Organizing is Hard — PCP 046

Organizing can be REALLY hard. This episode is going to talk about WHY its’ hard so we can acknowledge it and move on.

This post is inspired by my blog post Organizing is Hard that I think you’ll enjoy that as well!

Big thanks to our sponsor The Organized Home — if you want to get started on organizing your home you can start for JUST a month (cancel at any time!).

And, if you’re not ready to jump into the whole class, take my free 5-Word Organization Challenge:

In this episode

• Making Less Choices
• Shirt Filing
• Sunk Costs

Other things you might enjoy:

How to organize the bathroom (I talk a lot about getting through beauty products on this one)

Producer: Drew Erickson

Check out my other household tips podcasts:

Check out all my podcasts:

Hilary Erickson 0:00
Hey guys welcome back to the pulling curls podcast today on Episode 46, we’re gonna talk about how hard it is. Organizing can be really hard, let’s untangle it. Welcome to the pulling curls podcast where we untangle everything from pregnancy, parenting, home routines, even some family travel, because heavens knows! Our lives are tangled. I’m your host, Hilary Erickson! Okay, before we jump into this podcast, let me remind you to leave a review! We really appreciate it, we really actually need some reviews. So if you could, it’d mean a lot! This episode of the pulling curls podcast is sponsored by the organized home. the realistic way to manage a home reduce clutter and clean less ever wished you could relax with Netflix rather than worrying about the state of your home or that lost paper you need?No more needing hours to prep for company be prepared for any doorbell. Let’s simplify organizing so you can enjoy life more. save 15% with the coupon code untangled you can find it at pullingcurls.com in the menu under courses, or in this episode show notes. Okay, so today’s podcast is on how organizing really is hard. And I think I say to myself, like, what’s the big deal, just, you know, power through. But like the other day, I took a bunch of stuff out of a sewing cabinet we were giving away and I had it all piled on the floor, and I just looked at it and I was like, oh, and then I was like, What is the deal? Hillary, this is not that big of a deal.

You need to get it together. That’s how I talk to myself in my head in case the rest of you don’t talk to yourself like that. And while I was doing it, I was like, This really is hard. And so I came up with three ways that organizing is hard. And I think it’s really important to say yes, there are really hard things about organizing. So number one is it can be really manual labor. You know, normally I’m actually organizing fairly small stuff, but every once in a while it’s big things and it’s a lot of physical work especially like garage work or if you have weird cabinets that you’re getting to I have a post on awkward kitchen cabinets, and they are just at the weirdest angle and the weirdest things and it’s so it’s painful to get back there and to actually organize those things. So sometimes organizing can actually be hard because it, you know, involves actual labor. And so that’s hard.

Number two, organizing can be hard because you are confronted by all these bad choices you made. Yes, sometimes you’re throwing stuff out that you have well used and has come, it’s time to be done. But a lot of times you’re organizing things or decluttering things that you probably shouldn’t have bought. And so you are staring at your bad choices in the face. And that is never a good feeling right? Especially with like beauty items because I’ll buy something thinking it’s going to be the key to de freezing my hair and then I find out that it is not the key to freezing my hair and then I cry about it a little bit and instead of throwing that product away, I put it on the shelf and thinking well maybe it will be the key in the winter 24 as my hair when that is a complete lie. It will never be the key to depressing My hair, it made it more fuzzy. So either if you bought it at a store that you can return it to return it, if you bought it at a store that you can’t return it to put it

in the trash or wherever, or if you have a friend that you think could make use of it, if it maybe just wasn’t right for your hair, you could, you know, gift it to somebody else. But get rid of it, instead of thinking like maybe it will work. Sometimes it’s almost like putting off those guilty feelings of getting rid of it somehow. And so you just put it on the shelf. And then when you’re organizing, you dig all those bad feelings up, and it doesn’t feel so great. And so that is one of the reasons why organizing is hard. And I think we need to say yes, that is hard. Now I grew up with an economist, father, my dad talk economics. And so I learned all about opportunity cost, but I also learned about sunk cost and the more and more I think of sunk costs as an adult, I realized that there are choices and things we do that are not great decisions. I mean, every decision can’t be a great decision.

