062. Confessions of a Lazy Organizer: 4 Times I Was Totally Wrong About Organizing My Home

Summer may feel lighter, but real life (and soccer practice!) always sneaks back onto the calendar. Today I’m sharing four organizing “fails” from my own house—times I worked way too hard, spent money on the wrong solutions, or simply forgot to think things through. If you’ve ever color-coded clutter, jam-packed a closet, or decanted everything only to abandon the system a week later, this episode is for you.

In this honest, no-shame chat you’ll hear:

• Why “organizing clutter” does not make life easier
• The closet overhaul that ignored dirty laundry—and backfired fast
• How over-categorizing papers turned into a procrastination monster
• My short-lived “Pinterest pantry” (a.k.a. the Covid Decanting Debacle)
• Questions to ask before you buy bins, hangers, or matching labels
• How the Lazy Organizer mindset keeps my home functional without fuss

💡 Free Class – Get on the list!
3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So the Clutter Doesn’t Come Back)
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Connect with me:
• Email: support@fireflybridge.com

Enjoy the episode, embrace your Lazy Organizer side, and remember—being organized beats endless organizing every time!

Get on the wait list for my FREE class: 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter your Kitchen in just a Weekend! This is how you get no-cry mornings and calm evenings in your kitchen. And I'll show you how you can do it in just a weekend without overwhelm and without getting stuck. And, of course, you'll learn how to make sure the clutter doesn't come back with minimal effort. Go to https://fireflybridge.com/update and get on the wait list!

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You can find me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fireflybridgeorganizing
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Email me: zeenat@fireflybridge.com

Transcript

Summer has been great so far, with fewer scheduled kids’ activities and a less rigid evening routine for us. But this week, soccer training starts up again with early morning sessions some days, and evening sessions other days. So we’re back to lunch preps and timed dinner preps just like during the school year. It’s situations like these that make me really grateful that my kitchen is decluttered, and I know where everything is. Planning and prepping meals is easy, and we all enjoy hanging out in the kitchen and having dinner together. If your kitchen isn’t feeling that way for you, if you’re ready for no-cry mornings and stress-less evenings, and you’re ready for it now, then get on the waiting list for my upcoming free class:  3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So The Clutter Doesn’t Come Back). In just about 30 minutes, you’ll know exactly what to do to get your kitchen decluttered fast, without feeling overwhelmed, without getting stuck on Saturday afternoon. Imagine having a decluttered kitchen by Monday morning. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Go to fireflybridge.com/update to get on the waiting list. I’ll put that link in the show notes, and I’ll notify you when the class will be taking place, ok? Now, let’s get into today’s episode.

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!

I go to networking meetings regularly, and whenever I tell people I’m a Professional Home Organizer, at least one person in the room will say, “Ooo, I bet your house is really organized! You don’t want to see my office, or my closet, or mykitchen!”

It makes me chuckle every time, and I tell them the truth: no, my house isn’t organized all the time! I have spots that need my attention now, even: one closet here in my office needs to be decluttered because my son just reorganized his section in there for all of his soccer gear, and so now, I’m ready to tackle the other parts that hold our hurricane supplies and light bulbs and some other things.

But decluttering that closet won’t take me long at all because I know what’s in there in general. What’s changed is that over time, I’ve taken things out and put new things in and I know there are things I’m ready to let go of in there again. So decluttering that closet doesn’t scare me; in fact, I’m looking forward to going through it quickly since hurricane season started June 1st.

But see, that’s the thing. I’m not excited about the decluttering part. I’m excited about the being organized part. The part where I know exactly what’s in there, I’ve labeled things adequately enough that even if I don’t remember every individual item that’s in a bin, I know where to look for that type of item when I might need it.

And because you listen to the podcast, I believe that’s what you’re excited about too: being organized. Being able to find what you want quickly when you need it, and being able to put stuff away easily. I’ll bet that you’re not particularly excited about the decluttering part, the making decisions about each thing: what to keep, what not to keep, and how to put it away in a way that makes sense.

Nope. We all wish we could just bypass that whole step, and just be putting stuff away in cute containers and having it all be beautifully organized.

This is what I call Lazy Organizing, and I’m happy to include you into the Lazy Organizer Club. Which isn’t a real thing, but what if it was? What if you could get through the decluttering part fast and simply? And you could know that your house would stay uncluttered just by you and your family doing some very simple things ongoing? Wouldn’t that be glorious?

Look, I haven’t always been a Lazy Organizer, of course. There were many, many years when I struggled with organizing, when I tried organizing my house, only to feel completely overwhelmed by my stuff, by the process, by everything I needed to do.

And today, I want to share 4 times that I actually tried organizing my house, and totally got it wrong. 

These aren’t necessarily lessons for what not to do, because you might do one of these things and it could work great for you.

But these were the years when I was anything but a Lazy Organizer: I was more like a Stressed-Out Organizer!

So let’s start.

OK.

The first time I consciously decided to get organized was when we had 2 kids at the time, we had recently moved to a new home, and I was already overwhelmed.

