How To Keep Your Home Clean & Organized

If you are organized, you will not need a heavy duty deep cleaning in the spring. There are other benefits of remaining organized. This article will tell you just what to do to get organized, and keep your home clean so the need for heavy duty spring-cleaning is completely avoided.

Home Organizing Tips:

1. Start anywhere, with just one problem area. Choose a single area to work on. Decide where to start based on the answer to this question: “The thing that bothers me most is”…
2. Choose an organizational system that you think you will be able to work with. Simple is generally best; anything too elaborate might become overwhelming after awhile.
3. Gather or purchase the items needed in order to implement the system. Organizing paper might require file folders, an in-box, etc.
4. Decide on a suitable temporary holding area for items you have accumulated over the years which are waiting to be sorted, filed or acted on.
5. Begin using your system immediately. This will prevent the disorganization from spreading.
6. If you find that the system you’re using doesn’t address a particular need, such as what to do with graded school assignments, for example, make a decision about this immediately.
7. Use the system consistently. No excuses. That is the only way any system will work.

Kitchen Organizing:

The kitchen is the first area in any home to start organizing. The kitchen is a center of activity in morning and evening when everyone is at home. Everyone loves food and wants it prepared quickly Therefore, if everyone puts effort in organizing kitchen, then it can be done quickly and effortlessly. The kitchen is also the place where bacteria can develop easily. To eliminate bacteria is to improve the health of the entire family. Therefore, the following list needs to be attended as early as possible.

1. Clean the refrigerator and deep freezer if you have one. Remove everything in freezer and fridge. Clean the inside and defrost it. If you prefer clean it with soap or vinegar as a deodorizer. Anything that is not needed should be discarded.
2. If possible, move the deep freezer to the garage or to the basement. This will increase the available space in kitchen.
3. Clean all the drawers of kitchen cabinet and give it the similar treatment as in point no. 1
4. Shift heavy storage from kitchen to basement. You can bring out only the required quantity from basement as and when required. This will increase trips to basement, but you can delegate this responsibility to someone in the family. This will increase the sense of responsibility of your family members as an added benefit.
5. Keep you kitchen clean by cleaning as you go. This is most difficult part of organizing your kitchen, but if you develop this habit, it saves you time in long run.
6. Remove anything you have not used in last 2 years to some other area of your house.
7. Kitchen countertop, sink and the fridge are the areas most important in kitchen. Organize them in such away the least time is lost in going from one to another.

Office Organizing:

Organizing the office: Organizing an office pays for itself very quickly. Reducing wasted efforts means reduction of wasted time and as you know “time is money”, you can never see better example of this adage, after you organize your office.

Find a suitable time for organizing. The weekend is a god time. Organize help for doing this. If you involve your office staff, make sure it does not get in the way off the normal office work. As in kitchen, take out everything that is not required immediately but do not discard it. Keep it in a safe place so that you can organize it later, also consider the possibility of converting it to a digital form if required. Converting to digital form may require scanning or converting to microfiche. Remove all your files and regroup them in most efficient way. The filing system may require some minor changes for this purpose.

Before you start cleaning and reorganizing, inform all members of staff that the reorganizing will take place and invite the members of staff to give suggestions. Discuss with them the suggestions and inform them what are accepted suggestions and what are rejected.

After completing reorganizing, inform all members of staff about the reorganizing and give detailed instructions regarding new systems.

Organizing your computer: Computer is the modern dustbin. With decreasing prices of storage devices and increasing number of devices offering memory storage, it becomes difficult to know what the current information is. Synchronization of all devices like computer, laptop, PDAs, cell phones, and integrating it with other memory devices like CDs, Floppies, thumb drives, and others to ensure that all the information is current and useless information is discarded. This way the contrasting and confusing information is not present anywhere in the electronic form.