How to Organize Anything

[Music] hi we're back so good morning and Welcome to our seventh rrh class Ros Rett Homestead class and we do these every once in a while on average about once a month and it is a different format than our other videos this video These class videos Last around an hour a little bit longer than our regular videos and since Jim and I are both retired University professors it's more like a class and that's why it's called our RH class so today's class is on um how to organize anything and so um we're going to be talking back and forth and I'm excited Jim has agreed to be part of this video his perspective on organization is very different than mine and it will give you a a broader perspective of uh the possibilities because of the things that he has to say so shall we get started sure let's geted started and see where we go okay so as you can see we have some things written on our whiteboard and they are duplicated on the um sheet that on the handout for this class and um many of you know where those are but for those of you that don't please go to our website and here's the address right here and then once you get there just stay on that page and scroll down to the bottom and you will see a section of downloads for the rrh classes and this one is how to organize anything so um we've been asked to do this by a number of people and all of my life people have said to me oh Pam you're so organized you're so organized and I I don't know what they're saying I didn't have a clue what they were saying I didn't know what I was doing that reflected in their eyes that I was organized I just did what came naturally but this class has actually given me the opportunity to think back on things and how how did organization just come so naturally to me well it didn't it wasn't natural in the home in which I grew up organization was key and so it was modeled for me in the home that I grew up and I just I grew up thinking that that was the normal way how to do things and I've shared this in other videos before but um when I was growing up we would go to sleep to the sound of mother clattering on her typewriter mother could type literally 120 words a minute which was astounding and um in the morning we would wake up and go in the kitchen and each one of us had a cabinet door that was assigned to us around the kitchen and we would open up that cabinet door and on the inside of that door was our chore list for the day and some of the chores were repetitive throughout the week others were things that needed to be done um in our household for that time and um and so mother was a list maker I'm a list maker I could not survive and get the things done that I do without making lists I make lists all the time and lists can be um of any type including when I went into teaching a lesson plan is a type of list a syllabus is a list it is a list it's a structured setup as to how the class is to be conducted from which readings to have to look at the idea of discussions to activities and when those activities and discussions are supposed to be in on a particular daily basis or however often but it's an organizational structure and so list can be modified to be a whole lot of things well we both we've been talking about this class for a couple of months and doing various uh types of preparation and research on it and um we have on the board a a list of 10 principles that we're going to go through um one one of the things that we hope to accomplish with this class is to help all of us improve or develop um or cultivate is the word that I use for the goal cultivate an organizational mindset so it just begins to come natural for us and so we've talked you and I have talked a lot about the benefits of being organized and according to the literature and they're right there on your handout uh greater tivity do you think that's true can you be more productive if you're organized I think you can be more productive but also you have a way of being able to get X types of things done hopefully in an efficient manner yeah one that is set up for you ahead of time that you've developed or somebody has helped you develop and it's something that you've incorporated into your system your being whatever you want to call it which leads right into the next one which is a better performance so you were talking about your syllabus do you think you performed better as a professor because you had your class organized into a syllabus I don't know if I ended up doing better as a professor but I knew where I was going to go on a daily basis well I think your students would say would think everywhere Jim and I went since the time that we were married and he was at University I was at a university sometime sometimes the same University sometimes different universities we would run into his students and they would be waiters in restaurants that we attended or the the one that I remember is when we went to buy that light fixture I might have not even existed even though I was standing right beside you because Jim students absolutely loved him and praised his they loved his classes and the reason some of them did the ones you gave good grades to no the ones you work for the that's true um improved ability to handle stress I think that one applies to me because I was always susceptible to stress in my high stress jobs so being better organized helped with that and then more effective communication so I think that those are really good outcomes of of being organized so we're going to go into these 10 organizing principles and um as I was reflecting on these and we talked about these numerous times um I was probably doing just a lot of these naturally without knowing that it was one of those organizing principles this is right out of the organizational literature research literature that talks about how to be well organized in a number of of venues and a number of ways and so these are