046. Falling Back in Love with Your Home Through Organizing

Do you sometimes feel like your home is more of a to-do list than a sanctuary? It can be easy to fall out of love with your home when you feel frustrated by rooms and stressed out by spaces.

Learn how to fall in love with your home again, not by creating 'Pinterest-pretty' spaces, but, more importantly, by making simple, 10-minute-or-less changes to certain spots to reduce your frustration and increase your patience.

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Transcript

If you’ve ever walked through your door after a long day and felt stressed instead of relaxed… If you’ve ever thought, ‘I just want a home that works for me, instead of me working for my home’—you’re not alone.

Today’s episode is for all my fellow working moms and entrepreneur moms who feel like their home has become more of a to-do list than a sanctuary. Let’s talk about how to change that, OK?

Hey, welcome to Organizing for Beautiful Living, the podcast for working moms and entrepreneur moms that provides sustainable organizing tips for your home, work and life.

I’m Zee Siman, Professional Organizer and Productivity Consultant, and I’m here to share simple ideas that don’t take a lot of time so you can love your home, excel at work, and have the time to enjoy both without stress or overwhelm. 

Ready to get beautifully organized? Let’s make it happen!


Tell me if you think this is the truth: when our spaces feel cluttered, disorganized, or just ”off”, we stop enjoying them. And And instead of feeling comforted, we feel overwhelmed. Instead of being a place that fuels us, our home drains us.

But there is good news: You can fall back in love with your home. Not by adding more to your plate, not by spending hours organizing, but just by making some small but powerful changes in how you set up and maintain your space.

So today, we’re talking about:

-Why working moms fall out of love with their homes

-How clutter secretly adds to your mental load

-Small, strategic organizing shifts that make a big impact on how you feel about your space

-And how to create a home that supports your busy life and work, not one that drains you

And after listening to this episode, you’re going to have simple, realistic steps you can take this week to start feeling better in your home, without adding more stress to your plate. 

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I want to mention first off why working moms can fall out of love with their homes.

So think back to when you first moved into your home. You had a vision for how it would look, and feel, and function, right? Sometimes, that vision is based on the media that we’ve been exposed to. So many moms have said that their model, their ideal home, would be something they’ve seen on a show or in a movie. Others look at celebrity homes for ideas, and others think of staged homes for things like media shoots, or a home described in a really beloved book. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these visions! In fact, I absolutely believe that you should have a vision in your mind of how you want your home to look and feel, but, of course, that home has to have you and your family living in it, right?

And so we can sometimes feel like our vision gets lost in real, everyday life, and gets buried under loads of laundry, toys, piles of papers, and work projects.

So if you’re not loving your house right now, it’s not that you don’t love your home—it’s that the daily demands of life have just made it harder to enjoy.

In other words, it’s not your house; it’s the clutter and the disorganization in it that are making you feel less than joyful when you’re in your home.

Now, as a working mom, whether you’re working from home or outside your home, your brain is already full of things like meetings, deadlines, kids' activities, meal planning, remembering birthdays… and the list goes on. And this is whether or not you’re really good at calendaring and prioritizing what you need to do each day and each week.

When your home is cluttered or chaotic, it adds these silent to-do lists to your mental load. Every pile of laundry, every messy counter, every misplaced item is whispering to you: "Hey, you should handle this."

What a lot of moms say about this is that the result is that even when you aren’t working, you don’t feel off of work, you don’t feel like you have time off, because your home feels like another job.

This is what, in the organizing industry, we recognize as the unseen mental load of a disorganized home. And when we go into a home, or when I work with someone online, to help them to get organized, a measure of how successful the project is is to gauge if the - if some amount of a mental load is taken off of the client. Right? So as much as organizing your home is about creating order, you’re creating that order in order to lighten your mental load each and every day!

And one more thing to recognize is that your environment can affect your mood and your focus. Now, the research about this suggests that essentially, when we have a lot of random stuff all around us and we need to get things done - which is every day, right? - well the way our brains get things done is to focus on what has to be done while weeding out all the other random stuff that we see. So we have to work to suppress all the distractions to really try to focus on that particular task.

In the real world, in your home every morning, you’re trying to accomplish a number of tasks, right: getting yourself ready, getting your kids ready, making and packing lunches, keeping an eye on the clock, finding the things you need to take with you, thinking about your schedule and your family’s schedule for the day and evening.

In doing each of these tasks, the research says, and I think it’s fairly understandable, that when there are fewer visual distractors, it’s easier to get that one task done. And then, when you switch tasks, and you need new visual cues, well your brain has to work hard to suppress, or forget about, the stuff you were working with before and now turn and focus on the things you need to be focusing on now.