But I was determined to get my home organized, to put things away because we basically unpacked in a hurry, right? Just to be able to do the basic things we needed with 2 little kids - like their stuff, and then to be able to make meals, and get ready ourselves very basically.

But I wanted to invite people over. We wanted our daughter to start pre-school and  so mommy and child playdates at our house was something I was looking forward to.

I really went at it! While the kids were having their naps, and in the evenings when my husband would play with them and give them a bath, and after we’d put them to sleep, I concentrated, I took some things out of the moving boxes and quickly found a place to store them, I had some basic furniture made to store the kids’ toys that I was unpacking, because we didn’t have the same closet and storage space as our previous house. In fact, now with 2 kids, we had more toys.

My husband helped me to decide which things we should just keep in the moving boxes and put them into our big storage closet because these were things we weren’t going to use often. And that’s what we did. We wrote on the boxes basically what was inside and then stacked them all neatly in the storage closet, floor to ceiling, row after row after row.

And phew! After a good number of weeks with this, I felt like wow! We’re done! There weren’t any more boxes around, everything was behind doors or on shelves or in those under-the-bed storage boxes, or in over-the-door organizers.

I felt really accomplished!

But as time went on, I didn’t feel any better organized than before. I kept trying to remember where I had stored things, and I couldn’t. We would take out a bin of toys to play with them, and then, I would leave those toys out, whenever wherever we had played with them, and I just wouldn’t put them away. I felt like I was lazy, and not in a good way! 

I’d invite people over, but the whole process of hosting them was tiring - finding you know the right glasses to pull out, the right coffee mugs, preparing food felt hard. It wasn’t the vision that I had of casually inviting friends over and enjoying time together while our kids played! Everything felt like a production. I just didn’t get it. We had organized everything. Everything! So why didn’t it feel better, easier and less stressful?

Well at the time I didn’t know, but now I do. We had simply organized all our clutter. We organized it really well, too! Every single item was meticulously put away, but every storage space was stuffed with our clutter.

Every clever storage solution, like over-the-door storage and under-the-bed storage, and specific bins for specific things, and a specific container for batteries, a specific container for Ziploc bags!

I look back now and can see how, well, we had really organized clutter!

I mean I can laugh now, of course, but at the time, I didn’t understand why I still felt overwhelmed, even though everything we owned had a home. But we didn’t declutter. We thought we needed to keep everything we had. Every item felt important, or else we just didn’t think of it that way, we just thought, well, we own it, it’s in our house, so we need to be responsible adults and organize it well.

So is this where you are? Have you really thought about what you’re keeping and finding places for? Are you doing a really great job at organizing your clutter? It’s interesting to think about, isn’t it?

Now let me take you to a while later. I was super motivated one weekend to organize my closet. 

I woke up early, made my coffee, had breakfast and then basically barricaded myself inside my closet.

We had a small walk-in closet at the time, and my husband and I both shared it. So to me, it felt cramped. And so I decided that I was going to replace all of our hangers with those velvet-coated slim hangers - you know what those are, right? They’re just very skinny plastic hangers with a layer of velvet-type material on top.

I had bought about 8 boxes of those hangers and so I was ready to go! So I turned on my music, I traded out all the hangers. It took me hours. And it was so monotonous. Like, I’m surprised I didn’t get carpal tunnel syndrome from the hours of repetitive motion! 

So I changed out all our hangers, I did take a break for lunch, and by evening, I was I was happy with the hanging space. It was still tight, but it was marginally better than the fatter plastic hangers we had been using.

And it looked really nice to have all the matching hangers!

That was on Saturday, and I was pooped by dinner time on Saturday, so I quit for the day, and on Sunday morning, I went back in and reorganized all our drawers, put all our shoes in order on the shoe shelves, I folded and put all of our sweaters into the bins I had bought for our shelves. Again, I used every inch of the closet! The t-shirts, socks, pajamas, work-out clothes, swimsuits - there wasn’t space for even one more of anything in the drawers. That’s how cramped that little closet was.

So on Sunday early evening, I was really happy with how it had turned out!

So I went downstairs, and we had dinner, and then it was time to put kids to bed, and get the laundry and bring it upstairs. Well, of course I hadn’t taken into account all the clothes that had been in the laundry! A whole load of our clothes that didn’t fit in the closet, and then I remembered that my husband also had shirts at the cleaners that he’d be picking up on Monday.

At that point, I was so tired that I just squeezed I smashed all the laundry into whatever space I could find in the closet. Our clothes were so tightly packed in there that it really didn’t seem to make a difference that I had traded out the hangers.

Oh, and worse, I quickly realized that my shirts were so hard to take off those hangers now! Where I had just yanked my shirts off the plastic hangers before because they slid off pretty easily, even though they were packed tight, well they couldn’t be pulled off these velvet hangers. I had to take the hanger off the rod now and maneuver the shirt off the hanger! I hated that. It took forever. So the age of velvet hangers didn’t last long in my house. And from that point on, I never forgot that when organizing, I have to take into account the clothes in the laundry or in other spaces in the house!

The next time I remember really feeling like I had wasted my time organizing was when I organized my paper files years ago.