things that my parents a lot of them modeled for me a couple of them were new to me but we've talked about my upbringing and how I learned to be organized your upbringing was so different than mine and likely you did not have very good examples of organization so how did you learn the organizational structure that I had was do what you're told to do don't question my father was in the Navy during World War II navigator on a carrier in the Pacific War and uh the way he structured things was again out of his model during the war and in the military like I said do what I tell you to do period don't ask questions and there were times he would show me how to take an axle for um an axle out of my bicycle tire and one of the things he said was what you need to be able to do as you take each part out put it on the ground in the order that you took it out so you end up having the last one which would be the first one to go in and all that kind of stuff but again it was very much the idea of do what I say to do don't question well then how did you develop the organizational skills that you have today I talked with a lot of other people and I was able to go ahead and get their view on how to be organized did you actually ask the question how are you organized no I didn't I would when I first started teaching one of the things that I would do is um I would ask people who had taught the classes that I had been assigned and this is for probably the first couple of years uh could I have a copy of their uh syllabus for that particular class and then I would basically emulate that plus put in some of my own ideas as to how class should run Jim talks with his hands this is computer this is hamburger when he's cooking H at McDonald's for for a while so you are actually self-taught I I don't know if the term self-taught works for it's kind of like a self-made manand that doesn't exist but a lot of what I ended up doing and learning how to be organized was talking with other people getting their information and being able to apply it in a manner that worked for me so modeling yeah looking at models from other people who were already there okay so there are lot social learning theory social learning theory from your psych background you're now being a professor for us it's the modeling okay so for the rest of this class what we are going to do is talk about the 10 organizational principles and um and then we're going to learn three behaviors that you um that are present with any organizing activity whether we do it uh in the Forefront of our mind or whether it just comes naturally these three behaviors are key to being well organized and then we're going to give some examples from right around our home we're going to take a little what did you call it last night a field trip around our house a tour around our house to look at some organiz organizing projects that we have been working on so um the first one is to develop habits and to build a routine and then the three critical behaviors are listed there and am too so develop habits and build routine and here are these three behaviors and I've pulled them out and emphasized them right here analyze strategize organize so these we're going to be talking about and coming back to a a whole lot so developing good habits um mine started in my growing up home um yours have been developed over time just by just by being in various jobs yeah where those kinds of things were required that I needed to be able to do X in a specific manner otherwise the results wouldn't be the same on a regular basis so developing habits is always um it's part of our Lives we all develop habits uh some of the habits that are already routine for Jim and me is that we make our bed first thing in the morning I don't think in our almost 26 years of marriage we have ever left the house in the morning to go anywhere at work or any place without having our bed made I don't ever remember maybe no no never unless one of never unless one of us was sick um another habit that I have that was developed in the home in which I grew up was I have to have in my kitchen clean countertops not a lot of clutter I can't think I can't accomplish what I need to in the kitchen if um if my kitchen is just cluttered you know when we first started our YouTube channel before we actually launched our first video Jim and I did a lot of research by going online and looking at all kinds of YouTube channels and uh we saw plenty of kitchens that I couldn't work in and I'm not being critical if people can manage with clutter around them more power to them but I remember saying boy I don't want our kitchen to look like that our kitchen needs to since that's where we're doing most of our video it needs to be clean and I keep it clean anyway I Jim knows I don't go to bed until the dishes are done uh for the evening meal so that I can wake up to a clean kitchen so these habits um are developed over time and then pretty soon a habit becomes a routine and we don't even need to think about very much so that's the first principle so the second principle is plan ahead with the end in mind so do you have some anything you want to talk about that well one of the things is backing up the trailer oh oh you would have to use that example when we first started backing up the trailer it was crazy because we didn't have a set of hand signals worked out or communication structure as to whether when I was backing up would I would go left would I go right and the other thing is backing up and having to be able to turn the steering wheel the opposite direction of where you what the direction you wanted to go so if I was going this way I was actually moving that way to the right you know I had to figure that out so the end in mind was to have the trailer placed where you wanted it to okay all right and even back then we were doing the analyze the strategize and the organize you would analyze what way