HOT MESS // Gear

We should all have something to do that is creative, enjoyable, and connects us to a community outside of our home and our workplace.

However, we too often confuse owning gear with having hobbies.

Let’s take a common example. You want to get into yoga. You want to get in shape, be among like-minded people, improve your physical and mental flexibility, and take time for self-care. Great! Where do you start?

You probably buy a mat. Then you get a special tote bag that can hold the mat. Next you go out and buy new leggings, tops, sports bras, headbands, and slip on sandals that would make you look like a yogi. Now your internet cookies are telling Amazon to show you other assorted yoga gear, and you buy some blocks, and maybe even a blanket and some straps.You figure you might as well get a new water bottle, too. Into the cart it goes.

You have all of this equipment now, so you’ll definitely get really into yoga, right?

Unlikely.

If you’re anything like most people, that equipment will collect dust in a closet while you remain “too busy” to actually do yoga. You think that the expenditure of money will spur you into using all that gear, but it won’t. You’ll feel guilty and frazzled looking at all that expensive unused gear, and you might actually avoid the gear to avoid feelings of disappointment that you haven’t become the person you hoped you would yet.

You only do an activity by actually doing that activity. And for that, you don’t need to buy and store gear. You need to schedule and protect TIME.

If you want to get into something, or renew your commitment to something, make the time, get it on the schedule, and then do it with what you already have. Or you can borrow or rent the gear as you’re establishing your hobby habit.

Get into the routine of doing your activity of choice first to ensure that making room in your budget and home for gear of your own is something you’ll actually benefit from.

You may borrow a mat, blocks, straps, etc. at the yoga studio, and wear the comfortable clothes you already own. (You and I both know you already own the pajamas-in-public we call yoga pants.)

You can take great photos in the golden hour each evening with your smartphone before upgrading to a DSLR. You can get into the routine of sketching each morning with a standard issue no.2 pencil before upgrading to that set of charcoal pencils.

Once your hobby time is on a recurring schedule and your routine is established, integrating the gear will be be simple and seamless. Then, and only then,  should you purchase the gear.

But only if you write it on your shopping list first.

HOT MESS// Target Dollar Spot

Target Dollar Spot is the greatest masterpiece of some evil marketing genius. It's positioned RIGHT when you walk in the store so you can't help but pass by it. It is cheap, so so so cheap, that the dopamine floods your brain at the sight of all these "steals." And it's seasonal and ever-changing, so you feel just a little bit panicky on missing out on a great find. Visibility, urgency, a feeling of getting something for nothing = a trifecta of manipulation trying to separate you from your money.

But Dollar Spot items are typically the first to get the axe when a person purges. These objects are almost always impulse buys so they don’t fill a true need or serve a true purpose in the home. They are poorly made from low quality materials so they’re damaged easily. They are trendy and highly stylized, so they look dated and frivolous quickly.

They are rarely treasured, and frequently discarded.

I’m a reformed Target Dollar Spot shopper myself before becoming absolutely insistent on sticking to The Shopping List. Never have I ever written “novelty ice cube tray” on my shopping list, so once I built up that list-following muscle, my dollar spot purchases were eliminated.

Next time you’re in Target (or any other retailer that combines visibility, low prices, and FOMO to separate you from your money), try these baby steps:

Set a timer for 3 minutes. You may walk through the dollar spot for these 3 minutes. Touch nothing.  Seriously. Hands in your pockets or folded behind your back the whole time. Don’t check the price, don’t look for other styles or colors, don’t lay on finger on anything.

I'm a firm believer that the moment you touch something, you subconsciously feel a tiny sense of ownership over it, and you're more likely to go ahead and make that ownership official with a swipe of the card.  

When your timer goes off, you must leave the dollar spot. No exceptions.

Did you see something that could satisfy a need? Unlikely. But let’s indulge you for a moment here, and say you spotted something that would solve a problem in your home or life. (No, having rectangular ice cubes is not a problem.) Take out your Shopping List and write the item at the bottom. Then go on with your intended shopping.