Papers was not my strong suit. I would lose track of things that needed to get done sometimes, like forms that had to be filled out by a deadline and then I’d have to scramble to fix it.

So I thought that to be really organized with my papers, I really needed to overhaul my folders, create new categories for each type of paper that was coming in.

I created school folders for the kids, right? One folder for each child per grade, sometimes per class or per teacher, sometimes for each project or activity they were working on. I also had files for each child for each doctor, for each year’s annual school medical forms, or allergist visits, right?

But after a very short while, I had a stack of papers on my desk, a very neat stack, but I had stopped filing them away! That stack became really annoying. Like it was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I realized pretty quickly that looking at a piece of paper, and then deciding which folder it needed to go into, and then finding that particular folder took so long that I started avoiding it. I had basically over-organized these folders. I thought I needed each of these micro-categories to keep us organized so I could find whatever piece of paper I might need. But instead, I had created a system that was too detailed for me to keep up with.

Now, like I said at the start of the episode, this isn’t a lesson for what not to do, because maybe these micro-categories are how you prefer to organize your files, and you have no problem filing your papers away. But for me, it was too sub-categorized. I needed something simpler and less rigid. Again, I am the Lazy Organizer. I need simplicity.  In order for me to file away a piece of paper, it needs to take less than 5 seconds. So that just wasn’t something I could sustain.

OK so the final example of a time I want to share with you that I got organizing wrong - for me - was during Covid.

Not that long ago, right? By then, I was an established organizer, was working side-by-side with clients. But when it came to Covid, being stuck at home, we had a lot more time to experiment. And TikTok, Netflix and Instagram were showing us these amazing pantries with each color jelly bean in its own clear container, and arranged beautifully, I think Chloe Kardashian showed how she stacked her Oreo cookies in an Anchor Hocking big glass jar, and she offset the layers of Oreos all the way to the top, I mean who wouldn’t be totally engrossed by all that beauty?!

So I grabbed the kids one day and told them we were going to make our pantry cabinets really amazingly beautiful!

I ordered clear matching containers, and we got to work! I didn’t do the offset-layers Oreo method, but we did take all our Oreos out of their packages and stacked them into clear containers. And yes, I labeled that jar ‘Oreos.’ I had one jar with Thin Mints, another with Cheerios. We did the same with every bulk snack. I decanted also every grain I owned into its own container right? Each type of flour - white, whole wheat, bread flour, cake flour, almond flour, coconut flour - each one had it’s own container, and I printed out each label. The kids had a lot of fun picking out the fonts and sticking the labels on. Oats, nuts, seeds each had its own container. It was beautiful!!

But then, a week later, we had eaten part of all those things in the containers, so we had half-full, and a third-full containers taking space in our pantry. And there were so many containers!

Not only that, but pretty often, like, we don’t eat the same foods all the time, right? So my Oreos container would stay empty because no one wanted to repeat Oreos for a while. Or I wouldn’t need or want to refill one type of nut.

And, I wasn’t crazy about the amount of time it takes to decant my groceries week after week! I mean, when I want to add more crackers to my crackers container, I would want the newest the freshest crackers at the bottom of the container, and the oldest on top right? so we would eat the older stuff first. Well, it takes time to empty the container, add the new crackers, then add back the old crackers.

So that system quickly fizzled for me. I call it my Covid pantry moment. I tried it, it’s not for me.

Now we do decant some things, like some types of flour, quinoa, that type of thing, but not every item in my pantry cabinets. That’s just not practical for me. Again, it could be just the thing for you. 

But the idea here with all of my organizing foo-foos that I did is to think about the system you’re considering, and then think about whether it fits your lifestyle. How much time and effort will it take for you to maintain it? Is it something you’re committed to because you love it and it makes you love your home more? Is it fun to do it ongoing? Does it relieve your stress in any way?

Those are the things to think about as you organize so you don’t make the mistakes that I did.

The mistakes weren’t the methods of organizing or the types of containers I was using - they were in not planning ahead, not having a vision, and not aligning the system with my family’s lifestyle.

For me, being a Lazy Organizer works just great. My home is organized, and we love hanging out in it and inviting people over.

So just take the time to figure out what your lifestyle will support before you spend time and the money to organize your home.

I so appreciate you spending some time with me today.

And don’t forget to sign up to be on the waiting list for my free class coming up, 3 Steps to Painlessly Declutter Your Kitchen in Just a Weekend (and So The Clutter Doesn’t Come Back). Go to fireflybridge.com/update and you’ll be on the waiting list for it. It’s a free class. The link into the show notes for you. OK?

Just think what it would feel like to spend some time decluttering your kitchen one weekend, and know that on Monday morning, your mornings will be simpler making lunches, having breakfast with the kids, your evenings are calmer in the kitchen at dinner time. Feels heavenly to me!

Email me at support@fireflybridge.com or DM me on Instagram @fireflybridgeorganizing if you have any questions about it at all and to find out if it’s a class for you or not. We can chat about it real quick and I’ll let you know.

Have a beautifully organized week, and I’ll see you on the next episode!