you needed to turn the wheel and then you strategized about how far you needed to turn the wheel and whatever and then the organizing part was actually when you moved the tra to get it into place I mean we still struggle with that a little bit all the time we when we back our trailer into position we have to come in the driveway and avoid two trees three trees and a garage Seven Trees yeah so it's a little bit tricky so the end in mind and think about going on a trip you have a destination in mind and then you plot how to get there um last year when we made our trip to the Pacific Northwest for a grandson's graduation we were on the road for 3 days and so Advanced planning we knew where we wanted to be at a certain point in time but it was in segments of 3 days and Jim would plan where our campgrounds were and where we would need to stop and get gas and the whole thing and so a lesson plan is a a start in fact it's a road map yeah it is um and I remember teaching perspective teachers when I was a professor of Science Education that when you develop a lesson plan you don't start with designing the learning activities you always start with the end in mind what is it you want the outcome to be even this class our outcome is that we can all improve and uh that we can cultivate an organizational mindset and so then once you know what the outcome is you can plan accordingly how to get there number three embrace your natural inclinations I'm not sure what that even means in in terms of organization sometimes organizational methods are forced on us because our job requires a certain way if you work in a medical office they have a filing system and if you are in and out of that filing system all day long you know that it is organized in a in a specific way but when you have total control either things in your home or at your own home desk or whatever then we can EMB embrace our natural inclinations and um I guess one of the examples of that would be that when I was a at age 20 a firste teacher starting to teach sixth grade I had a colleague and she and I became really good friends we were both putting our then husbands through graduate school I was putting my husband through dental school and she was putting hers through a PhD program in um astrophysics and then we became good friends and um how we organized our files was so totally different um be she organized her lessons she put every lesson in a file folder and then put that in her um drawer according to in alphabetical order according to the title of the lesson and so she had a math lesson next to a social studies lesson next to a science lesson all mixed up and and she had in her head she knew what the title were I organized my file system into subject area first so I had all of my science lessons together all my math lessons together all my social studies lessons together and then within that organizational within those categories I organized my lesson folders according to the order that they occurred in the textbook so that I could would know where I was in the textbook and know where to go go in my file system and so that's kind of our natural inclinations sometimes we can um sometimes we can honor those natural inclinations when it's just us other times we have to learn someone else's system of organization and when we are totally in charge of doing an organizational project sometimes we get caught up thinking oh what's the right way how to organize this and it's seems oh I don't like it that but oh that's the accepted way to do it we can break with what is tradition and do it in a way that works for us does that make sense that makes sense but it also depends upon who you work for structure well that's what I'm structures it's this is the way it is period you will not deviate blah blah blah blah well that's I said that yeah you said it too yes I said it too so it's a good idea from both of us squared okay okay then this next one practice consistency over Perfection oh my gosh how important is this and I've got an example to show you when we get to the examples sometimes we get so caught up with being perfect in what we do that we lose sight of the power of repeated iterative intentional actions that build skill over time and forgive a mistake here ignore a mistake there Perfection doesn't is is is an elusive goal but it's like compounded interest we pretty soon will get interest on an account and then the next time we get interest we get interest on not only our original um deposit but also on the interest that we have previously earned and so that interest is compounded over time so we're getting interest on our interest and it is the same way when we are developing habits and moving into a routine it is the consistent iterative um intentional action that builds those habits and contributes to um uh a routine all right finding balance is number five we talked about this last night um you and I are both both I'm waiting for the shoe to draw very intense workers intense when when we get on a project okay I'll speak for me thank you when I get on a project I just have blinders on it's like I have to isn't this true I just I'm yeah I'm I'm not saying anything to contradict that um so I just work and work and work can just I just immerse myself in that project until it gets done um or until I come to what my Benchmark goal is as part of the process of getting that done when I write a book that's one thing that I just I just am intent on getting the recipes and trying them out and making tweaks and all that kind of thing um what what I have found is um when I was in my PhD program I two fellowships one was a teaching fellowship and the other was a research Fellowship I worked for two different professors so I was going to school full-time this is when I met Jim on an on again off romance I would break it off and then I'd want you back and then poor three or four times a day not quite that bad