If you'd like to return to purchase a selected item from the dollar spot, you may do so only after completing your other shopping.

Chances are great that you will forget to do so, or return with more objective eyes that can see that those items are not worth it now that you actually have a cart full of needful things that you actually intended to purchase.

Make that impulse buy less impulsive by requiring you wait until the intended shopping is done, and make the trek back to the dollar spot. Those two tiny obstacles of time and effort will likely diminish your “need” for the object, and you can delete/cross off the item as if you had never even written it down and get the heck out of there.

Mastered those baby steps? Great. Now, up the ante. Do not enter the dollar spot. I repeat, do not enter the dollar spot. You know everything in there is cheaply made crap, the likes of which succumbed to a big black garbage bag when you last did a purge. You know you made your list well before your trip to the store, and before you were under the influence of these sly marketing tactics. Stick to your list and keep it moving. Leave the store with more money in your bank account and less junk coming in to your home.

Remember, today’s impulse buy is tomorrow’s clutter.

HOT TIP // Keep Your Stuff

You have my permission to keep your stuff. Go ahead. You’ve made it this far, and you’re most likely able to open the front door to your home and go to the grocery store and whatnot. Sure, you have to search high and low to find your phone charger every once in a while, but you’re doing alright. Heck, I’ll even come and organize your home with each and everything currently inside.

Here’s the caveat: don’t acquire anything else until your current stuff is used up.

Wear those jeans until the seams split. Eat all of those jars of salsa. Use your current cell phone. Use that moisturizer until you are scraping the bottom.

We all have too much stuff. And our consumption of more and more and cheaper and cheaper stuff is ruinous to our planet, not to mention our bank accounts.

The natural resources, human labor, transportation costs it took the get your existing stuff to the store have already been spent.

The time and money it took to get your existing stuff from the store into your home has already been spent.

There would be even more resources and energy spent dealing with your stuff were you to just discard it.

If you’re just purging all of your things so that you can acquire a whole set of slightly newer things, I’d almost rather you didn’t.

If you can’t use them up because your baby grew up or you lost a bunch of weight, find someone else who can so that at least they don’t have to go out and buy new stuff with a similar cost of resources, energy, and labor.

It’s important to tidy the objects in your home, but it’s even more important to stem the tide in the first place.

HOT MESS // Smug Shopping

I'm all about voting with your dollar. I avoid shopping at stores or buying brands that are associated with policies or political opinions I find problematic, and I will continue to do so.  

The flipside of that for me, however, started to become an unhealthy and unproductive over-identification with stores and brands I do feel comfortable supporting. I was excusing myself from making needless purchases because the brand donates to charity, or because the store gives its employees fair pay.

I was excusing impulse buys at Michaels by telling myself that at least they don't bar their employees from collective bargaining or deny female employees full insurance coverage like Hobby Lobby, when in reality I don't need another sketchbook. I was scrolling through the REI website for nothing in particular because they minimize their participation in Black Friday madness. In reality, I don't need to go shopping at ANY outdoor equipment retailer for ANY outdoor equipment because, truly, how many headlamps does one woman need? (Answer: one per head.)

So what if TOMS gives away of pair of shoes for every pair purchased? YOU still don't need another pair of shoes. So what if Newman's Own donates all of its profits to worthy causes? YOU still have three bottles of salad dressing in your fridge. Justifying a purchase because it's more socially conscious or sustainable than some alternative purchase is a slippery slope towards smug and self-congratulatory excessive consumption. Let's not kid ourselves; none of us are saving the world with our purchases.

If you need something, and you wrote it on your list, and you've waited the appropriate amount of time, then yes, purchase it. Support your local economy at a great store that treats its employees fairly. Choose brands that take responsibility for their environmental and social impact. Try very hard not to make the world worse. Vote with your dollar.

