Use the Organizational Triangle to Keep Your Home Organized
When you finally decide to declutter and organize your home, the initial cleaning and restructuring is important (and therefore satisfying), but maintaining order later on will be a more challenging task. To lead a more organized and streamlined life in the long term, focus on three pillars that form what is called the “organizational triangle.”
What is an organizational triangle?
This three-tier approach provides a three-step process for keeping your home clean:
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Every thing needs a home
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Keep liking and liking
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Use a “something in, something out” approach
Keep these three principles in mind during your initial cleaning, as well as later, to ensure your space stays tidy and doesn’t require another big cleaning a year or so later. Here’s a deeper look at what each step involves.
Step 1: Every item needs a home
This step is critical when you’re just starting out. No matter which of the many available cleaning methods you choose, you will almost certainly end up categorizing your possessions by whether you want to keep them, throw them away, donate them, or sell them. When negotiating your territory with organizational triangle tenants, you need to carefully evaluate everything you decide to keep.
This is because every item in your home should have its own designated place, be it a specific drawer, cabinet, basket or shelf. If you can’t think of a permanent home for something, you either need to build one or get rid of the thing. Nothing should float, move from space to space, or remain homeless in your home. The reason for this is simple: everything you want to access needs to be somewhere you know you can find it. It should only be in one of two places: in the designated place or in your hands. Decluttering is of no use if the remaining items end up in a heap on the table or are not easy to find when you really need them.
Step 2. Keep likes like likes
The second step is to reorganize your space to always keep the same things together. For example, don’t keep some screwdrivers in the garage and others in the kitchen, even though it seems intuitive that when you need a screwdriver for some indoor work, it will be more convenient to have one nearby. Don’t keep a basket of batteries in every room; collect them all together. Etc.
If you have AA batteries in a drawer in the living room in case you need them for the remote control, and all the other batteries are in a bin in the kitchen cabinet, you may not remember where to find those AA batteries when the remote control is for the fan in your bedroom. goes out. You go through the kitchen basket, find nothing, and buy AA batteries at the store, wasting your money. Meanwhile, radiators will create even more clutter in the living room.
Step 3: Some in, some out
Something in, something out is a proven organizational method that should only be used once you’ve completed the initial phase of decluttering and are moving into a more organized lifestyle. But it’s pretty simple: when you get something new, get rid of something old to make room for it. If you follow the rules of the organizational triangle, you know that there needs to be a place for everything, but space is limited. Don’t put too many things on shelves and drawers, otherwise they will become cluttered too.
If a space can fit a lot of items, that’s great, but most of the time you need to be strategic about how much stuff you accumulate. If you can only use one item at a time and are committed to following the rules above about returning each item to its place when you’re done using it, there’s no point in having more than one item. Accumulating multiple objects only makes it easier for you to break the rule about returning things to their place after use. Following the “something goes in, something goes out” rule can also serve as a check on your impulse buying habit, since you will know that buying something new means getting rid of something old.