but it was a very very intense time of my life I was like working two halftime jobs and full-time in school and in starting a relationship with someone that I realized was a pretty neat guy and one day I was just sitting in The Graduate Office and I just was leaning back in my chair and one of the professors my statistics Professor whom you might remember um walked into the office and she caught me just not doing anything and I thought oh boy I'm going to lose my fellowship and and um when she asked what I was doing and I said I'm just letting my mind settle down for a little while while I think about things and she said Pam that is so important not very many people recognize how important it is to just take a step back reflect and just think I'm happy to pay for your time while you do that downtime and that was a really good lesson for me um and so we do a variety of things we actually look at the idea of going out we've been working all day we go out and take a walk or something like that take a drive same kind of idea or watch something silly on TV just to be able to there's a lot silly on TV these days even sillier so yes to find balance and not get so engrossed that you um overshadow everything else with one topic and so the idea is to create a Harmony in your life so that you are feeding all sides of your personality okay next is to prioritize appropriately and I thought appropriately I don't what does that mean I guess if you if you prioritize well I guess the example that I used was a good one in every profession there are rotten apples we all know that so one summer at one of the universities where I taught my office was across the hall from a classroom there was a math class going on that was differential equations or some high level math class and the professor had prioritized his golf games over his class and so and in summertime classes met every day and so he would go into class he would spend 10 minutes there say a few things to his students do whatever he was going to do and then he would leave his students now the classes were an hour and a half long and so the students stayed in the classroom after he left some of them would leave after he left too but what he didn't know was that my son was in that class and I never told him and so I had inside information on that as well and what he said was that oh he just gave us grades things that we didn't even earn he didn't want people to know that he had prioritized his golf game over his teaching and so I guess that would be an example of prioritizing inappropriately so when we prioritize we just need to recognize what are the the most important things that we have to do and um my priorities were always family first and then um after that came my job and you know it's a give and take we all know that it's a give and take for me this whole idea of being able to prioritize appropriately is again I used the earlier issue with the trailer we get the trailer back up on the pad as far as we need to go and and part of that whole idea is do you unhitch first do you put your chalks in first so it doesn't roll uh so there's a specific set of um activities that we have to go through when we unhitch the truck and if we end up putting the stabilizers to stabilize the trailer on all four corners first and then we start bringing the trailer down we're going to end up what uh bending or spraying the uh the stabilizers so again we've got a specific set of activities we have to do for that particular end goal in mind and if we don't then we run into problems as far as the trailer is concerned so you have combined actually um prioritize with um plan ahead with the end goal in mind that too and that's what organization is like it is it is um Cross polonization of all of these strategies because they work together yeah okay um so the next is declutter and simplify um last year after our trip to Washington for my grandson's graduation we had thought that we wanted to make a move uh this place was getting too big for us and we wanted to downsize and so we had been thinking about where would we go where would we go and on our trip home we got to talking about where we were up in the Tri Cities area I had lived up there before and had a pretty good experience and so we thought that's it we need to move up to Washington I've got two kids up in that area and so we came home and decided that we were going to put our house on the market well the first thing that we had to do was to declutter our home and so we ended up moving about would you say about onethird of the stuff that we had well first of all we went through every room and decluttered and part of our organizational strategy was here to analyze what we wanted to keep what we wanted to throw what we wanted to give away that kind of thing and then we strategized about what should we pack this up get rid of some furniture and then so we completely um reorganized our home so that it would look good and um as it was being shown and um part a huge part of that was to declutter and simplify and what is very very interesting after about two months and the mortgage rates just climbing and climbing we realized that it was foolish for us to try to move that the best place for us to stay is right here so we've made that decision we're staying but um we have not moved everything back in place in our home uh some of it is still we put a lot of stuff out in the garage we um had a place where we used to park our four-wheelers that is about an 8 by10 spot maybe a little larger and we packed up a lot of stuff stuff in boxes and to put it out there so our home would look decluttered we haven't moved that back in and it's been we've moved we've moved some of it back in but not all of it no some of it's still sitting right out there it is yeah and it's because we are very much enjoying the simplified decluttered look to our home and so um for for me I can't function unless