Hasta La Ideas

Around 1:15 this morning, those of us in the northern hemisphere officially started spring. The local weathermen explained to me as I sipped my coffee that because this is a leap year, spring showed up on the calendar a day early. As we did yard work and waved to our neighbors over the weekend, it was obvious — at least in our part of the country — that winter had ended.

If spring sprung up on you and took you by surprise, the following 10 tasks are what I consider to be the most valuable spring cleaning activities. These are the Firsts, the things to get to before the other activities:

1. Check fire extinguishers, furnace filters, and batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors (if you didn’t do these tasks when you moved your clocks ahead an hour). Remember, safety first.
2. Purge all expired food from your refrigerator and pantry. If you’re unsure of an item’s freshness, check StillTasty.com and/or the product’s website (especially good for condiments that take up near-permanent residence in the door of your refrigerator).
3. Clean gunk out of your gutters if you have gutters.
4. Rake the last batch of dead leaves out of your yard and pick up sticks and debris that fell during the last few months of winter.
5. Inspect any lawn maintenance chemicals you had stored for the winter, such as pesticides or fertilizers. Make sure none of these items are leaking or expired.
6. Have your law mower serviced so it’s ready and working when your yard is ready to mow.
7. Dust. I like to carry a hand vacuum with me as I go to suck the grime off the cloth.
8. Move furniture (including your bed and bookshelves) and vacuum or sweep every inch of your floors.
9. If you have pets, bring out the Furminator and start the regular task of brushing to get rid of that heavy winter coat.
10. Sort through your clothing and coat closets and donate to charity all items you never plan to wear again. Clean heavy sweaters you intend to keep and take steps to properly store them to prevent pest invasions over the summer. Clean and put away heavy winter boots and shoes. Finally, bring out any stored warmer weather clothes and get your wardrobe ready for the next six months.

What must-do items are on your spring cleaning list? If I don’t do the items listed above, I feel like I’m not ready for spring. How about you?

More spring cleaning tips and advice from our archives:

• “Spring cleaning tips from Lifehacker”
• “Spring cleaning in the yard”
• “Five spring organizing activities”
• “Seeing spring”
• In my book, Unclutter Your Life in One Week, there is an exhaustive checklist of spring cleaning activities that begins on page 185.

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At dinner the other night, my friend Melissa commented about how her family growing up never changed things in their houses once they occupied them. If there was wood panelling on the walls when the family moved into a house, there was wood panelling on the walls when they moved out of it. If her mother hung a picture in the hallway, that same picture was hanging in the same spot the entire time they lived in that house. Couches, chairs, and dressers were never rearranged.

As Melissa explained this frozen-in-time behavior, I realized my grandmother was that way, too. Not a single picture or wall color or piece of carpet changed in her house during my childhood. She added a library onto the house when I was in elementary school, but once that room was decorated, it wasn’t altered in any way.

Since moving into our current house a year ago, we have done the same thing. We unpacked boxes, set up furniture, and hung artwork on the walls, and then let things stay. There are numerous ares of the house that aren’t working for us, but we haven’t attended to them.

It’s time we did. We need nightstands in the master bedroom (a year of putting things on the floor is too long), the pantry needs a makeover, the laundry room has become a storage room (and it needs to be turned back into a laundry room), our living room needs a better arrangement, and the cable panel must be installed on my desk because I’m tired of looking at cables.

The one year mark is a good time to evaluate how you’re living in your space and make changes if you’re dissatisfied with it or if it isn’t supporting your needs. We’re getting ready to embark on this evaluation and improvement process, and I’ll share with you the daily tasks we plan to tackle in March:

• Room Purpose. Start simply by taking 15 minutes or so to walk through every room and write down all the things you do (and hope to do) in the space. Your kitchen might be a place to prepare food, serve snacks and small meals, and store food and cooking equipment. Your kitchen might also be where your children do homework or you have your home office or where you keep the family calendar.
• Uncluttering. For most readers, myself included, this part of the process will take more than one evening. We’re dedicating one room per night to uncluttering. We did a good amount of uncluttering in 2011, so we’re not expecting a room to take more than one evening. If you need more time for each room, schedule that on your calendar.
• Repairs. Walk through each room again, and this time note any structural repairs that need to take place. Is a window cracked? Has the garbage disposal stopped working? Make note of all the repairs that need to take place (not improvements, those will come later).
• Appointment Setting. Make appointments for all of the must-do repair work that has to be completed to keep your home safe and in good condition. The only exception to this might be if you plan to do major renovation work and want to have a contractor take care of all the odds and ends at the same time as the big work. I’m assuming, however, that most readers aren’t looking to renovate their homes right now and just need to get the broken items fixed.
• Planning Improvements. Time to take another walk through the rooms of your home and decide all of the changes you wish to make. Consult the list you created on the first day of what exactly takes place in each room. Make sure all of these purposes are addressed in your improvements, if you have any. You may simply want to rearrange furniture to better suit the needs of the room. Or, you may want to organize some shelves or get storage containers or paint the walls. What improvements do you want to make?
• Budget. Many home improvements, even the small ones, come with a price tag. Sit down and review your budget and see how much money you have to devote to the improvements you’ve listed.
• Making Improvements. Again, set aside one or more evenings to work on a specific room making the improvements you desire. Change out the artwork or carpet, organize a cabinet, move the furniture or hang new shelves.

