Last night my good friend Cara from The Household Helper held a seminar about getting your home organized once and for all. As someone with Attention Deficit Disorder, I’ve always struggled with keeping my house clean and organized.
Cara had a lot of great tips to share - I took pages of notes! Here are a couple of my favorites:
Organizing your bills:
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Have a place and a container for all of your bills, and a binder for keeping track of paid bills.
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Each day when you get the mail, sort through it, throw out any junk, and add the bills to your container.
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Designate one day a week to handle the bills. (This is the part I always used to get stuck on. I could put the bills away, but remembering to deal with them in a timely manner was sometimes a challenge. I solved that problem. See here for details.)
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When you pay the bill, note the date, amount paid, and check number on the bill. Use a 3 hole punch on the bill so that you can insert it into your binder (or use those plastic sheet protectors).
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When you pay the same bill the following month, you can discard the previous month’s copy, unless you need it for tax purposes.
Where to begin:
If you’ve got Attention Deficit Disorder, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by a disorderly home. You want to get organized, but you don’t know where to begin. Here’s what Cara says:
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Pick the area of the home that’s causing the most stress and begin there. If your kitchen is a mess and you can barely prepare meals without aggravation, that’s the place to start.
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Pick an easy to do task first. Some people need immediate success in order to stay motivated, and a small start is just the thing for that. Find a small area that you see every day that bothers you because it’s so messy. It could be as simple as a table top. Clear it off and keep it that way. It will motivate you to do more.
- If you just don’t know where to begin, Cara suggests that catching up on the laundry is a great place to start. Laundry is certainly one of my stress points, so I can agree with her on that!
If you’d like to know more about Cara’s ideas for organizing, she’s got a special going right now. You can buy her “Household Helper’s Guide to Home Organization” for just $8.97 and also get “Organizing the Kids” for free! Click the image below for more information.