I have a decluttered organized space and so um it says here to seek opportunities to make space physically digitally and mentally and I really agree with that so that mental space has to do with balance as well decluttering a simple form on my computer I get tons and tons and tons of messages each day and I get the spam and I get the you it's just garbage so each day two or three times a day because get so much garbage I will go in and empty it out empty it out and delete it so for me that's one of the big issues that I have so so that's digital decluttering yeah digital decluttering I didn't know that you did that yeah I do I have something like 75,000 email messages I probably should do the same well I've got I've got those kinds of things too and I've got I'm in the process of so one of the most important things that we can do when we organize is to measure our success and there are a lot of ways to think about this so in a way what we're doing is we are going to be analyzing our success think back over the project that we just organized and uh just take a look at did it work out the way we wanted to do we feel good about it so that's one way is to actually analyze the project itself and then the other way is to analyze our effort to think about well this is I remember what it was like before and this is what it looks like now and I'm really pleased with it and give yourself a pat on the back for a good job job there are lots of times in our lives where our performance is measured um for instance as as our jobs as professors often our um team leader or chair the chair of our departments would come in and observe our teaching and so they would measure our success but it's important for us to measure ourself too to look at the things that we have accomplished based on our own thinking and Analysis strategizing and organizing and then we can figure out what is working and what is not working so it's always good to measure our success then automate and Outsource so um to automate things is great when we can do it uh we we work with an electronic calendar that works really well for us for I for me and for you I I don't know if I have one or not I've never checked it on your computer on my phone it shows up yeah you you do your phone uh calendar all the time and I do mine they are linked whenever I enter in either my phone or my computer it puts it on the other one and so there's a lot of times like with medical appointments with my church appointments um I can either the medical people or the church people can send an appointment to my calendar and it's put on automatically which saves me from typing it in and so anything that we can automate anything that we can um that is a repeated thing that we do over and over again um and so as we were putting this together Jim said that a lot of times um automation can replace either repetitive and he added the word or boring boring activities that we do over and over again repetitive boring yeah got that got that they do get boring and then Outsourcing my mother was a really good example of Outsourcing and organizing her household she would Outsource to all of us children we were her Army of workers a little queen bee and the rest of us were the worker bees well mother did a lion share of work herself of course but um Outsourcing anything that we can delegate to others um I did a a research project at one of my universities where we collected over 300,000 data points that needed to be entered into a computer program and there was no way that I was going to do that my my time for what they were paying me as a professor was far more valuable than just sitting at my computer doing entry work and so I hired a group of graduate students to come and do the data entry and I trained them and then I double checked them I did random checks on their entry to be sure they were be doing they were doing accurate work and so anything that we can Outsource or automate to save us time so that we can use our time things better suited to the things that we're responsible for then experimenting and this is where we can stay current stay current in whatever it is we do either in our discipline Jim reads all the time in Psychology even though he's retired he reads tons of stuff all the time he likes to stay current in his field um once I gave up my teaching in Science Education to become a university administrator my experimenting turned from classroom to university-wide and I was reading a different level of research or different topics of research on organizational skills and faculty management and that kind of thing and so experimenting and thinking out of the box and trying new things is always a fun thing and those of you who are regulars on our Channel know that we experiment all the time don't you think that that's one of the I don't know the most important ways or the funnest ways that you and I learn new things is by experimenting I think that's one of the things that we do a lot of I do too and whether is it's the idea of how are we going to back the trailer in or do we end up uh what do we put out first in that kind of order uh but we're always looking at the idea of some kind of new experimentation we are and and most of our experimentation is geared toward Improvement uh new ways of doing things that might be better than old ways and so and that's the purpose of um doing some experimenting is to keep our brains fresh and um and also Al helps us with our learning curves so um the next segment of the class is we're going to move into some actual examples and so this actually begins with the question what is it in our lives that need to be organized well one of the obvious one is spaces we all have spaces that need to be organized whether it's our kitchens whether it's our drawers whether it's it's a pantry um or even Jim keeps his car really organized he likes certain things in certain places where he can reach