Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Organizing isn’t rocket science, it’s common sense. If something works, don’t reinvent the wheel. For example, if storing cereal in your kitchen cupboard in the box it’s sold in works for you then there’s no need to buy beautiful containers for you to decant said cereal. Leave ’em. Don’t reinvent the wheel. What a waste of your precious time to go through that rigmarole. No, if you’re rightly wondering what wooden hangers have to do with cereal boxes then read on, my friend.

Occam’s Razor

Most of the eureka moments that my clients have are when I tell them the “why” behind my usually simple advice. Uniform wooden hangers in your front hall closet look nice. But the real reason for using them is three-fold. They’re sturdy enough to hold up heavy coats, they’re uniform, so you can SEE all of your coats and therefore find them and they’re narrow allowing for more coats. Now, there are a ton of different things one can do to organize a front hall closet. But if I pressed a client and they said generally their current system worked for them, I wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. I’d work around the edges of their system tweaking a few things to make the closet more efficient. Matching wooden hangers are often all you need to make a front hall closet work.

You Often Already Know the Answer

Before I give a client my thoughts on how to solve their organizational dilemmas, I always think through a dozen scenarios of what I COULD do to fix the problem for their particular personality type and the problem at hand. This helps me see what’s the best and most efficient. It allows me to see when the situation calls for reinventing the wheel. Sometimes I do this process out loud because often the client has already had my idea but wasn’t sure it was a good one or not. Those are my favorite consults because I’m not a rocket scientist, I’m an organizer teaching people how to lead more efficient, happy lives that work for them. When I validate their innate common sense solutions, I know that going forward they’ll recognize a great organization solution instantly.