Room One Halving Plan

I know many of you are familiar with FlyLady.com, so I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here, but I will talk a little more about halving, organizing, paring down...whatever you want to call it.

We all have stuff that needs to be organized and taken care of, right? You may or may not be in the mood right now to pare down, but after the holidays most of us are faced with cleaning and organizing of some sort.

I'm proposing that we pick a room to work on during the month of January. First, take a second to count the number of rooms in your house. I, unfortunately, have fourteen. However, I'm not touching my husband's workroom or office, so that leaves me twelve rooms. (I count my stairs, entryway, halls and laundry room as one space).

Now pick one to work on in January. I think I'm going to pick my bedroom again. I already halved it earlier this fall, but somehow....it's not feeling halved. And since I store all my Christmas purchases in my closet during November and December it's pretty much a wreck now.

Next, break it down into trouble spots. I have:

1. closet
2. dresser
3. desk
4. under bed
5. file cabinets
6. corner shelf thing
7. television stand

Here's the big trick to halving (or organizing) - don't do it all at once. Pull out your calendar and pick a date for each trouble area. My closet and file cabinets may each take an hour, but the rest of those trouble areas are going to take 15 to 30 minutes - an easy amount of time to slip into a regular day.

I just wrote those jobs into my calendar. I put no more than two of them per week and I still have an empty week at the end of January.

What room will you work on this month?