15 Extra Minutes... What You Can Do! - BB's Clutter Solutions - Professional Organizer

From Bedlam to Brilliance

There are times, I am sure, when you have an extra 15 minutes where you just want to sit, relax, and take a few deep breaths. There is certainly nothing wrong with self-care. However, self-care can also take on another form where you want to use those extra 15 minutes to get something done in your home or office.

In my world, of course, it has to do with de-cluttering and organizing. There have been a couple of times recently where I took that 15 minutes with a client and myself to do just that.

A client of mine moved into assisted living about a month ago. We are still unpacking and organizing her apartment. I had some extra time during our last session and went through one of her end table drawers in the living room. We were able to recycle and trash 95% of what was in the drawer – old catalogs, old address labels – and could make room for other items that were now important for her to have nearby.

In my own life, many of you know I love to travel. So, I always have travel articles and catalogs that I keep in an antique rice holder box (pictured above). When I started going through my collection, I was amazed at what I could recycle – articles and catalogs that went back to 2016. Since the box never looked like it was totally overflowing, I just kept putting more articles and catalogs in it. As with my client, I was able to recycle 95% of what I had stored.

This led me to think about what we can all do in 15 minutes to maintain our organizational systems. Maintenance and persistence always seem to be a large challenge in the organizing world. Developing a system or process is 1 part of the project. Another part is maintaining or tweaking what you’ve already developed.

Consider what you can do in 15 minutes. You never know what you’ll find unless you go through these areas.

· Go through a junk drawer in your kitchen, bathroom, and/or bedroom and recycle, trash, shred, or donate.

· Go through a section of your closet or a dresser drawer when you have bought something new and recycle, trash, shred or donate.

· Go through a section of your closet or a dresser drawer when you haven’t bought something new and recycle, trash, shred, or donate.

· Go through a file drawer, if you have paper files, and recycle or shred things you no longer need to keep.

· Go through some bookshelves and box up books you’ve already read or have no intention of reading and donate to a local library.

· Go through your medicine cabinet and dispose of medicines properly – do not flush down the toilet.

· Go through your make-up and discard what is old.

· Go through your spices and discard what is old.

Please feel free to add to my list. In the meantime, with those extra 15 minutes that you have, sit back and relax or go through an area of your house to see what you no longer need

Tell me, how have you spent your 15 extra minutes?