We occasionally meet despairing customers in our Chester STORE, disheartened by their own clutter and inability to maintain neat and tidy storage in their homes just a few days or weeks after they’ve had a really good go at getting organised and streamlining their space.
If you’re reading this and thinking “that’s me, I try but I never seem to stay organised after the event” then keep reading because being aware you’ve got a clutter problem at your place is the first step towards making a change.
One of the keys to decluttering and organising your space is taking control of the flow of ’stuff’ that comes into your life, whether it’s across your desk at work,or with home organisation. And one of the biggest storage and organisational issues I’m always quizzed about in our shops is, how to effectively control and store post and paperwork.
Firstly, make sure that the flow of items through the letterbox and general paperwork you pick-up elsewhere is effectively stored in an in-tray, file box, or even a series of colour coded plastic boxes, each for different subjects or people in your house. Popping mail and paperwork into A4 sized storage boxes is going to instantly provide gratification via a more organised storage routine but the key to decluttering and staying on top of the reams of paperwork in these storage box in-trays is to manage the ‘through flow’ and indeed ‘out flow’ of paperwork you store in them.
A great tip I gleaned from a storage professional across the pond was to think of these colour coded storage boxes for your post in the same way as you think of your kitchen sink. Most of us (even STORE’s warehouse manager Kevin) have a natural tolerance for how long we leave dishes cluttering-up the sink and draining board. For some people it’s a day or two and others can’t stand to go to bed at night without doing the washing-up. Have this same tolerance threshold to your household post and paperwork: open, read, action and decisively discard or file and you’ll notice the differences within a few days.
The more you perform this simply paperwork decluttering task, the more your awareness will grow of better organisation. This transferable organisational skill can be used in other areas of your home too and over time you’ll naturally become more conscious about what you bring into the house and indeed what you spend your hard earned pennies on. You see, decluttering and reorganising is a money-saver too!