Mark on your calendar for a year from now when you will go through this process again. Keep your home from becoming a museum, based on whatever random design you determined on the day you moved into your house (or apartment or office or wherever it is you spend a good chunk of your time). It’s very likely your needs and tastes must have changed a little since you moved into your place, and will continue to change as you are in your home.

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One of our local libraries recently asked for donations for their upcoming used book sale. The revenues from this sale help to supplement their funding over the year and they also go through the donations to see if there are any books in good condition they wish to add to their collection. I love this time of year because it gives me an excuse to go through my bookshelves to see if there are any titles I’m ready to give away for the sale.

In the article, “Keeping book clutter off the bookshelf,” I outlined the standards I use to decide which books to keep and which ones to donate, recycle, or toss. Now that I’m a regular Kindle user, I added a fourth standard to my Donate, Recycle, or Toss list that includes getting rid of books easily accessible in the public domain. If I can find it for free online and easily download it to my e-reader, I donated the book to my library for their used book sale. I use Google Books and my library’s digital checkout system Overdrive (a very large number of public libraries in the US use this service, so check it out to see if yours is included) as my online resources.

Inevitably, as was again the case this year, a week or two after the donation period for the sale I’ll look at my bookshelves and spot even more books I could have donated. It’s as if the first pass was a practice run and helped me to build up courage to be even more thorough with my uncluttering efforts. Instead of letting the books linger on the shelf until the next year, I grab a box and complete the second pass.

The second pass has become a vital step in my uncluttering process, whether I’m getting rid of clutter off my bookshelves or in my kitchen pantry or in the linen closet or my wardrobe. I’ll always find at least one more thing to donate, recycle, or toss, but usually I find enough items to justify a second trip to a local charity. In the case of books, another nearby library has a used book sale a couple months later, so I simply make a drive to the other library to donate the second pass books there.

When completing a second pass, I don’t usually need to go back to reference the standards I used on the first pass. The only question I ask myself during the second pass is, “Do I really want this?” If I have finally admitted to myself I’m never going to finish reading a book on my bookshelf, the second pass is when I’ll pass it along to someone who will read it. If a shirt is a pain to care for, and I don’t get enough enjoyment out of wearing the piece of clothing as I should for the amount of energy I have to invest in it, the second pass is when it’s most likely to get added to the donation pile. Being brutally honest with myself is all the second pass typically requires.

The second pass is also a good time to evaluate the organizing work you did after the uncluttering process. Is everything in its best place? Does everything still have room for storage? Are the items you’re accessing most frequently in the most convenient to reach locations? Are items you’re not accessing very often in the less convenient to reach locations? Is there anything you need to do to improve your initial organizing efforts?

Do you do a second pass on your uncluttering efforts to make sure that you didn’t accidentally leave clutter in your collections? If you haven’t been doing a second pass of the areas of your home and office you’ve uncluttered, I recommend you schedule it on your calendar for a few days or weeks after your first pass in your uncluttering process. My guess is you’ll find one or more items you’re now ready to purge from your bookshelves, or whatever area you’ve recently uncluttered.

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Most of us joyfully said goodbye to homework when we left school. I certainly was glad to see it go, especially the busy-work stuff that didn’t serve any point except to waste a lot of time.

Recently, I’ve had a change of heart, at least when it comes to self-imposed homework. I’ve had some success with giving myself homework assignments related to my uncluttering and organizing projects. When I structure the homework more like a lesson plan than a to-do list, I can better remember why I’m doing work and stay focused on the end goal.

