The first lesson of being organized is to learn to discard or donate. The lesser you have , the more organized you can be as it is easy to organize smaller number of items, and it makes no sense to keep cluttering your sweet home with all those unnecessary things that you never use or even look at.
But its easy said than done when it comes to discarding things, you won't know where to start, how to go about it and at times it will be difficult to get rid of those small things that you really love, even if they don't have any value addition in your house. So, here's some golden rule that help you starting to discard or donate:
- First of all learn that discarding and donating is not a one time job. Initially when you do it for the first time, it might be most time taking. With time the frequency at which you need to do it would decrease and the amount of things that you would collect for donating or discarding, would also reduce every time you do this over. But you still need to keep doing it at regular intervals.
- I always say - donate or discard - discard or donate - because , if there is something that might not be of use to you anymore but can be used by someone else - its better to donate. there might be other things that are broken, ruined, rusted or torn so that they won't be of any use to anyone, only then should you discard them. When you start your organization spree, have two bags - mark them as "donate" and "discard" and then start with them
- Carry the above bags all through your house - slowly - maybe over a period of days (one room at a time or one closet at a time). Keep looking into every nook and corner, all the drawers, wardrobes, tables, wall hangers, bookcases and cabinets , inside files and folders and keep picking things that you no longer use or need or you can't use because they are ruined. keep putting them in the discard or donate bag as you pick them.
- If you do the above, dedicating some 15-20 mins per day then that should be sufficient enough for you to get your whole house free of unwanted things in a week's time.
- At the end, grab the bag that says "discard" and just throw it in the dustbin or hand over to the garbage collector that comes to your home to collect the garbage.
- If you would be happy to do a little bit more and contribute towards a "go green" initiative, then categorize the contents of this bag before discarding material wise - like papers, glasses, metals, tins etc. which will help save sometime for the people who can collect them from you and then recycle them, or, you can give specific things at specific places - like papers to those who collect and recycle paper, tins and cans for those who recycle them.
- One more step further, if you are also interested in DIYs and crafts & creativity, there are dozens of sites out there which would give you idea about how to recycle and use. Go ahead, explore some of them, and you might be able to build some decorative or useful pieces out of the garbage that you were about to throw.
- Now, grab the bag that says "donate" and categorize its contents. There might be different kind of things that you would have collected. They might be donatable to different kind of organizations like your children's cloths, shoes, books and copies and toys that can go to orphanages. Your own cloths, blankets, utensils, etc. can be donated to disaster relief organizations, old age homes or other such places.
- If you want to make money out of your garbage, you can as well do that. Organize a garage sale and sell off whatever you feel is no longer of use to you but others might be interested in, you can send your books & magazines to second hand book selling stores or lend them to libraries on some nominal fee. You can also sell them on ebay and facebook.
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