A Little Goes A Long Way- Part 1

In the effort to get organized, one of the things that is hardest to overcome is the overwhelming wall of work that needs to be tackled. Maybe it's a room that doesn't get used all that much and so it's a convenient place to toss all the extra stuff while you are "cleaning" the parts of the house that you do use. Maybe it's the garage, or the basement. Both of these areas are out-of-sight-out-of-mind places that can be forgotten with the simple closing of a door. You might have given up on using the garage to actually park a car in years ago. Maybe it's now just an attached storage unit, and that basement, well it can wait until you have to move, right? Someday it will be time, but not now.

The thing is, most of the time we create a much bigger job in our minds than the one that actually exists in the space itself. Our time is valuable and we look at that mountain of stuff and think, "I just don't have an entire day to devote to working on this, so I'm just going to leave the door shut." We are closing our minds, as firmly as we close the door.

Yes, to do the job from start to finish might take a day, or a weekend, or a week. It's true, it would be good to get it done, but if you know that you are just going to keep putting it off until you have time, when why not fit the job into the time you do have? Why not figure out what kind of time you can devote to decluttering that space, every day, every week, or once a month even? You aren't doing anything about it now, so small bites are going to be progress.

What does the clutter in that space consist of? Bins of paperwork? The belongings of children who have moved on? The belongings of relatives who have passed on?
Start by simply going into the space and taking inventory.
What are we dealing with here? What's it going to need down the road; shelf systems? better lighting? Just estimate from what you see. Is this going to be a lot of tossing, donating, passing along to family or creating a more workable storage system? It's probably a combination of all of these, but just going to the stuff and taking a mental picture places the task in a higher priority in your mind. It makes it something you are working on.

There, you have taken the first step. You're done for the day. You've started to put a mental plan together, so the next step is going to be another small one. You'll start to write out your plan, setting managable goals.
You are doing something about it.
A little time, consistantly and faithfully, goes a long way.