How to Start Getting Organized, Part 2 | Clutter Video Tip

⚡️ UPDATE: The Clutter Diet program has officially ended. I’m now helping professionals and entrepreneurs with personal branding and communication at 👉 BePutTogether.com ✨
When I think of pitfalls, I automatically begin to daydream about headlines Like "Brad Pitt Falls for Local Organizing Expert"- swoon! Mr. Pitt is darn dreamy, but he has nothing to do with organizing projects so let's get back on subject. In today's video Lorie Marrero shares four pitfalls that you may encounter when you are in the sorting stage of your project. Keeping these pitfalls in mind when you begin your project will help you deal with them and ultimately overcome them more effectively. This will make your organizing time more productive, so you will have more time to star gaze. ;)

Pitfalls:
1. Category Confusion
2. The Scary Phase
3. Elsewhere
4. Memory Lane

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Hi. I'm Lorie Marrero and today's Clutter Video Tip is Part 2 on the sorting process of your organizing project. In Part 1 we talked about general approaches to sorting and now we're going to talk about some of the pitfalls that you might run into during this stage.

First you might be confused about what category to sort your items into, and you want to think about what are the first questions you're going to be asking yourself when you look for these items later. The answer to those questions is going to dictate whether you sort things by function, by type or color, by priority or date, or by the owner of the item. Whatever that is, there's lots of choices, but think abut how you're going to most easily find and manage those items later on and that's going to help you decide.

Another pitfall that you will run into is that you'll be in what we call "the scary phase." And some people are very unnerved by the idea of their stuff being all spread out over the floor, it definitely gets worse before it gets better, so just accept that and move forward through this stage of the process and know that that visibility [POP] is quite necessary for you to be able to make decisions about all those items and put them in the right categories and know what containers you're going to need and lots of other information that you need to finish the project. So just push through it and everything will be fine.

Another pitfall that you'll run into is the "elsewhere" pitfall, where during your sorting you find things that belong in another room. So don't get distracted by taking those things into the other room right now. You want to use something like -- we recommend a paper sack most of the time -- just write the name of the room on the paper sack and immediately sort the items into those sacks [POP] and stay focused. Stay right there and finish your project instead of, you know, moving out into other areas of the house.

Another pitfall that you'll run into is the "memory lane" pitfall. So you're going to run into a lot of old objects that you haven't seen in a while and it could be a lot of fun to reminisce. But if you're sitting in an armchair with a box of old letters or old photos you're going to be wasting a lot of time that you could be using to finish your project. So you want to stay at a high level and get a lot of the sorting done and get things really cleared out and finished, and then you can have fun taking those boxes of photos later, as a reward, and sitting down with them. [POP]

If you have trouble with this, we really recommend working with a friend. It can make it more fun, this friend can provide objectivity to you that you don't have, and also this friend can keep you from getting distracted. We talk a lot about having a motivation partner or accountability partner. And we often serve this role for our members in our Member Message Board area. You can find out more about our program where we have a team of organizing experts available seven days a week for a very affordable price, about the price of a pizza in fact. You can see more about this at clutterdiet.com/learnmore.

See you next time, and