But remember: Voting with your dollar is not ACTUALLY VOTING, which we should all be doing frequently and enthusiastically. And more often than not, buying nothing is often the best choice we can make.*

*Unless it's fresh lemonade from kind and entrepreneurial children. In that case, buying nothing probably makes us jerks. 

HOT TIP // Rethink Your S.P.A.C.E.

I get it, hiring an organizer can be a bit nerve-wracking at first. My clients feel at ease once they’re familiar with my process, which I’ve adapted from many leaders in the field, including Queen Marie Kondo, Gretchen Rubin, Laurie Palau, Amanda Sullivan, Julie Morgenstern and many, many library trips worth more.

Once they understand the process, clients are able to work alongside me to see profound results in their home. So, here’s what we’ll do, step by step, so you can feel more at ease, too.

Let’s make some S.P.A.C.E. in your home. First things first:

Sort

You bought thank you notes in January and stashed them in a desk drawer. You bought thank you notes in June and stashed them in a file cabinet. Then, you need a thank you note in December and look in the bin of wrapping paper, gift bags, and bows, and upon finding no thank you notes there, head to the store and buy them again.

Repeat a similar process with batteries, black cardigans, chapstick, jars of almond butter, etc.

The first step to bmore minimal is to sort. Like with like, in one visible spot, thoroughly and completely. Every single jacket is heaped onto the bed, whether you pulled it from a bedroom closet, a hook by the front door, the off-season bin in the hall closet, or from a pile of clean clothes in the dryer.

Sorting helps you confront the sheer volume of objects you have and get a handle on what you need to replenish and what you need to use up. Plus you get to spot redundancies and compare your well-utilized treasures to your least-favorite versions of those same items and prepare for the purge.

Purge

I couldn’t call this thing bmore minimal without encouraging a good purge, right? So you’ve done the sort, and now you’re ready to put those big black garbage bags to work. It’s time to cull.

Touch everything and commune with your objects to see if it sparks joy.

Or, touch nothing at all, and have me hold them up from across the room so you can bid them adieu with impunity.

Just be honest, ruthless, and decisive. Use the “maybe” pile sparingly. Question yourself about all of the things in that category: is this a treasure imbued with special memories or an unwanted anchor to the past? Is this supporting my present life and ambitions, or am I holding onto this out of anxiety about what the future holds?

Sell it, donate it, gift it. If you can’t do those things, dispose of it responsibly.

Unburden yourself from these things and reclaim your time! According to the National Soap and Detergent Association, 40% of household chores are caused by clutter in the home. And those soap nerds put a lot of money into studying this stuff.

And obviously, reclaim that real estate in your home for your newly curated set of possessions.

Assign a Home

You don’t just live in Baltimore. You live at X house number on X street in Baltimore. Knowing that address is the only way the post office knows how to find you and deliver your junk mail.

Give all of your possessions an address. Be as specific as you can. Pens don’t just go in the office. Pens go in the third compartment of the drawer divider in the top drawer of the desk in the office. That’s how you’ll know where to find them and where to return them. It’s the image of all your great pens in that third compartment of the drawer divider in the top drawer of the desk in the office that will come to mind as you’re offered a flimsy, underinked promotional pen from that conference and help you say “Nah.”

And while we’re on the subject, a storage unit along a desolate patch of highway is not an address. Your possessions belong in your home, or they probably shouldn’t be your possessions anymore. Short-term storage due to the timing of a move or the gap between the birth of your babies is one thing. We’ve all spent a night sleeping in a crappy hotel knowing full well that we’d get to come home to our own beds. Your possessions can spend a few nights in a crappy storage unit but they deserve to come home sooner than later. Otherwise, let them go.

Contain

So you have all your favorite objects assigned to logical spots in your home. Now is the time to contain them. This could mean literally, as in putting things into containers. Or it could mean metaphorically setting boundaries on where these things can be by putting them in zones.

