There I am, in my stiff scrubs, at 6:15 am — lunch in hand, ready to take on a new day of nursing.  When I grab my keys and woah.  They’re not there.

Ever happen to you?  Frankly, I have spent a huge part of my life spending hours looking for my keys.  I just couldn’t find a home I could remember to put them in when I got home.  My husband would look at me with “that look” every time he said “oh, I need to find your keys” — yup, buddy, you do.

With little kids my hands were always so full.  Full of diaper bags, carseats, little hands, toys, groceries, my head — wondering why I’d had so many kids!

But, now it’s more about me.  I have teens to haul in groceries, and I am so thankful I no longer have a carseat to haul in.

But I’m still me.  I still have a really hard time putting things back in their right place.

It’s who I am.  I’m 40 years old and while I’ve REALLY tried to work on it (I’d guess my keys are on the hook about 90% of the time now) it’s me.  Keys are my downfall.  Althouhg, I do have an lot of organization bright spots (check out my organized home page that links to all of them).

Flash to my 16 year old son.  His wallet is his arch nemesis (Frankly, it would be keys, except he doesn’t ever use keys – thanks to a programmable garage door).  We’ve gotten about 6 bus passes in 2 years.  #fail  But, he just got a debit card (and a fancy checking account to go with it) and while there is hardly any more than 10 bucks in that account — I want to teach him how to keep his things.

Find Your Keys:

A few tips we’ve worked on for keys or wallets:

1.  Get a bright wallet ~ Make it easy to find.  He got a wallet that is bright yellow.  So, at least it doesn’t blend in, or get lost at the bottom of his backpack.  For my keys, they’re pretty large and that helps me find them when they’re in the wrong pocket on my purse (sadly, happens frequently).
2. Put it in the same spot EVERY time.  This is something we both struggle with (more on that later).  My mind is just full of ideas and other things I want to move on to when I get in the door.  I also have one pocket that is designated for my keys in my purse.  If I put them there — that’s questionable. 🙂
3. This is part of #2 — but make sure you HAVE A spot. Having a spot where things go is one of my favorite organizing tactics.  Makes my life SO much easier!

Ok, a quick little plug for parenting to who your kids are.  I think, before reading the Child Whisperer I would have just told my son that it was something he needed to get over.  But, after reading the book — I truly realized this is just something he REALLY struggles with (and I was able to more clearly see that it was something I struggled with).  Instead of trying to change who we innately were — we needed to work with our challenges and see a way around it.

So, I got us The Tile.

**Bought with my own money, for our family — this is not a sponsored post. ** 🙂

And I love it.

It’s super handy.  There are a lot of devices out there, similar, but this one had the cool feature that my keys can find my phone, and I can also find his wallet for him or whatnot since we can all share tiles (or, he can help find my keys).

They have a lot of cool videos that show how it works:

While I do love my tile, that’s not what this post is about.  It’s about finding out your organizational weaknesses.  Finding the snags that consistently happen in your day (like not being able to find your keys) and figuring out a way to work around it.

The beauty of the internet is that we can find products that might help support us in areas that we are weak on.  Things like the tile.

So, here’s the big question on this post — what is YOUR weakness, and have you thought about a work around.  OR, have you already found a work around?

If you liked this post, you might like energy profiling.  While it sounds kind of “out there” it really did help me find out who I was, and how I could best support myself.  All of myself, the things I’m amazing at and enjoy, along with the things that drug me down.  It’s been REALLY helpful.

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