them and know where they are with almost without looking and so organizing spaces is one thing organizing events is another thing and sometimes those events have timelines and we're going to do an example of that one too then household organization our households need to be organized and my gosh that's layer upon layer upon layer of organization my mother was a genius at organizing her household and things were not rigid I grew up in a very loving household and um felt like as I left my parents both encouraged us and we left feeling like boy we could get out there in the world and accomplish anything that's the kind of upbringing that all of us had um I have eight siblings as I mentioned earlier and um we all just left thinking that we could pretty much do anything that our hearts desired for us to do in terms of professions and whatever then we have to organize our time I organize my time all the time I make almost a daily list of things I want to accomplish during that day and this is a throwback to my list in the cupboard that mother used to put out for us but I accomplish so much more when I am organized and know that I have a list and a timeline and that sort of thing and then organizing projects so we have some examples we want to share with you that will take us into different spots in our home give you a tour yes and so Jim is going to now uh be behind the camera for the rest of the video so we'll come back which with our first example which is a cooking example first example is a cooking example and this particular one is one where I'm going to be organizing this because we're going to be shooting a video on this actual thing which is making a stir fry a universal um way to make stir fry that you can then uh plug your own ingredient and your own way of doing things but it's a structure for how to do a stir fry and so in my analysis which is the first step right here I have pulled everything out of the cabinets and the refrigerator in terms of the food and the equipment and the supplies that I'm going to need and I just it's just here it's not organized so now next step is for me to strategize how I want to ultimately organize it well I'm going to be doing actually five preps during this one is the rice separately so I will probably put that Rice over here and kind of out of the way so I know that I've got to do that then I also am going to make a sauce so maybe I want to organize all of the sauce ingredients right here and there will be some ginger in this and and red pepper flakes see if I've got everything and and then I need a whisk so that's one piece of equipment that I will be putting right here that I will be using to make the sauce then I'm going to be at some point um doing the meat oh I have the meat right here I have steak strips so I'm going to put those there those will need to be thawed and cut into smaller pieces pieces but I'm getting it ready right to set out then I'm going to be doing some uh vegetable prep so I'm going to gather all of the vegetables and because I'm going to be um cutting I'm just going to organize those right here on my cutting board that use piece of onion a red pepper and some snow peas I'm going to be peeling and then I'm also going to be doing some aromatics again the ginger is going to be used with along with some uh uh garlic so I'll set those separately and oh here's the rice vinegar that goes with the sauce so here's the knife that goes with the veggies here's the microplane that goes with um the aromatics and here's measuring spoons that goes with the sauce oil that will go with the actual stir fry so that's going to be here here's my garlic press that goes with the aromatics and so now I'm relatively organized and I've set up my cooking equipment here this goes underneath to protect the cabinet so I'll do that and so the strategize was about that quick I decided I strategized and said okay I'm going to organize things according to the pr preps so I have 1 2 3 4 five preps and here we're all set up to go so when the video opens I'll have something like this and then I will decide the order of operations that I want to do things what would I do first and so I will have that in my mind either that or written down and in order to see the order of operations you can tune in to the video I think we are going to air that one uh next week but we're going to do it probably this afternoon or tomorrow so this is how I set up for a video how I get things organized for a video or even when I am cooking a meal for Jim and me I pull everything out of the cabinet I organize it by prep I have things all ready to go and before that video opens I will have prepped these vegetables so they will be sitting on the cutting board already prepped um one of the things that Jim and I did when we were first looking at other similar YouTube channels to ours is that we don't think you need to spend a lot of time showing people how to peel and cut up carrots um we watched one video where they showed every minute of making a stew peeling the potatoes and cutting the potatoes in pieces and um and so we want to have our organization such that yes we give you enough of a glimpse of how to do things but you don't have to sit through the entire ordeal of us doing the ENT entire thing so part of organization is also uh figuring out when we're doing it for a video how much needs to be shown in order to give the audience enough information so next on our list of examples is bookcases so I'm standing right here by my desk as you can see I have a sheet covering everything and um that's a permanent thing whenever I am not using my computer or sitting at my desk I keep it covered with a sheet we live on a dirt road and our house gets very very dusty and so I'm covering all of our Electronics to prevent them from being inundated by dust but I'm right here by my bookcases now I have five in my library that are this tall and two