3 Tips to Get & Stay Organized

Happy New Year! We’re excited for what 2020 will bring, and what we’ll make of it too!

Have you made a new year’s resolution yet? We know resolutions are not for everyone, and sometimes they can seem impossible to achieve, but they can be fun and rewarding too.

A popular new year’s resolution is to get more organized because when you’re organized you feel more in control and more relaxed. It can also enable a person to handle life’s little or BIG surprises or blips with a little more ease and confidence.  

If your new year’s resolution is to get more organized this year, this blog post is for you. Here are 3 tips to help you get more organized, and stay organized:

1. Create & Follow Organization Rules

By setting up and adhering to rules around what you keep and what you don’t, you help eliminate sentiment and indecisiveness, which can be a serious roadblock to organization. Rules could be around size, condition of items, time period of ‘no use’. Here are some examples:

• I only keep clothing ranging in sizes from A to B.
• Items that are stained beyond wear or use (even in the privacy of my own home) are to be discarded.
• Items that are broken beyond repair are recycled or discarded.
• Items that need repair but have not been repaired in 3 months’ time are to be donated, recycled or thrown out.
• Things that have not been used in the last 12 months are to be donated, recycled or thrown out.

With rules, it becomes easier to go through your personal items and make decisions over what should be kept and what can be donated, recycled or thrown away.

2. Transition to a Paperless Household

Paper, like mail, receipts, flyers, magazines, catalogs, bills, bank statements, school forms, etc., add up quickly and create a huge amount of clutter. Home papers often add or lead to disorganization as these papers get misplaced, stuffed somewhere or piled on top of each other, which can result in a late or missed bill payment, an important school form not signed and returned and or an activity or deadline missed.

You can quickly eliminate this clutter by going paperless, which means opting for electronic copies of these typical home paper items. With today’s advanced level of technology, magazines, flyers and catalogs are commonly available online to browse or download to your phone, tablet or personal computer. Almost all businesses make going paperless easy by offering electronic bills, options for receipts to be emailed, and coupons available by email or store apps. There are also affordable scanning devices for purchase that will help you convert existing important paper documents into electronic versions. Here are a few tips for going paperless:

• Never just toss your papers into the trash or recycling bin as this exposes you to identity theft, which has huge and lasting consequences. Shred your paper documents, especially anything that contains sensitive information that can personally identify you, like your full name, address, birthdate, health card number, banking information, SIN, etc.
• Note all paper documents should be digitized and shredded. Keep the original paper documents of original birth certificates, death certificates, wills, deeds, marriage certificates, etc.
• Because computers last only for 3-5 years at best, avoid saving your electronic documents directly on and only on your computers hard drive. If something unexpected happens to your computer, like it just conks out and dies (which almost everyone has experienced), the items on your hard drive may not be retrievable.
• Select a single place to store all your electronic files, such as an online cloud-based solution, like Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, etc., or an offline solution like Network-Attached Storage (NAS) drive, which is a hard drive you plug directly into your home computer to save to or can plug directly into your personal Wi-Fi router, and connect to via all your home devices.
• However you decide to save and store your electronic files, use a folder system to organize everything so that you can find what you need quickly, and make sure documents are labeled such that you can tell by the name, what the electronic file contains.

3. Digitize Your Nostalgic Items

We all have nostalgic items that we hold near and dear to our hearts. Some of us have so many of these types of sentimental items that they start to take over our space. Why are they so hard to part with? Because they are associated with memories that we do not want to lose.

Through digitizing nostalgic items by taking their photo, the memory can be preserved and the item that we will never use again can be donated, recycled or discarded. Depending on what these items are, you could even take all these images and create a photobook to preserve the memories together. This work’s great for your kid’s artwork you have saved since pre-school, including the macaroni crafts that are falling apart.  

There will be items, like the outfit you brought your child home from the hospital in when he or she was born, a wedding dress, a note from a childhood crush or best friend, tickets to an event, a piece of jewelry, etc., that have sentimental value that is too high to be digitized and discarded. These are best to be kept and preserved whole, as they represent something deeper.

We hope you find these 3 tips helpful in achieving your goal of a more organized home.

And if you temporarily need some extra space while you organize your home using these tips, renting a self-storage unit is an easy and affordable solution. Give us a call, text or email to rent or reserve a storage unit from either our Milton self-storage facility our Woodstock self-storage facility.

We offer full flexibility with month-to-month rentals so you can rent extra space for as  little or long as you need to get your home organized. We make renting self-storage super easy, and fun. Like or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for tips, tricks and a good laugh.

Wishing you a very organized 2020!

Your friend in self-storage,

Storage Solutions