on the path towards living a more organized lifestyle. Forget the all-or-nothing approach you might think it takes to declutter and organize your home, instead opting for progress over perfection by implementing one or two new habits at a time and mastering them before adopting more. To learn more about habits in general, I highly recommend reading Atomic Habits (the author James Clear has since published the accompanying workbook which I’ve used).
If you need help getting to a place where you can adopt these home organizing rules and routines to complement your organized home, grab your behind-the-scenes guide to working with me, Meg, a Certified Professional Organizer ® servicing in-home clients in Denver and virtually nationwide, here.
