The Lazy Genius Podcast - #192 - What To Do Before Reorganizing Your Home

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

We all get that early January itch that carries into the dark winter of February where we just want our homes to feel good to be in. But we often start in the wrong place. I want to prevent that from happening to you today. Stuff Mentioned Pick up a copy of The Lazy Genius Way to learn all about Lazy Genius Principles and how they can help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t. Check out The Lazy Genius Store where you’ll find The Swap, The Clean Slate, The Meal Plan and The Holiday Docket. Download a transcript of this episode.   This post contains affiliate links meaning if you click through and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission. Love you, mean it, bye. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is episode 192. What to do before reorganizing your home. We all get that early January itch that carries into the dark winter of February where we just want our homes to feel good to be in. After the holidays, we take down all the decorations. We have more stuff to store because we likely got some gifts.

things just naturally transition after the winter holidays and into a new year. It's just the way it goes. It's in the air. Don't fight it, right? We do like a reset. But we often start in the wrong place. And I want to prevent that from happening to you today. So before you start reorganizing your home with all the resetting and purging and moving

stuff around and then maybe even considering like moving your house entirely as an alternative to dealing with your stuff, I want you to do this one thing. This is likely going to be a shorter episode, but it is very very much. very important. You need to name what matters. And then we're going to use two lazy genius principles for my book, The Lazy Genius Way, that are essential for creating a home you love to be in. We'll get to those principles in a second. But first, name what matters. You have to know what matters in your home. So last week, I walked us through how to name what matters in 2021 by using three simple questions to help narrow the field. What could matter? What does matter? And what

what matters most. This is a path that you can take in any scenario, really, and for your home, it's just super important to do. You have to know what matters most about your home in order to organize it in a way that supports that. How to know what to keep and what to get rid of. How to think about tending it and cleaning it on a regular basis. All of that is connected to what matters most, all of it. There is no universal list of items you should have or not have. there is no universal cleaning schedule that you should follow or not follow. There is no universal purpose for one home compared to another. You have to choose for yourself. And if you start getting rid of stuff and then putting stuff back before acknowledging how that stuff contributed or takes away from

what matters most, you're doing work for no reason. It's just wasted effort. And that's no fun. I honestly think that's why so much of our organizational mojo gets lost really quickly because we don't have a framework. We're flying blind on what to keep and what to toss and where it should go. You cannot make a decision without knowing the point of the decision in the first place. So before you do anything with your home, anything, you need to stop and name what matters most about your home. And if you need some help on the specifics of that, most of the time we organize and reset because our home doesn't feel the way we want it to. Like I said last week, something can matter most in different areas of your life, right? There's not just like one singular thing that matters most

across the board. And the same is true of your home. But for the sake of the reorganizing and resetting, generally the thing that you're trying to tend to is the feeling of your home. How does it feel to be in it? So you want to name the feeling that matters most. That will direct everything else. Maybe that specificity will kind of help you name it. So go through those three questions. We talked about last week. And I just mentioned here again, what could matter, what does matter, and what matters most. And once you have the thing that matters most about how your home feels, maybe, and then know what follows in terms of priority, which we're about to get to, you can know how to move forward. Okay. For me, the thing that matters most about how my home feels is calm. Calm wins all the time.

That's why I don't have detailed organizational systems. Instead, I just put a lot of stuff in baskets in general areas of the house, because if stuff is put away out of sight, the house feels calm. And what's left over in terms of like decorations and fabrics and candles and the vibe and all that, all of that contributes to a sense of calm, calm always wins for me. Now, the secondary thing that matters to me is comfort. That changes how I direct the calm. If the second thing was cleanliness or simplicity or uniqueness, how I create calm, it would alter a little bit. Okay. So it's not that your second thing as you're narrowing down

what matters most about how your home feels or how it operates. As you narrow it down, your second thing is not unimportant. It actually helps direct the decisions of what matters most. So do make your list. Name what matters most. Nothing will work well until you do that. All right. So once you do that, I want you to keep two lazy genius principles in mind during all of your reorganizing, decluttering, resetting efforts. The first is, essentialize. When you essentialize, you name what matters and then you get rid of what doesn't support that. Sometimes you also need to add something in to support what matters if you don't have it yet. But the main thing is to get rid of what is in the way. It's likely that a lot of your organizational

efforts will be a lot easier and take way shorter if you just get rid of stuff that doesn't support what matters. You don't have to like put everything in pretty bins right away. You'll just have a lot of space left over to see what you have left. It's pretty great because there's no real organization required yet. Just purge and move things out of your home if they do not support what matters. Get essentialize. Get rid of what doesn't support what matters. The second principle to use in this particular task is to put everything in its place. Everything needs a place in your home. Your home likely feels a way that you don't like because things don't have a home. Your stuff needs a place so you can find it, so you can easily put it away to make your space feel calm or tidy or

welcoming or whatever you're after. And then having things in finite places, it helps you see what you do and do not have space for in the future. One bonus tip I always like to share when I can is to not buy something new unless you know where it's going to go. If you love coats, but you only have three hooks to put your coats on. You probably should reconsider having seven coats. That's why your coat area is overwhelming. You have a finite space that you keep adding to. Now, if coats matter that much, find a different storage solution. But if coats don't matter enough for you to invest in a new system, then essentialize your coats. Get rid of the ones that don't support what matters most and then put the rest in their place. That is their place. That is their place.

That is where they live. Those three hooks is where they live. Giving everything a place helps you keep your stuff from taking over. If it doesn't have a place, it doesn't get to stay. And that's it. That's really what it is. You need to name what matters and then essentialize and put everything in its place. I have some past episodes about organizing different areas of your home or ways to think about specific areas, but ultimately you don't need a big system to tell you what to do as much as you think you do. I mean, it helps to a point for sure because systems already built, they make a difference, but only if the person who built that system has the same priorities as you. You have to name what matters most before you reorganize your home or do whatever it is you want to do

to make her space feel different than it does now. So name what matters and then use those two principles, centralize and put everything in its place to direct you as you make your decisions, one small space at a time. And that is what to do before reorganizing your home. If you like these ideas but need more direction than this episode, I have some very fun news for you. We have now opened the lazy genius store, which has all of the digital product. I've ever made available to purchase whenever you need them. No more like open door, closed door situations. You can buy them whenever you want. So that includes the swap, the lazy genius guide to decluttering for life, which is the one that makes sense in this episode. You can see that along with the meal plan,

the clean slate, and the lazy genius merch shop and my favorite tools and items from Amazon, all kinds of things at the lazy genius collective.com slash store. In the past, we've had the ebooks available for you know, limited stretches of time, but we're going to keep them up, like available forever and always, at least for the near future forever and always. So if you like the ideas in this episode, but need even more of a step-by-step plan, check out the swap in the new lazy genius store. Okay, that's it for today. Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week.

like you are living just a B or B plus life, it's so dangerous to live that. More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.