And that switch from the past task to this task and focusing on those visual cues, that switch takes time. As much as we think we can efficiently switch between tasks, it takes time for our brains to forget about the you know how important the old visual cues were that we were using on the previous task. So, we can help that happen more easily by having less, fewer, visual cues out when we’re doing a specific task.

Make sense? So, for example, if you’re getting your kids dressed, boy, it can go a lot faster if you can quickly pick out an outfit among the dozens and dozens of pieces of clothing and accessories in your kids’ closets. How can you make that happen? Well, by having an organized closet where the clothes are in order so you can efficiently pick out an outfit, whether you do it the night before or the morning of.

Then, when you switch to getting yourself ready, well, it will be much easier if you don’t have the kids’ clean laundry mixed up with yours, and your clothes are all confined to one space in your house, that kind of thing.

Now, something else we know is that visual clutter makes a lot of moms feel stressed in their homes. And when your home feels stressful, it lowers your patience (hello, morning chaos with the kids).

On the other hand, when your home feels organized and calming, you feel more in control, more productive, and more present. All of that, of course, can make your mornings feel complete, instead of hurried, like you’re leaving things unfinished just to get out the door on time.

All of this: your mood, your focus, your stress and patience, well, it all centers on the emotional connection you have with your home. The more in control of that space you feel, well, the more of a safe and comfortable place it can be, and the more you’ll actually LIKE to spend time at home.

That’s why today’s episode isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about making small organizing shifts that reduce stress and help you enjoy your space again.


OK, so then how do you love your home by organizing?

Well, Step 1 is to Identify what we call your ‘Pain Points.’

So instead of feeling frustrated by your entire house, focus on let’s say the two spaces that cause the most stress or friction in your daily life. 

- So ask yourself: Where do I feel the most frustrated or wasted time?
    - Is it the entryway that’s always a mess in the morning rush?
    - Is it the kitchen counter where everything piles up? So then, making breakfast or packing up lunches or cooking dinner is a real pain?
    - Or is it your home office that doesn’t feel productive? Has it become a storage space for all the junk from everywhere else in your house?

OK, so now you’ve chosen two spots in your house that are causing you lots of frustration practically every day. So what you’re going to do is choose one of these pain-point areas to improve this week, all right?


And Step 2 is to make high-impact, low-effort changes to this one spot this week.

What you’re going to focus on are small shifts that take 10 minutes or less but they make your space feel lighter and more functional immediately.

So let’s say that it’s your entryway that you really want to improve. You’ve probably had thoughts like “I wish the entry was bigger”, or “We need a closet and cabinets in here”. 

While those are possibilities, neither of them is necessarily a 10-minute fix, right? Instead, try thinking of what you can change up in just a few minutes.

Maybe you can create a drop zone for bags and shoes to make coming in and getting out the door easier.

It can be as simple as designating you know a small console table as the spot to put backpacks and the diaper bag whenever anyone steps into the house. That way, no bags end up on the floor. You can use 3M command hooks for lighter handbags, or the umbrella or sweaters and school jackets.

Now, if your family is like mine, shoes seem to multiply in our entryway. 

So, we’re a no-outdoor-shoes in the house family, so when we come in the door, we’re in the habit of taking our shoes off. And we do have cubbies to place our shoes, but of course, that space is limited, and I would sometimes find that there were more shoes than could fit into the cubbies, and so shoes ended up all over the floor! Very frustrating to me

Well the quick fix I did is that each evening after the kids had dinner, I would take a quick peek in the entry, and if I saw extra shoes, I would give each person one or two or three pairs to take to their closets on their way to go take a bath or shower. So, essentially, the kids would have their school shoes, a pair of sneakers for PE and maybe a pair of cleats in the cubbies. And that was it!

It varies for me and my husband, but we also stick to that rule, and when we’ve got a pair too many in the entryway, we take a pair to the closet with us in the evening.

That peek into the entryway takes less than a minute, and then less than a minute to straighten up the shoes that are left there.

Maybe you don’t have cubbies. In your case, maybe a basket will work, or if you have the space, a basket for each person. Or maybe you have a shoe rack. Again, taking a quick peek to keep the number of shoes that stay on that rack under control is all you need.

So, tiny changes: naming a spot for bags and backpacks, a spot or hooks for jackets and umbrellas, and keeping shoes to a set number, these things take 10 minutes or less to set up and to maintain.

Now a little bonus step is to give a visual reminder for everyone so you’re not nagging them every day to put their backpacks on the console table and all that right? And you can do that easily by printing out a small picture of a backpack and just pasting it, you know taping it or hanging it on the wall above the table. Maybe you place a little sign above the show rack that says “Maximum 3 pairs each!” Or you have a picture of 3 pairs of shoes.

