Quick review of O.N. chapters

Getting back into using the book Organize Now! to guide my chaos taming has been very helpful! I’d forgotten I had a map for my next moves and it’s injected some vigor into my day.  I showed off my craft room a couple days ago and wanted to quickly review previous chapters since I moved into our new house.

I ended up reviewing all of the first four chapters again: Organize Your Mind & Life Vision, Organize Your Priorities, Organize Your Schedule, and Organize Your Cleaning Schedule. Very good reminders of the things I need to TAKE ACTION on to actually bring into my life – another motivating force.  I didn’t change much except for my chore list.  I haven’t done much cleaning since my first child was born (2.5 years ago!), so I adjusted my expectations and, after looking through Pinterest for ideas, changed how I organized and presented my chores. I’m pretty excited by this – I think it’s slick! The primary inspiration came from Of The Hearth’s tutorial, but I expanded it by adding more layers. Her chart shows rotating chores that aren’t scheduled by day, but here is my chart (not very pretty, though!) which is scheduled:

• The center, green square has the daily chores that can happen (although watering outdoor plants is no longer needed).
• The yellow squares show the chores that can happen each day of the week and it repeats because that is how I was able to get it to fit with the month chores that come next.  It is meant to happen each week, not just the first two weeks of the month.
• Purple squares are for monthly chores and I put them in specific date squares, but only because it spread them out evenly throughout the month.
• And finally, the blue squares list chores that should happen once or twice a year.

I feel NO compulsion to adhere intently to these days, dates, or frequencies. I see this as a guideline for the ideal situation.

Back to the book, I flipped through the next group of chapters (Organizing Your Papers) and I felt I was keeping up with all of that great. The husband and I even organized our books in our office (non-fiction – by topic, and fiction by author)!  I did come across some books and things that I was keeping out of nostalgia and will be featured in future posts. And then they were all recycled!  Yahoo!

Now I am back to “Organize Your Things” group of chapters and should be organizing my car next. I want to create a comprehensive emergency kit in the car, so this will take a bit of research and saving for shopping to get it done.