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This week I’ve been studying The Power Of Habit by Charles Duhigg on the Imprint learning app. It’s so good!

The Instagram-story-like bite-sized visual lessons are super digestible and make it easy to get in a few minutes of education every day in a way that feels fun and light.

So I’m stoked that Imprint sponsored today’s Habit Example!

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Today I woke up with a mission on my mind:

A specific note-card sized piece of paper I needed to find.

And I was 80% sure it was in my “junk drawer” in the Kitchen (both my wife and I have our own drawers for random stuff).

It looked like this to start:

Pretty much can barely open or close it without getting stuck or having piles of receipts fall out.

It hasn’t been organized in like 4 years (since we moved into the house).

Way overdue.

I started by just pulling everything out one item at a time, and trying to loosely categorize it into different sections:

• Garbage

• Keepsake

• Devices

• Receipts

• Important Documents

• Church Stuff

• Planners / Notebooks

• Miscellaneous

This is the weird part about organizing things. They always become a bigger mess before they get more organized.

It’s easy to start an organization project, then get overwhelmed at feeling like you just made a bigger mess.. then abandon ship and just stuff it all back in. Or worse, leave it as the bigger mess it became!

Trust the process though… as you keep organizing, it does start to trend toward being more organized!

Might seem crazy, but it took about an hour and a half to go through everything.

Every time I got stuck not knowing what to do next, I’d just pick the next easiest category to organize. I started with garbage, then receipts (which all turned out to be garbage too, lol), then miscellaneous, and so on.

There were so many tiny decisions to make:

• Is this garbage?

• Should I keep this?

• If I keep it, do I put it back in the drawer?

• Or does it go somewhere else?

• AM I SURE THIS ISN’T GARBAGE?

Talk about decision fatigue!

Having to make lots of decisions is mentally draining.

So I tried to apply the 15 second rule: If it takes more than 15 seconds to figure out if I need to keep it, it’s probably garbage.

Which turned out to be more than half the stuff in the drawer!

Now that it’s all clean and organized though, I have space to put the few things in it I *actually* want quick access to! Like my iPad, headphones, and planner.

The only bad news?

I never found the piece of paper I was looking for. 😂 

So I think it’s time to deep clean our van next… haha.

What’s the moral of the story?

1. Don’t wait as long as I did to clean your junk drawer. Make it a habit to spend 5 mins once a month-ish sorting things out and putting things where they belong.

2. If you do have a daunting organization project, try setting yourself a timer to see what you can get done in just that amount of time (this works well for my wife)

3. Don’t be overwhelmed by the mess becoming a bigger mess before it starts to get organized. That’s 100% normal! My dad calls it “Chaos to Order” - everything goes through a greater level of chaos, before coming to a greater level of order.

Got a tip or strategy for organization that works for you?

Hit reply and let me know!

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- Kody

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P.S. These take 3 hours to research, write, and design. It only takes you 3 seconds to share.