OK so that’s step 2: think of one or two high impact, but low effort changes you can make to that frustrating spot. And they should be little changes that take less than 10 minutes to implement, and put those into place this week.



Right, so you have a sense of why you’ve fallen out of love with your home, and you have a few ideas for how to improve a “pain point” spot in your house by making little changes that don’t take a lot of time or effort, but that can be really impactful to how your day runs. So now, how do you keep your home working for you?

Well, the simple answer is to design your home for your real life, not a Pinterest aesthetic.

If you think about the entryway example I gave you, it should be that the changes you make there will make your daily routines easier, and not be a full-time job to maintain.

When I started to do the peek-into-the-entryway thing every evening after dinner, you know, I knew that I would never be able to maintain that every single day for as long as we live in this house! No way! But, I understood that after a short while of reminding my family to do these things, like, going in there after dinner, I would announce it to the kids: OK, while you’re putting your dishes into the dishwasher, I’m going to take a quick peek in the cubbies, so come on over to the cubbies to grab your extra shoes! 

And the kids would, you know, all come running over to the entryway, and if there were shoes to be taken to their rooms, I’d give them those, but also, while they were in there for that one minute, I’d say, oh hey, you forgot to hang up your backpack - we had wall hooks for their backpacks - and they would just quickly hang the backpack up, grab their shoes and go on their way.

And before long, it became a habit, and now that they’re older, of course you can bet they know what to do.

Does this mean that my entryway never gets shoes on the floor and looks pinterest-pretty? Not on your life! But all it takes is a reminder to everyone: hey, the cubbies are messy. Could you guys please take extra shoes back to your closets tonight? And we get it done. 

The reality is not that the frustrating spot never gets messy again; it’s that when it does get messy, there is a quick and simple solution that your family knows how to handle. That’s what takes away the frustration.

So let me just repeat this, ok? Because it’s important: Your home should make your daily routines easier; it shouldn’t be a full-time job to maintain.

Right? So if your mornings are chaotic, focus on entryway systems, clothing prep, or streamlining breakfast routines as possibilities of pain point spots to tackle first, ok?


So the final thing I want to leave you with is this: as a working mom, a weekend is a great time to embrace organizing one or 2 pain point spots. And if you plan it properly, you can do more than the 10-minute entryway example I gave you here today. A weekend is enough time to declutter and organize one or 2 of those spaces that make your mornings hectic, or just that cause you to feel dejected and frustrated, like a home office that’s filled with piles of paper and random junk from everywhere else in your house! And you don’t even want to BE in there, let alone work in there!

So a weekend decluttering sprint is a wonderful way to leap ahead in loving your home again. But again, we’re not talking about the aesthetics, making it Pinterest pretty. We are talking more importantly about reducing the friction to you using those spaces how you envisioned using them when you first moved into your home! We’re talking about you loving to spend time in those rooms again! Organizing things so that your home supports how you and your family function every day instead of draining you because there’s so much that you have to remember to do, so much to move around every day in your house and that kind of thing! 

So I’ll talk about a weekend decluttering sprint in a later episode, but I wanted to bring it up now so you don’t think that the only way to love your home again is with 10-minute mini-changes. Those are powerful, but an entire weekend? Ooh! That’s exciting! Especially when you have visual formulas of where to put things, what to declutter, and a schedule to follow!

But for this week, embrace one little spot that’s making you see red, and brainstorm the small changes that you can make in 10 minutes that can really improve how that space functions for you, ok?


Alright, so that’s your roadmap for falling back in love with your home, without adding to your mental load. To recap:

-Clutter isn’t just physical; it’s a mental load, too.

-And so small, 10 minute organizing shifts that create BIG improvements in how you feel is something that you should focus on.

-Your home should work for your real life, not against it.

-Start thinking about a weekend decluttering sprint where I give you the schedule, the visual formulas, the steps, and just think about how much better your day will run at home when you get these one or two really frustrating spots cleared up in your house. How much would you love spending time in your home then, huh?

If you enjoyed this episode, I’d like to ask if you would please leave a review - you know the, click the number of stars you want to leave? And I sure hope it’s 5 stars, but if it’s not, I’d love to hear how to make it better. What types of organizing tips and content would you like to hear about? Feel free to leave me your ideas in your review, or leave me a voice memo using the link that’s in the show notes!

And all you have to do is click the link and start talking to let me know your ideas. You can edit or even delete your voice memo, so no worries there, ok? Give it a try! I’d love to hear from you!

In the meantime, here’s to creating a home that supports you, fuels you, and makes life easier. And I’ll see you on the next episode.