And when we make them, we need to just be like that wasn’t a good choice. We’re making Moving on the worst cost of a sunk cost is if you wallow in the poor choice that you made right? Or you decide to keep every bad product that you’ve ever bought for your hair that is making the sunk cost even worse, because you’re taking up extra space, you’re taking up extra time to work on those things. Or like when you can’t find what you actually like to use, that is increasing your sunk costs. Whereas if you just decided, no, this isn’t gonna work for me, and you got rid of it, the sunk cost is actually less and so by making the poor choice longer and bigger and deeper, that isn’t helping anyone anyway. sunk cost makes organizing a little bit difficult and I would dare say it’s hard. So if anyone has ever felt that way, that you’re just confronting every poor choice you’ve made in your whole life with you.

Alright, number three, organizing is hard because it is constant decision making, even if they’re not poor choices, and you’re just trying to decide, do I need this Do I not and you know, you don’t have any guilt about those feelings. It is still really hard to make choice after choice after choice after choice, right? I want you to read some about President Obama that he had someone else pick out his clothes because he made so many choices during the day that he needed to minimize what choices he was making and clothes just wasn’t important to him. So he just had somebody else pick them out. And I kind of do my life that way as well. I do shirt filing. If you don’t want to refine this, I’ll put the link in the show notes. This is Episode 46. And I put the newest folded shirts to the back, and I just grabbed the shirt out of the front unless it’s like, you know, the wrong weather or something like that.

But I pretty much just grabbed the shirt at the front. And if I don’t like that shirt, and I keep skipping over it, I know that that shirt needs to be decluttered because there’s some reason I am not wearing it. So by making less choices, we feel a little bit better. But when we’re organizing it’s just choice after choice after choice. And that gets really draining. No, we’re not making the choice to go to war, but we are making the choice of Do I really need the same tape. You know, do I need four seam rippers is that really important to my life? And so you’re just constantly you know, going through those motions, where is an array Life in some ways, we’re really not making choices as much, we’re not constantly thinking, I need to turn right at this light, I need to turn left at that light because in our mind, it’s just a routine. And so we’re going through the routine of this is how I get to the grocery store.

But we’re not having to really make choices the whole time that we’re there. So making choices can be really draining on our brain. And you just need to acknowledge that is hard. So next time you sit down to organize and you feel that super overwhelming feeling, I want you to acknowledge that yes, this is hard. It is hard on your brain and your body. And the good news is that when you are done and you have an organized system is going to feel so great. And sometimes by just taking those first few steps and saying yes, this is probably not gonna be super fun, but let’s just get through it because I really want the benefit of having an organized space you just do so much better. If you are looking to get organized. I have actually a five word organizational challenge that’s totally free. You could find it in Episode 46. I show you how to sign up for it. We go through five words that are going to change how you see organizing and decluttering and Going through your space.

And if you use those five words, it really helps you to stay on track. And while you might say yes, this is hard, at least you will get it done. So definitely check that out. I want to thank our sponsor today, the organized home, it is a great way to get organized and get going on your home, I think you’ll really like it. So I want to challenge you to find an area in your house that really needs some organizing a small area Don’t be just like my closet, because that’s overwhelming, but maybe a shelf on your closet or a drawer in your dresser or a shelf in your bathroom and say I am cleaning out this spot and do it. Do it today. Say, it might not be fun, it might not be great, but it is going to be worth it because it totally will be worth it. And I find that once you get started on your organizing journey, it’s just gonna make a big difference and you’re going to be able to make better choices in each area of your life as you go on. If you like today’s episode, we’d love it if you would share, subscribe and review. We really appreciate it. We drop an episode every Monday and until then I hope you have a tangle free day!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai