040. How To Start Your Organizing Journey: The 5 Simple Steps To Organize Your Home Sustainably

2025 can definitely be the year you become organized for beautiful living! In this episode, I'm sharing the 5 simple steps that I use for every organizing project I do, whether for myself or for clients.

It's my CLEAR5 Framework:

1. Clarify
2. Limit
3. Edit
4. Assign Homes, and
5. Review

You'll hear exactly what each step entails, and how to get organized in a sustainable way.

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Transcript

In this episode, we’re starting fresh again! I’m going to tell you exactly how I declutter and organize in 5 simple steps.

And over the next few episodes, I’m going to lay out everything you need to get yourself organized this year.

I’m talking holistically here, so your home, your schedule, and your priorities as well.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not an inherently organized person! I mean, I had to put real effort into getting and staying organized.

But, I didn’t want the process of being organized to be what I spent significant time on every day, right?

And I don’t think you do either. So the idea behind this podcast is to give you ideas to reach a place where you are organized for beautiful living.

Now, everyone’s definition of beautiful living might be different, right? But I think there are common themes that all of us would consider Beautiful Living: it’s living more socially, connecting with others more at work and in our personal lives. It’s also living more sustainably, thinking carefully about what we’re buying, consuming and discarding. It’s working more intently, being able to prioritize to really move our career or our work forward in a meaningful way.

And it’s also when we’re organized enough to not have to think about organizing. We are organized, and so we can do things more easily - we can live more easily, whether that’s inviting people over at the last minute, taking on a new project at work, or doing something specific with our families. 

And we do all these things without stress. Instead, we do them with excitement. And we’re organized enough that doing these things doesn’t drain us. Instead, they energize us. Now we might be tired physically after hosting a soccer families’ Christmas gathering, but we’re not emotionally drained by it because it doesn’t take everything out of us to plan and execute whatever it is we would like to do.

So today, I want to tell you how to declutter and organize sustainably in 5 simple steps that I call the CLEAR5 Framework.

To achieve this state where you are organized for beautiful living, one of the biggest things we have to do is declutter and place things where they need to go. To create systems that support how we do things - again, so we’re not actively organizing and reorganizing all the time.

Over my years as a professional organizer, I’ve developed how I approach decluttering and placing things into 5 simple steps.

I call these 5 steps to follow for any organizing objective you may have the CLEAR5 Framework. Thinking of the acronym CLEAR is an easy way to remember each step, and the number 5 because it is 5 steps we must follow.

CLEAR stands for Clarify, Limit, Edit, Assign Homes and Review.

In the Clarify step, you clarify your vision for how you want to feel and function in your home. 

This is a really big deal. Before you begin taking stuff out of your closet, you need to know what it is that you want to achieve in there.

Is it that you want your mornings to run more smoothly, and being able to get dressed easily, in a space that inspires you and makes you feel good will help the morning be smoother?

And then, what does that look like in your mind? What does that closet look like? Would you need to invest in a custom closet solution? Or can you make some simple tweaks and still have a space that will make you feel good? A space that feels good for you to be in? 

Once you clarify this vision for your spaces, you’ll have little mental movie clips of how you see yourself and your family living in your home.

Each of the clips becomes part of the overall vision for how you want your home to function.  And they become a very real guide to making the decisions about what you want to keep, and what you want to let go of as you declutter.

So, you have a little mental movie of you getting ready in your closet in the morning. What do your clothes look like in there? Well, they’re probably not jam-packed into the drawers or packed tightly onto hangers is my guess. And depending on what your closet looks like now, that will probably lead you to realize that maybe you need to reduce the amount of clothing you have.

Or, if all you have in your closet right now is the one wire shelf to hang things on, you might decide that you need to invest in a dresser or in a custom closet solution.

If you don’t have that vision, or a mental picture of how you want your space to feel or function when you’re done, you’ll have a very hard time while decluttering. But when you realize that in order to have that specific mental picture, that you need to live with less, it will make it easier for you to donate some things that maybe you’ve been hanging on to.


The next step is Limit. This is the step where you define the physical limits of where you’ll keep your stuff.

Going back to the closet example, unless you’re remodeling and adding space to your closet, the physical space you have is defined. So now, you can work within the confines of your closet walls to set limits for how much space you’re going to allow for various types of clothing.

For example, let’s say you have 5 drawers in your closet. You can define one drawer for socks and underwear, one for folded tops, like t-shirts and sweaters, one for pajamas, one for workout wear, and one for accessories, like scarves, hats or jewelry.

But let’s say that as you start decluttering and organizing you realize that you own way more tops than can fit into one drawer. Well then, you have a choice to make. If you allow 2 drawers for tops, then what are you going to give up? Maybe you’ll pare down your workout wear so they can fit in the same drawer as your pajamas. Or maybe you’ll decide, well, no, you need that space for pajamas and workout clothes, so you HAVE to cut down on the number of tops so they fit into that one drawer.

And now, you need to stick to those limits. When you buy new things, and they don’t fit into the drawers, you need to cut back. It’s this discipline that will keep you organized.

It’s simple, right? It’s not always easy. That’s why having that vision from the Clarify step is so important. It keeps your ultimate goal in your mind all the time as motivation.

The next step is Edit. This is normally what you think of when you hear “home organizing”. It’s when you sort through your things, and choose what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to let go of. 

So now you’ve got your Clarity, your vision, you’ve set your limits. And if something fits into your vision and your limit, you keep it. If not, you let go of it. 

Of course, that’s very simplistic. The reason why this Edit step is difficult is because we are very attached to our stuff.

You might think that the hardest things to declutter are sentimental things, right? Wedding gifts that have been in storage for years, or gifts given to you by loved ones. But the truth is, anything that’s in your possession becomes difficult to part with sometimes!

Even something as innocuous as paper clips. Who really cares about paper clips? But for someone who purchased those paper clips, all of a sudden, they’re thinking, “Am I wasting money by donating these? I spent good money on those! What if I need 50 paper clips a month from now or 2 months from now? I’m going to have to re-buy them!”

That’s a silly example, I know, but these are real questions people ask, and it’s a big reason why they can’t seem to stick to a limit that they set, or to let go of things that are not part of their vision.

By the way, this is called the Endowment Effect, it’s a cognitive bias that makes you value something that you own more than its market value.

Not everything we try to declutter falls into the endowment effect, though, right? There are items of real value that we often need to declutter from our homes in order to achieve that state of Beautiful Living. 

Can you see why this is sometimes hard to do alone? It becomes easier to do when you have someone to talk it through with, to talk about the alternatives, to reset your limits. It’s a big reason why people hire professional organizers. 

Right. The next step is Assign homes. In this step, we choose where and how you’ll arrange your things and put them away. 

Looking at our closet example again, if you wear more formal clothes to the office every weekday, well, you’ll want those things easily accessible in the prime areas of your closet so it makes getting ready as easy as possible for you. And maybe you’ll also want certain accessories available for work, so we’ll contain and arrange those up front, and the accessories that you use less often can go behind.

If you need drawer dividers, boxes, baskets or bins, this is the step where you’ll choose them.

And the last step is Review. The goal of this step is to come up with how you’re going to keep your home organized in just a few minutes a day. What are the key few things you need to do each day to stay organized?

Sometimes it’s the same thing each day, like run the dishwasher if you have a big family or, you know, do your laundry every Saturday.

But on other days it might be putting away laundry, or checking that the shoes are all in their cubbies in the entryway.

You define all of these little tasks, but because you’ve already organized in the way that fits your vision of how you want to live and function in your home, the tasks are easy and they’re basic. So they only take about 5 to 10 minutes each day.

This Review step is also about reviewing your home as you go about living your life each day. So let’s say you’re putting your tops away after doing laundry, and you notice that it’s become a little messy in that drawer. Well rather than just push your laundered tops in there and calling it a day, take the 30 seconds you might need to re-fold and rearrange the shirts in there so that drawer is neat again.

I call this micro-organizing, and it’s just taking a few seconds to review a space you’re actively using while you’re using it, to leave it in order before you move on. 

You won’t have to do this in every space in your home every day, of course, but doing this type of review consistently will keep your home organized long-term, and with minimal effort.

And that’s the CLEAR5 Framework:
Clarify, Limit, Edit, Assign Homes and Review

And woven into each step are your habits and your family’s schedule and habits.

The systems you put into place have to work for you. We look at all of that certainly in the Clarify step, but also in each of the other 4 steps of the framework.

We also pay attention to your consumption patterns. How often do you purchase things and what effect do they have on your home? When you discard things, where do they go? This is how we make your life more sustainable.

When you first think of sustainability in organizing, you might think of “Oh, I’m buying only bamboo drawer organizers, or baskets made of sustainable materials.” And yes, that’s part of it.

But sustainability really starts with consuming intentionally - so buying and using what you need, reducing waste, and trying to live as naturally as you can in your home.

And so let me recap the 5 Simple Steps to Organize Your Home Sustainably:

I call it the CLEAR5 Framework which stands for Clarify, Limit, Edit, Assign Homes and Review.

And sustainability is woven into every step of the CLEAR5 framework by keeping in mind how and what you purchase and consume and how to easily prevent unneeded or unwanted stuff from getting stuck in your house! 

So try this out for yourself, if you’d like. Try it in a small space with things that aren’t terribly sentimental at first, ok? And let me know how it goes.

And over the next several weeks, I’ll tell you all about the major ways to organize your home, schedule and priorities, so that 2025 can be the year you will be organized for beautiful living.

Enjoy your week, and I’ll see you on the next episode!