Here’s what that looks like in my home, from the most literally contained to the most metaphorically contained.

I have a container for meat on a shelf in my fridge. This leaves the produce drawers just for produce (okay fine, sometimes beer, but mostly fruit, I swear!) and prevents raw meat from contaminating other food. I also can’t keep buying Aidell’s sausages until I’ve used up what I have, because the container sets the boundary. I open the fridge multiple times a day every day, so having an actual container within is reasonable.

I have a small canvas closet system in my basement. All the things I buy in bulk from BJ’s are there. Toilet paper, paper towels, etc. There are no additional containers, no cute labels, and, frankly, it’s not pretty in there. But the point is it’s IN THERE. The closet sets the boundary for bulk toiletries and paper goods, and I refrain from buying more until there is space within that container. I access that space once a month or less, so there’s no need to have it more containerized than that.

I have a open space in my basement. One on side of this little room is summer stuff: beach chairs, camping equipment, patio cushions. On the other side of this little room is winter stuff: Christmas decorations, snow shovels, a super awesome extendable windshield scraper (thanks, Dad!). There’s a tiny section with our firebox of serious adulting papers, and one file box for each of us of other papers we’d like to keep for now. I can’t accumulate more summer stuff because then it would cross the invisible line into winterland. I can’t get another file box without it crossing over to summerville. These categories of objects have to stay in their lane, “contained”even without traditional containers. I access the stuff down here on a seasonal basis, so it only needs to be “contained” in zones and it really doesn’t need to look great to be functional.

If you’re going to buy containers, measure twice, buy once. And don’t buy a single container before the sort and the purge, or you’ll be containing things that shouldn’t even be in your home at all. Not to mention the fact that you probably have all the containers you need hiding in your home, waiting to be liberated from holding the expired medicine you’ve hoarded.

Matching all your containers in a space is great for reducing visual clutter, but simply coordinated is fine, too. Go for all wood, or all acrylic, or all canvas, so that even if you purchase at different times or from different stores the result is a clean look.

Skip the labels if you’re not into that sort of thing, but get your containers/zones to be specific enough that they could be labeled if you wanted them to, e.g. baking supplies, hats and gloves, bulbs and batteries, almonds, etc.

And no, “miscellaneous” is a not a viable label.

Establish Routines

Congratulations! You’ve sorted, purged, assigned, and contained your belongings. That is no small feat.

I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want first? I’ll assume you’re on this organization blog because you tend toward the neurotic, so I’ll assume you want the bad news first.

The bad news is that clutter is like a weed. If left unchecked, it will return, slowly growing through the cracks in your system until it has reasserted itself as a presence in your home. Your organization efforts are not over, and in many ways, they are just beginning.

The good news is that you will never have to lay out the same expenditure of time and energy towards organizing your home again. The truly demanding stuff is behind you, and your task now is to maintain your systems with brief and intermittent periods of vigilance against clutter.

This final step is to establish routines. What is your routine for incoming mail? I check the mailbox daily, open mail standing over the desk in the kitchen right away, recycle junk immediately, and store bills and papers to be filed in the little organizer on the desk in kitchen. On the 20th of each month (arbitrary date, but before bills are due) I handle each paper that has been stored. Your routine will look different, but it must keep you from succumbing to piling envelopes on a dining table for weeks on end like before.

Have a routine for doing and putting away laundry.

Put your keys in the same place every time you come home.

Dedicate a bin in the closet or basement to clothes your kids have outgrown.

Have a spot near the door for library books you’re ready to return.

Check your pantry once a week before heading to the store.

Think about the system as you design it, and then put it on autopilot.

Sort. Purge. Assign. Contain. Establish.

That’s it. That’s S.P.A.C.E. in 1500 words. There are no “industry secrets” here. Just make sure everything in your home has a purpose and a place.

And if you’d like some help in this endeavor, drop me a line here. It would be my pleasure to work with you.