What I do:

• Identify the unit objective. What is a unit objective? In this case, it’s going to be the reasons you want to unclutter and/or organize. Your objective might be that you want to have friends come over unannounced and not have to worry that your place is a mess. Your objective might be that you don’t want to injure yourself constantly tripping over your child’s toys. Your objective might be that you want to downsize to a smaller home to reduce your mortgage and other expenses.
• Identify your deadline. Do you have a solid goal by when the work needs to be completed? If you don’t have a set deadline, can you create an artificial one to help motivate you?
• Identify current status. Where are you right now? This is a good time to photograph the room, desk, closet or area you wish to unclutter and/or organize to record your starting point.
• Identify action items. Analyze your current status and determine all the work that needs to be completed for you to successfully meet your unit objective. Be specific with these actions. “Organize shelf” is not specific enough. Use language that expresses exactly what you plan to do — “Pull all items off shelf, sort items into three piles (keep, purge, other), etc.”
• Create your timeline. Using your deadline as a guide, distribute action items onto your calendar. Do this in pencil or electronically, so you can easily move items if necessary. Always leave a few nights before the deadline open in case you fall behind schedule. If you stay on schedule, you’ll be rewarded by finishing the unit early.
• Do your homework. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. Do the homework you’ve set for yourself for each night, and don’t make any excuses. You’re working toward a goal you desire and you want to reach.
• Assess your progress. Decide if you want to review your work daily, weekly, or only at the end of the unit. Personally, I like to give myself daily grades (my system is simple: A is 4 points=did the work; F is 0 points=didn’t do the work). At the end of the week I’ll see how many points I’ve earned and keep a tally (20 points is an ideal week, only working Monday-Friday).

I’ve started to think of my on-going house routines in this way, too. My objective is to keep the house running smoothly so I think less about chores and the state of the house, and more time on doing fun stuff with my family. To meet this objective, there are certain tasks I must do every day (homework) for this to happen. The chores are spread out over a week, and each day I can easily assess my performance — did the homework, or didn’t.

The reason I believe this method works for me is it keeps me focused on the objectives and it’s easy to see how the work I’m doing is directly related to those objectives. Chores and uncluttering and organizing tasks seem less like busy-work and more as steps to something I really desire in my life.

Could you use a little homework in your life? Share your reactions and methods you employ in the comments.

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

We write a great deal on this site about how knowing what you really need can help you unclutter and organize. Do you like to have paper and pens next to you while you work on the computer? Do you access your hole punch five times a day? Do you like to have music on while you fold the laundry? If so, you should have these tools in places you can easily reach while you work on these tasks. Get rid of the things you don’t need, and have available the things you do.

In addition to knowing what tools you need, though, it’s also a good idea to know your personal strengths and weaknesses when it comes to uncluttering and organizing. Are you good at putting items away after you use them? Are you spontaneous or procedural? Do you work better on your own or in groups? When you’re honest with yourself about the things you do well — and not so well — you can be more successful with your uncluttering and organizing efforts.

One of my strengths is I don’t ever get caught up in the “what if” line of thinking. When I look at small slivers of wrapping paper or fabric remnants or empty yogurt containers, I don’t hesitate to recycle these types of things. Conversely, one of my weaknesses is I don’t ever get caught up in the “what if” line of thinking. I have great difficulty imagining how to re-purpose objects. An empty paint can is always an empty paint can to me, it’s not a pen holder or a bin for small toys or a bucket to use to clean paint brushes. As a result, I’ve learned to let my husband look over items I plan to donate to charity or recycle before making final decisions about them. He’s a level-headed guy who usually agrees with my decisions but has rescued a few important objects from my purge piles over the years.

The following list is far from complete, but my hope is that it can get you to think about your strengths and weaknesses so that both can work in your favor when taking on uncluttering and organizing projects:

• Strength — Idea Generation. In your family or when working in groups at the office, lead the organizing solutions aspects of the project. Research and dream up ways to store the items you decide to keep in ways that best suit all of the people who will access the space and/or items.
• Weakness — Not Good with Follow Through. If putting things back where they belong is difficult for you, consider having storage space for an item you regularly use in many different rooms. For example, if you take off your shoes sometimes in the living room or by the front door or in your bedroom, have bins to hold your shoes in all three spaces. You’ll easily be able to find your shoes in one of the three bins, and your shoes won’t be cluttering up three rooms.
• Strength — Motivation. If you’re good at motivating others, use these same skills to motivate yourself and other people on an uncluttering and organizing project. Don’t announce that you’ll be the official cheerleader, simply do what you do best. Play music, get everyone and yourself laughing, and make the most of the situation.
• Weakness — Wandering Mind and Feet. Work with a buddy when uncluttering and organizing. This person doesn’t need to participate in the process directly, he or she only needs to be in the same room to talk with you and help keep you on task. I like to refer to this person as an accountability partner.
• Strength — Noticing Patterns. I often refer to this skill as a super power. People who are good at noticing patterns are great at sorting papers, filtering out duplicate items, and grouping like objects with like objects. If this is your strength, roll up your sleeves and let your organizing skills shine. If working in a group, help teach others how you quickly and efficiently make sense of the information you’re processing.

What do you do well? What don’t you do well? How can you get your strengths and weaknesses to help you succeed with your uncluttering and organizing projects?

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.