5 Lazy Ways to Get Organized
Leverage your laziness with these techniques.
Have you heard the expression: Organized People Are Just Too Lazy To Look For Things? I have, and to be honest. I believe this to be true.
Let's be real, trying to make changes, like being more organized, is difficult because you're essentially going against the grain of your well-formed habit patterns of disorganization that have been imprinted on your brain for weeks, months, even years... sometimes decades, yikes!
Change is hard for nearly all of us. We just don't like to change and let's face it, we're lazy. In today's world, everything is about convenience and indulgence. It's almost like accepting change willingly is a major flaw in our wiring because we know it'll take effort and work.
My suggestion for all of this is to flip the script. Make it hard to do the things you want to stop doing and easy to do the things you want to start doing. In essence, make the bad habits difficult to keep up and the good habits easy to implement.
Here are 5 ways to leverage your laziness:
1. Set up a mail station.
Many people let their mail pile up to the point that it takes over their kitchen table and countertops. Make it so that it's easy to sort through by having a recycling can and the shredder where you do your mail sort.
2. Utilize TV commercial breaks.
A colleague of mine just wrote a post talking about couch potato organizing. When you settle in to watch your favorite show, get comfy and bring a task with you to the sofa. Use the time during commercial breaks to do a mini task like deleting photos off your phone, weeding through your recipe box or folding laundry.
3. Label all the things.
If you're struggling with your family members putting things away after they use them, quit nagging them and just make some labels (or have them make the labels!). It'll become glaringly obvious where things go in the pantry, linen closet, utility room, etc when there are big colorful signs staring folks in the face. This is a great one-and-done project that'll pay dividends.
4. Plan your outfit the night before.
We all like an extra 10 minutes of sleep in the morning and by planning out what you will wear the night before, you can hit the snooze button one more time!
5. Menu plan.
Set up a weekly schedule of meals ie; Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday, Wacky (use up what we have in the fridge) Wednesday, etc. Putting in a little effort up front will allow you to go on auto-pilot each evening instead of rushing around trying to figure out what's for dinner. And if you want to be even more lazy, prepare dinner in the mornings. I'm lucky that I don't have to rush out the door in the morning so that's when I prepare meals. By 5 o'clock I can be in my pajamas rather than aimlessly staring at the pantry trying to figure out what to make for supper.
Do you see how putting in a little planning and work on the front end can support your laziness on the back end? It's the back door approach to changing those behaviors!
How do you see yourself leveraging your laziness to break out of those disorganized habits?