Make a List

One reason you can't get started is that you feel totally overwhelmed. Every time you turn around you see another disorganized mess that's driving you crazy. They're all competing for your attention, and you don't have the time or energy to attack them all. The first thing I want you to do is walk around your home and office with a pen and paper and write down all of the areas of your home and life that need attention.

Don't limit yourself to physical spaces - note the frustrating situations you find yourself in day after day. Do you constantly run out of shampoo, breakfast cereal, gas or clean laundry? Do you misplace your keys, bills or slides for the important meeting? Is it impossible to get your kids out of bed and on the school bus each morning? Do you find that your family is spending most of their time in the kitchen, and the clutter is starting to pile up? Keep your list near you for a week or so and note the frustrations in your daily life.

Prioritize

Now that you know what's bugging you, figure out what's bugging you the most. Many people living in disorganized situations feel overwhelmed because everything seems like it has equal urgency. To counter this, you need to determine your top three organizing priorities. Ask yourself which problems affect you in the most negative way. Which things are you battling with most often? Which situations or areas do you dread most? Which problems, if solved, would improve your life the most? Day-to-day activities are the biggest organization priority for many people: getting meals on the table, doing the laundry, paying the bills and keeping on top of the family schedule.

Diagnose

In my experience, organizational problems come in three flavors: stuff, systems and time. In order to solve your problem, you need to know which of these three is behind it.

Stuff

Problems with stuff include having too much stuff, not having enough space to put the stuff you have, having the wrong stuff and having poorly arranged stuff. Generally we're talking about equipment and space. If you think your problem relates to equipment and space, you need to ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish in this area of your life and whether you're really equipped to do it. Any task or activity needs adequate clear workspace, a comfortable area for the people involved to sit or stand, good lighting and the right equipment to get the job done. Imagine a chef trying to create a delicious meal with a rusty penknife, a badly wired microwave, a hunk of Velveeta and a bottle of expired salad dressing, all while standing outside in the rain. We all know that it can't be done, and yet we're often frustrated that we just can't seem to make ourselves work in an home office in a dank basement with a tiny desk, rickety, overstuffed file cabinet, hard folding chair and flickering overhead fluorescent light.

If you have too much stuff, keep in mind that your possessions can be separated into what one of my readers classifies as friends, acquaintances and strangers. Friends are those possessions you like and use often, acquaintances are those that you use less often, and strangers are those that you don't like or use. Get rid of the strangers, and store the rest of the stuff by the real estate maxim: location, location, location. Get those friends into prime real estate areas, i.e. the most easily accessed drawers, cupboards, shelves and closets.

Often our stuff just needs to be rearranged. Sometimes you think you hate a piece of furniture because it's not adequately serving your needs, and swapping it with a different piece of furniture in another room can solve your problem. If you hate your nightstand because it's too tiny and doesn't have enough surface space, and you hate the table next to the bathroom sink because it overwhelms your bathroom, you have a potential swap.

Systems

Organizers like to say that clutter is just deferred decisions. Systems are those habits that help our lives run smoothly because they remove the decision-making from staying organized. If you do the laundry every Tuesday instead of waiting to do it until you're out of underwear, that's a system. So is having an easily accessible place to write down grocery needs. Here are some basic systems that help to make life run smoothly:

• One good address book
• A calendar
• To-do lists
• A daily household and office pickup
• A schedule for household tasks
• Scheduling certain times during the day to make and return phone calls, exercise, eat dinner and have the kids do homework
• An agreement about who plans meals, shops, cooks, cleans up and empties the dishwasher
• A big box to accumulate the items you should donate to charity
• A clearly defined space for each category of your stuff

Look at your list of priorities and ask yourself if part of the problem is that you don't have a regular, specific way of dealing with it. If life is hectic because the activities in your day to day life are being done inconsistently, it might help to implement some systems.

Time Management

You have great space and equipment, impeccable systems, and you still find yourself falling behind. What's going wrong? I often hear complaints from clients with lovely home offices that their bills are always behind. "What day of the week do you pay bills?" I ask. "Oh, I don't have a regular time. I just get to it when I can" is the usual response. These clients won't get organized until they make the time in their lives to take care of this sort of task.

If you're serious about getting organized, I recommend that you find a paper or electronic time management system that works for you and can go wherever you go. My clients seem to like either small, inexpensive calendars in binders, or hand held personal electronic organizers. Start scheduling the important things in your life. Scheduling shouldn't be a rigid method of cramming as many activities as possible into your time. Rather, it should be a fluid, flexible way of consciously choosing where and when to make space in your life for everything that is important to you: your work, health, partner, children, friends, spirituality, relaxation, talents and interests. Use time management as a way to spread out and minimize the negative impact of the boring nitty gritty of life like paying bills and doing laundry.

Make a Plan

Now that you know what your target problems are and what's most likely causing them, it's time to figure out what to do to solve them. Make a plan for each problem, breaking it down into steps you can do in short periods of time. Write your plan down - I suggest keeping it with your calendar - and schedule these steps regularly.

Get Help

After all, help is available from lots of sources and at a variety of prices.

Books and other publications:

You might want to start in the resources section of this web page to find other web sites and a list of useful books. Bookstores and libraries carry lots of organizing books, but prepare your self for a little detective work - these books tend to be poorly categorized and organized!

Friends and family:

Try trading organizing work with a friend who needs help in this or some other department. If you have a lot of organizing work to do, finding a buddy can be invaluable. And of course, family members (outside of your household) are often willing recipients when you need to unload all of your stuff!

Professionals:

Professional organizers are worth their weight in gold, and generally not quite that expensive. Hiring a professional can be well worth the investment when it means it will save you time, money (on all those ill-thought organizing products you could buy) and grief. In addition, you'll end up with a system tailored just for you that you will find easy to maintain.

A Few Tips

Before we finish, I'd like to leave you with a few ideas to keep you on the right track.

Weed first. You wouldn't try to plant a lovely vegetable garden in the back lot without first removing the waist-high weeds. Don't try this in your closet, kitchen or attic, either. It's much easier to organize once you remove the extraneous junk from your life.