It’s Hard GETTING Organized

Crazy that an organizing company whose motto is “Life Should Be Easy” will admit in writing that organizing it is hard, but it is. No matter what your personality type, it’s the getting part that’s always so difficult. Staying organized is much easier, but not if you’ve organized yourself in a way that doesn’t take into account your personality type. Or worse, you actually organized but don’t think you are because you don’t think or feel that it looks the way it should. Ah those “shoulds” again. Life should be easy, but it isn’t always because we’re always having to get organized and never allowed to feel or think that we already are.

What’s the solution? Well you can hire us. You can read our blog and look through our extensive archive of PixieTips for some solutions, and soon you’ll be able to buy our book, but until then, here’s a few tips to help you get started.

1. Figure out who you are. It’s the second tab on our website for a reason and we put the PixieQuiz up front and to the right of our logo so you can get a good idea of your organizing preferences. Knowing your PixieType is the first step towards making your life easier and to stop wasting time always getting organized and never staying that way.
2. Be brutally honest with yourself. Seriously. If you have a lot of trouble putting your shoes away in a straight line every night, it’s not necessarily because you’re lazy or tired, it’s because you’re probably one of those types who doesn’t care what your shoes look behind a closed closet door, or even worse you’re a kick your shoes off in front of the television type and it annoys your spouse so much that they’re actually putting your shoes away and you don’t even know it. Your spouse needs to put a bin in your closet or close to where you kick your shoes off, or ask you ever so nicely to take them off and chuck them in a bin the moment you walk through a door. Otherwise the two of you are not only always trying to GET organized you’re also living with some major bubbling under the surface conflict.
3. If you’ve been trying your whole life to use a to do list, or keep a schedule, or put files away in filing cabinets and always failing then you need to find a different way. And yes there is a different way. You can use a bunch of in boxes or bins on a credenza or bookshelf to keep your naturally occurring piles of paper at bay, or one of those desktop filing sorters, that keeps your files in vertical plain view.
4. If you are someone who tends to have a lot of paper piles around you that makes other people think you’re a mess, but YOU know where everything is, then you need to accept that this is the way you ARE organized and stop wasting time trying to GET something you already HAVE. If you pay your bills on time then your system for paying bills is working. It might not look that way, so make it look nicer. Take a look at what’s containing your already working system and see if there’s a way that a few matching bins can’t make it look nicer. Formalize what you’ve already got going on. This is a lot easier than getting organized in a way that makes it harder to stay organized.

Okay, so yes. Sometimes, everything’s a mess no matter what your PixieType. Your bills aren’t getting paid on time, you can never find that permission slip for your kid’s field trip, and let’s not even get into your overstuffed linen closet. Sometimes every personality type needs to admit complete defeat and ask for help. From someone like us. We can work magic, we really can. And if you can’t afford an organizer, then a helpful friend can always provide a deadline, or a start to help you GET organized. If you want to Get organized and Stay that way then make sure you take a hard look at points 1 through 4, otherwise you’re going to have to keep doing it over and over again and life will never be easy.