Whether you’ve been dreaming of getting organized for years now, or you just want to make sure you can still find your keys and wallet when you leave the house during the last months of 2022, Clea and Joanna have tips for anything and everything organization. Read on for The Home Edit’s top three tips for organizing your home this season
1. Start editing your items, and start small
Making the commitment to get a space in your home organized is one thing, but actually doing it is a whole other beast. Clea and Joanna’s first recommendation for anyone feeling overwhelmed by organizing is to start by editing your items. This means getting rid of anything you don’t want or need anymore before you do anything else—you can’t move on to containing or labeling your things until you know exactly what you want to keep. “The edit is the most important part of the organizing process,” Clea said. “All it takes is a decisive attitude.”
2. Categorize, contain, and label
Once you’ve gotten your space edited, you can get started with the most fun parts of home organization: categorizing, containing, and labeling. Editing and categorizing before doing anything else will show you the best possible way for you to organize a given space: it will show you if you have a few too many duplicates of one thing (it may actually be possible to own too many pairs of black boots, unfortunately).
3. Be honest with yourself about the “fussy factor”
Going through all of these steps and creating a beautifully organized space is a wonderful feeling, but at the end of the day, your organization has to be functional, too. Are you really going to want to come home from the grocery store and put all of your cereal in gorgeous glass jars on your countertop? If that’s you, then totally go for it, but there’s nothing wrong with creating systems that are lower-maintenance. “There are different levels of what we call a ‘fussy factor,’” Joanna said. “You want to be honest with yourself about how fussy you want your space to be, and what you want to put into continuing to keep it up.”