Book Summary: Organizing From The Inside Out
Julie Morgenstern’s Organizing From The Inside Out is all about learning to organise your life. Covering areas such as work, home and even the bags you carry, there is something here for just about everyone.
Related Book Summaries to Organizing From The Inside Out:
The Year Of Living Danishly – Helen Russell
Happier At Home – Gretchen Rubin
Quotes:
If you don’t know where you are going, how will you know when you get there?
Successful organizing forces you to look at the big picture, not one small section of the frame, so that the system you design will be complete.
Book Summary Notes:
The Cause of Disorder
Disorder and clutter seem to stem from three main causes. The technical downfalls of your system, for example not having a good place for everything or systems that people should follow day to day. By leaving this structure out it can make staying on top of cleaning very difficult.
Second is environmental problems, the author lists a few examples such as an untidy spouse or unrealistic expectations around a new baby or the work environment.
The third area is psychological limitations such as not being 100% certain of what you want. This also requires clear goals that you can work towards. You need to also become clear on which of the above areas are giving you, your issues.
Evaluating The Mess
Start by finding out what currently works in your system. Chances are that not everything you have going on is ineffective. Once you’ve figured out what works lets look at what doesn’t.
You can begin by making a list of problems you encounter each day. This gives you somewhere to focus on and also allows you to measure your progress.
Take some time to analyze the situation and figure out where your problems are, while also giving yourself a set of concrete measures of progress to move towards.
SPACE
You can use the organization strategy acronym SPACE. S is for sort. Do you like these objects? What category of item do these belong to? You can sort similar items into groups for later.
P is for purge. Do you have items that need to be given away or sold? Do they just need to be thrown away? Purge means simply to remove, use this as a chance to get rid of things you don’t need anymore or have started to break down.
A is for assign a home and C is for containerise. Choose a place the things of similar groupings can go to. You can also use containers to help you group and organise your items. This should help you more easily find spaces for things and also to keep them neat going forward.
Finally E in SPACE stands for equalize. The author uses this to basically say that your plan should evolve over time. You should continue to monitor what works and change things as you find better options or other issues.
