Home Organizing Tips: Simple Habits Professional Organizers Use Every Day

A tidy home doesn’t start with a weekend-long purge. For the professional organizers who spoke to House Beautiful and House & Garden, it starts with small habits repeated every day.

We’ve all been there. Staring at a chaotic closet or a messy corner of the house and not knowing where to start. Professional organizers’ advice mostly comes down to small daily habits that go a long way in keeping your home organized. Here are seven that you can try.

A woman seated in the middle of a room full of clutter | Source: Pexels

1. Do Your "Farm Chores"

This quick routine for tidying up only takes 15 minutes once or twice a day for Diane Lowry, founder of New York at Home, who devotes this time to tackling the basic chores like loading the dishwasher, folding clothes, taking out recycling, and putting things back where they belong. Lowry, whose family calls these “farm chores,” likes to think of this as a gift to herself, which allows her to wake up to a home that's ready to enjoy.

Woman loading the dishwasher | Source: pexels

2. Give Unwanted Things a Way Out

It’s easy to bring stuff into your home but getting it out, not so much, according to Lowry. To make it easier, she suggests designating a spot by the door for anything that needs to go, including clothes that need alteration by tailor, shoes that need to be repaired, or things that are destined for donation.

A basket of clutter by the door | Source: Pexels

3. Keep Only What You Can Care For

Organizer Faith Roberson goes by this rule: "Keep what you can care for." If you can't keep up with your laundry or fix a bag with a torn handle, she says, this means you have too much. Roberson purges weekly, and she makes sure to empty and wipe down her fridge before grocery shopping. She also says that organizing a pile of things you don’t need is just “polluting your space.”

Person storing things in boxes | Source: Pexels

4. Declutter Before You Organize

House & Garden features editor Elizabeth Metcalfe highlighted the difference between decluttering and organizing. She says organizing only begins after decluttering.

Mimi Bogelund, a professional declutterer in the U.K., suggests sorting through your things by category, starting with clothes, which tends to be a “relatively quick win” according to Metcalfe. Bogelund also insists on tackling one category at a time. Only after decluttering, she says, will you find the space to organize. She notes that there is always storage space, even in the tiniest of homes.

Woman sorting her clothes by category in boxes | Source: Pexels

5. Work in Small Chunks

For most of us, our closets remain chaotic and our living room untidy because we think we don’t have the time to address them. Bogelund gets this, suggesting bite-sized sessions to tackle small areas like a single drawer, or designating an hour every Saturday on your to-do list.

Beth Penn of Bneato Bar agrees that it doesn't have to be a one-time grand effort. Her mantra is "I'm moving the needle," and House Beautiful notes that even picking up quickly before bed can help. The magazine adds that a picture-perfect home isn't realistic for most people, and Penn says she has had to learn to let some things go.

A woman decluttering in bed | Source: Pexels

6. Give Mail a Home

To organize mail and packages that tend to pile up fast, Penn uses pouches with clear pockets mounted inside a kitchen cabinet for mail and to-dos that need attention. Everything else is put away, but she can still see it when she opens the door.

Person storing mail in a bag | Source: Pexels

7. Get the Family Involved

Organizing your home can be a family effort, too, according to Jen Martin of Reset Your Nest. In her home, she says labels help her kids know where things go, and she assigns them tasks like decanting cereal and rice into containers and adding anything that's running low to a list on the fridge.

A child helping her mother fold clothes | Source: Pexels

The goal in keeping things organized isn’t perfection all at once. It’s working with the time you have, tackling things in small doses, until you’ve developed a system that works for you regularly. Try picking up one of these habits at a time, and you may find it easier to manage the chaos.