that are half tall and they're all along this long wall and um I just want to explain to you how I reorganized my bookcases it started when we were getting ready to move my bookcases every shelf was packed wall to wall on every Shelf with books and papers and everything I couldn't fit one more book in on these shelves and I had retired several months earlier before we decided to move and um and so I recognized I have so many books in my library do I really need all of them and I of course didn't so I analyzed the first thing is I needed to go through and sort through things that I was going to keep things that I was going to throw away and things that I was going to giveaway and so we I boxed up about half of my library and took it down to a used book place and I just gave them those books and I'm hoping that someone gets a lot of use out of them so I now have about half of my books that I originally had and they are my very favorite books books that I use all the time so then the thing was well I've got all of these lovely bookcases now I can I've decluttered this is me analyzing I've decluttered so how do I strategize and or and uh want these shelves to look when I'm finished so I'm now thinking about the end in mind I've decluttered and I then decided okay so I'm going to organize them with lots of space the open space will give a feeling of of decluttered and good organization and so I also strategized well I'm going to group books of the same topic that are together so up here I have um readings on plants and nature here's plants here's gardening here is gardening and then I also decided to use pieces of art I have some Indian art I have some petrified wood this clock was a gift of um when I left BYU when I retired from BYU this was my retirement gift which is a lovely little clock so I'm organizing with art and objects and books over here here this is just general science reading organized by author this is some John MC books this is all about um also I've got the green world this is biology this is geology this is astronomy and so I've organized things to where now I know where everything is and it's spacious so when I actually after I had stacked them in piles part of my strategy then I began the actual organization which was to put them on the shelf and find out which art or objects looked good on which shelves so that was the process I used to reorganize my bookcase um part of it was done when we were getting ready to move and then another part was done when we redid this room when we had to take literally everything out all so I had to pack up all of my books the ones that I had saved I'd already given away um half of them so I packed up everything and so and I was unpacking and ready to put them on the bookcases this is when I came up with this organization scheme so as we mentioned one of the things that we need to organize during our lifetime is spaces that was the bookcase at um that was just the bookcase example it is also the pantry example some of you may remember that a couple of years ago we did a video on how to organize your pantry I I did it in the video and showed how I organized and and then a little over a year ago we had our kitchen remodeled and at that point in time that was a huge disruption to my pantry they put in new cabinets for me so I was I was reorganizing and getting things moved to the two new cabinet spaces and it sort of left my pantry uh gutted in some ways and then I did not take the time at that point in time nor have I since to get my pantry reorganized when I open this door you are going to to know how disorganized my pantry is so there it is it doesn't look anything like it looked at the end of the pantry organizing video that we did a couple of years ago it is in desperate need of being reorganized we've gotten to the point where we're just cramming stuff in anywhere and so I'm going to talk through the strategy that I'm going to use to reorganize first of all I've analyzed this just by looking at my analysis in this case is very quick again what I've realized is I need to pull everything out then once again just like the books I need to or I need to order like things together and go through everything and I need to sort into things that need to be thrown away that are very outdated some things I need to combine I have little bits and pieces of things that can go into the same jar instead of two or three different jars so um and then um I need to decide what I'm going to keep in this pan and what can easily be moved out to our food storage area because I hardly ever use it here in my pantry and then when I'm ready to actually do the organizing I'm going to be putting things back on shelves according to the type of what it is and so that's a project that I'm going to be undertaking before summertime comes to get things better organized so that I can find things when I want to find things so that basically is what I'm going to to be doing it is the it's the analyzing strategizing and then the actual organizing the act of putting everything back into where it is organized so that is is the story of my pantry so the next thing on our examples list is my junk drawer and actually there are three Jun junk drawers and these are in our utility room and they all look about the same so are these organized not only no but heck no because I am invoking number three embrace your natural inclination does every single thing need to be organized well to work efficiently I I don't think my junk drawer needs to be organized and I don't feel the least bit guilty about it because this junk drawer things go in and out of here faster than checking out a book at a library and it's just full of all kinds of things a little leftover pieces look here's two bolts that we use for something here is uh some fittings that I have I have no idea what there for maybe Jim knows here are some things that were left over from a let's see a TV mount here and a a piece of tape and some leftover copper roofing roofing nails and um so whenever I need to find an odds and end piece of something I come to the junk doors and just go through it now the reason that I don't organize this is because it would not stay organized because things come and go this all the time and I we just my latest deposit in the junk drawer is three Allen wrenches and they are identical we got a new um sectional sofa after we gave away well we took to the dump our 40-year-old um couch that I had before Jim and I married and so we replaced it and it came in three segments and each one came with its little allen wrench and I just put them in the junk drawer I don't need three one of these days I might need one Jim has several sets of Allen wrenches and so I'll think about things and pretty soon toss some things but it it is in a disorganized array because it's not worth my time having to think about analyzing strategizing and organizing every two minutes when I make an addition or a withdrawal from this drawer so there are just some things that I don't think need to be organized the last example for our class today is an event with a timeline and that is our first trailer trip of the Season whenever we have our first trailer trip there's a whole lot of unique things that need to be done that don't occur with every other trailer trip uh some of the things overlap but there's a lot of things for instance our trailer has sat through the winter and all of the water pipes have been winterized with antifreeze and so there's a lot of undoing things that we had to do for the winter time we pull things out of that trailer that we don't want to overwinter so now we have to put them back in so I have now made a list of things that need to be done to and for our trailer before we take our first trip and I'm so excited because we are scheduling more trailer trips this year than we ever have before since we've owned our trailer and um and that is because last year even though I was retired and the summertime we couldn't leave because of all of the remodeling that was being done on our kitchen that lasted forever uh but now we're done we're done with remodeling for quite a while in fact probably forever and so now we can start having fun and so we need to get our trailer in ship shape so here is how I did that this was my analysis was that before I could even strategize I had to see what had to be done so on this list and this is only a partial list I'm just put a section of it so that you could get the idea so pretend like you can't even see anything to the right of the of the dark line so my brainstorm to do list I just every time I thought of something I added it to the list no particular order none whatsoever I was just listing the things as I thought about them that needed to be done prior to our first trip and in getting ready to take our first trip so here's a list of several things then the next thing that I did and this is where I strategized was I needed to get this ordered in terms of when things had to happen so this is a timeline now as we cross that dark line over into the middle column this is the number of days before the trip now if we actually had a date for our first trip then instead of using number of days before the trip I just could have put date March something or other April something or other but this is days before because now this is going to be a master list for us I'm going to keep this list so I don't have to recreate this every year and so it makes it more convenient for me to have a master list written as number of days before the trip so 21 or 3 weeks 21 days or 3 weeks have the trailer dewitz and serviced then it proceeds now in a logical order of the number of days before we plan to leave on our first trip of when each of these things needs to happen and this now is a great little list I refer to it now all the time and we are working on this list getting ready for our very first trip so whenever we have an event that also coincides with some kind of a timeline we need to do something similar to this now one of the things that you may have noticed the way that I get ready to organize in my analysis piece um I very often just brainstorm and um I just figure out what needs to be done and I will put everything out everything out on a recipe everything out of the pantry everything out of the bookcases and then I strategize on how I'm going to put them back well with a timeline we then have to order in order of importance and time that has to be done do invitations need to be sent out how far in advance who is on our invite list or if it's an event where people are invited that sort of thing and so these organizational strategies as Jim mentioned they really fit together they cross-pollinate one another and um they are actually in effect as we analyze strategize and organize so we hope this class has given you some ideas of how you can proceed and just remember that we've presented our perspectives and even though our perspectives differ with each other they may differ with you as well so it is important to embrace your natural inclinations so long as the end result is that we are developing or cultivating an organizational mindset and then that way as we do that this habit of being organized will become a routine to where it will just happen naturally and we don't have to think about it very much or that we know easily how to proceed and which lists we need to make to get things done so thank you so much for joining our class we're so happy to have you along and we will see you in a few more weeks with another class and certainly before that with many more videos from Rose Red Homestead [Music]

Channel: RoseRed Homestead

Views: 24,986

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Id: zYgBzx9tIEs

Length: 56min 34sec (3394 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024